A Superior Court judge, relying solely on allegations made by a creepy attorney once convicted of upskirting, might be helping a shadowy cabal steal an election in South Jersey, perhaps unwittingly.
Judge Benjamin Morgan signed an order on November 21 barring the Salem County Clerk from certifying the results of an election because an attorney for the Republican candidate, Louis Pasquale, claimed the apparent winner, incumbent Mayor LaDaena Thomas, was ineligible because she pleaded guilty to third-degree theft of service charge 23 years ago.
Meanwhile, the attorney general’s Division of Criminal Justice told local officials on Saturday that they will probe a racist, terroristic voicemail left by an employee of the Lento Law Group, John Groff. Groff had referred to Thomas as a “black fucking nigger bitch” and threatened to “fucking destroy her.”
“They are looking at this as a bias incident,” a spokesman for Thomas said.
Warning: This recording contains offensive language.
The Lento firm had been the Penns Grove solicitor until 2021, when Thomas replaced them for allegedly unethical behavior. Richard Rivera, the police director, stated in court filings that Groff and the law firm had recommended the retention of Praxis HCS, Inc. to conduct COVID-19 testing for the municipality without disclosing that Groff owned a piece of the company.
This could be the second try by the attorney general to look at the allegations against Groff.
Rivera said he and Thomas met with investigators of the New Jersey Office of Attorney General regarding the extortion attempt and threat to destroy her in 2021,
Reached on his cell phone Saturday afternoon, Groff said he never spoke to someone from the attorney general’s office.
“I got no interview from anybody because that can’t be verified that it was even me,” he told the New Jersey Globe.
“For years, I have tried to bring this intimidation to the attention of law enforcement to no avail. The Lento Law Group is well aware that my probation ended more than a decade ago, yet they have spearheaded this effort by my opponent to discredit me and subvert the will of the people of Penns Grove,” Thomas said in a statement on Sunday evening. “This is nothing more than an attack on democracy and I will not sit by and let this happen.”
Pasquale’s attorney, Samuel D. Jackson, filed a complaint on November 20 alleging that she was ineligible to serve as mayor – a post she’s held for the last four years – because she was on probation when she registered to vote. He asked the court to block the votes from being counted; Morgan did that the following day.
In 2017, Jackson was arrested at the Belmont Park racetrack in New York for taking photographs up the skirts of two nineteen-year-old women. He pled guilty to two counts of unlawful surveillance and received five years’ probation. A month later, he admitted to a judge that he had done the same thing at Grand Central Station.
He was disbarred in New York, but the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics recommended that he be suspended for six months and undergo psychological counseling.
Morgan’s willingness to put the counting of votes in Penns Grove on hold for three weeks is peculiar.
“People across the country would have been in the streets if a judge had prevented Pennsylvania from certifying the 2020 election based entirely on an accusation from Rudy Giuliani,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.
Rasmussen added, “There are times when judicial intervention is necessary to protect the will of the voters, and there are times when it would interfere with it. It shouldn’t be rocket science to discern which is which.”
Thomas’ attorney, Scott Salmon, wants Morgan to disqualify the Lento Law Group from representing Pasquale because they represented Thomas personally in her bid to get that conviction expunged.
“Mayor Thomas spoke with Groff several times and provided confidential, attorney-client information to him and other lawyers with the firm,” Salmon said in a letter to Morgan filed with the court.
Groff, the law firm’s administrator, has an extensive rap sheet that includes as many as eight convictions of various offenses, including check and insurance fraud. In 2016, Groff was accused of promising to keep a Camden man out of jail in exchange for sex with both him and his girlfriend.
One day after the injunction was granted, Deputy Attorney General Levi Klinger-Christiansen, representing the Salem County Board of Elections, asked Morgan to lift the temporary constraint because the role of county election officials was to count the votes, not adjudicate an election challenge simply. Morgan appears to have ignored that request, even though court rules require a hearing on temporary constraints within two days.
(State election officials used the same argument to certify the election of State Sen. Teresa Ruiz even though an independent candidate had been left off the ballot in two Hudson County municipalities.)
Morgan will hold a hearing on Tuesday – three weeks after he signed the first order — to decide if the Salem County Board of Elections can count votes cast in the November 7 election in Penns Grove, a small Salem county municipality where a majority of the 4,837 residents are non-white.
The mayoral campaign has followed an unusual path with Morgan as a central player.
In September, Morgan threw Thomas off the general election ballot after finding that she had sought write-in votes in the Democratic primary and that her independent candidacy violated the state’s Sore Loser Law.
Thomas appeared to receive roughly 200 write-in votes – maybe more – with Pasquale getting 191 votes and 153 going to Democrat John Washington, a former mayor unseated by Thomas four years ago.
Rasmussen suggested that Morgan might be on a slippery slope if he continues to delay the election certification or tries to affect the outcome before a recount or challenge occurs.
“Judges run a serious risk of public uproar when they thwart the clear, expressed will of voters. Certification is the last step in the election process— it means all the votes have been cast and counted, and someone has been elected. Putting themselves between citizens and their elected representation at that late stage of the game is a precarious place to be, and ought to be avoided at all costs,” Rasmussen said. “Judges need to push back once and for all on lawsuits to subvert election certifications, because they are purely and simply a function of the voters’ choices. Their job should be to protect the will of voters, not prevent it.”