How To Cover Up An Affair The Cooley Law Way: Claim To Be Caught With A Male Prostitute.

Cooley grad has best idea ever! (Nope, not at all.)

Michigan State Representative Todd Courser is an up-and-coming Tea Party darling and a proud graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law. He’s also in a bit of trouble these days. While “Courser’s belief in the Christian heritage of America” may have inspired him to go to law school, it apparently played a much smaller role in inspiring him to keep it in his pants. So now he’s involved in the strangest sex scandal in American politics since Franklin Pierce got caught with those goats. Perhaps that’s not fair, because the sex scandal itself isn’t all that strange, but the impromptu public relations strategy that Rep. Courser followed crosses into the straight-up bizarre.

As they say, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up:

State Rep. Todd Courser planned the distribution of a fictional email alleging he had sex with a male prostitute in a bid to conceal his relationship with Rep. Cindy Gamrat, according to audio recordings obtained by The Detroit News.

To repeat, the audio recordings suggest he tried to leak an illicit hookup with a gay prostitute to make an end run around the revelation that he was cheating on his wife. Move over Olivia Pope, this guy has damage control all figured out.

At several points, the House aide [Ben Graham] can be heard on tape advising Courser against distributing the email and urging him to acknowledge the relationship with Gamrat.

“This is a crazy way to deal with this situation,” Graham told Courser on May 19. “Normally, people just like front it off, head it off themselves and say ‘Hey, this happened’ or quietly resign and go away.”

Written using the pseudonym George Rathburn, the sexually explicit email was received by Republicans on May 20 and 21, the two days following Courser’s meeting with Graham. The missive claimed Courser was removed from the House GOP caucus after being caught having “paid male on male sex behind a prominent Lansing night club,” among other claims.

During the May 19 meeting, Courser twice read aloud portions of a draft email to Graham. Most of the sentences Courser recited match copies of the email sent to Republicans and obtained by The News.

“Nobody’s gonna believe any of that,” Graham said about the draft email.

“Correct,” said Courser, who then added: “No, they’ll believe some of it. They’ll believe some of it.”

Courser does not explicitly say he wrote the letter, only telling Graham “it’s already written” and that Gamrat “agreed” with sending it.

“It’s what they won’t expect,” Courser said. “At that point, if they don’t have some really, really, really offensive stuff… it will be tough for them to bring it after this.”

As if this wasn’t weird enough, now confronted with these audio recordings, Courser claims he sent the male prostitute email as part of a plot to expose blackmailers. Seriously.

“The email in question was really put in motion to disrupt, disrupt the blackmailer and to give me some clues as to what their ability was as far as surveillance over my life and the threats they were making,” Courser said in an audio recording released early Monday morning.

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Genius.

Courser alludes to the Establishment GOP as the menacing presence in the shadows. Speaker Kevin Cotter… um, disagrees:

“He’s really displayed a long and consistent pattern of that type of paranoia,” Cotter told The News. “There are no black helicopters here; no drones circling the House Office Building.”

As of now, Courser vows to fight on, despite a growing chorus calling on him to resign over this kooky cover-up and allegations that taxpayer funds may have been used to conceal the affair.

On the other hand, maybe Courser was right after all. I mean, the affair is the hardly the top story here, is it?

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Recordings: State rep asked aide to hide relationship [Detroit News]
Courser responds, says he was exposing blackmailers [Detroit News]
Bio [Todd Courser]