State Rep. Frank Ryan (R-Lebanon) speaks at a meeting of the House State Government committee on Jan 10, 2022.
Sam Dunklau / WITF
Lebanon County state representative Frank Ryan will not seek reelection
Ryan supported the election-fraud lie and spoke out against COVID-19 mitigation orders.
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Jeremy Long/WITF
Sam Dunklau / WITF
State Rep. Frank Ryan (R-Lebanon) speaks at a meeting of the House State Government committee on Jan 10, 2022.
(Lebanon) — State Rep. Frank Ryan, who represents part of Lebanon County and helped spread former President Donald Trump’s election-fraud lie, will not seek reelection.
Ryan was one of the state House members who signed a letter in December 2020 that asked Congress to object to the 2020 certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes going to Joe Biden, despite no evidence that would call the result into question..
The election-fraud lie led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history.
Ryan supported the election-fraud lie in other ways. A couple weeks after the 2020 election, he joined Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, other lawmakers and dozens of Trump supporters at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg for a state Senate Majority Policy committee hearing. They listened to Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis repeat debunked claims about election fraud. President Trump also addressed the crowd by phone, making at least 15 false or misleading claims.
State GOP Rep. Russ Diamond and Ryan would later falsely insinuate that more ballots were counted in the presidential race than the number of voters who turned out.
They claimed that more than 200,000 votes were cast than registered voters according to the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors database. Ryan’s claim was quickly debunked when the Pennsylvania Department of State stated his claims relied on incomplete data and that some larger counties had not finished uploading the data.
Emails released by the U.S. House Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol revealed Ryan shared a slideshow outlining the misleading voter database claim with U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R, PA-10). The congressman then forwarded the slideshow to Justice Department lawyers.
The Select panel sees Perry as a key player in Trump’s effort to remain in power despite losing the election. Members asked the midstate lawmaker to explain his role in an effort to install as Attorney General a junior Justice Department lawyer who supported former President Donald Trump’s election-fraud lie. Text messages show Perry talked with Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, about doing that – just days before the Jan. 6 attack.
Perry declined the request.
Ryan has denied that he supported efforts to overturn the election when WITF reached out to him a day after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Let’s engage in civil dialogue and perhaps we can use this as a time now for our nation to heal across the board, and based upon the results of the electoral college, then we can all perhaps get on with a better way and hopefully fix this election process going forward,” he said at the time.
Ryan, 71, a certified public accountant and retired U.S. Marine, was first elected to his seat in 2016 and his platform was to put the state’s finances in order. In his statement, he said it was an honor to serve the 101st District, and said there is still too much work left to be done.
He said “… the amount of restructuring needed to fix our state’s finances will involve some very tough choices and about 10 to 15 more years to turn around. There are simply too many financial matters that still need to be fixed.”
He said he wants to “provide for an orderly transition to someone with the youth, intelligence and energy necessary to see this mission through.”
Ryan added he would still work on the state’s financial problems.
“I believe I can be more effective in tackling these important fiscal issues from the outside. I will continue to work on these crucial issues and express myself freely,” he said.
Ryan opposed Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID-19 mitigation orders early in the pandemic and urged the county he was tasked to represent to rebel against business shutdown orders and mask mandates.
At the time, Wolf instituted a color coded system to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The system had three phases businesses and organizations were supposed to follow: red, yellow and green – the most to the least restrictive phases, respectively.
Ryan, along with state Rep. Russ Diamond, former state Sen. Dave Arnold, Arnold’s Chief of Staff Greg Moreland, Lebanon County District Attorney Pier Hess Graf and Lebanon County Commissioners Bob Phillips and William Ames, planned how Lebanon County would move from the red phase to the yellow phase without Wolf’s approval.
Emails obtained by PA Spotlight, a partisan accountability and investigative organization that bills itself as “dedicated to exposing right-wing extremism in the state,” through a right-to-know request showed Ryan communicated with WellSpan Health and Cornwall Manor, one of Lebanon County’s largest senior living communities, about plans for Lebanon County to ignore the Wolf administration guidelines.
Lebanon County moved itself into the yellow phase without Wolf’s approval by a 2-1 vote. Commissioner Jo Ellen Litz voted against the move and Wolf withheld $12.5 million in federal CARES Act funds Lebanon County was set to receive.
Lebanon County and Wolf eventually agreed that the county had to use $2.8 million of the funds for a campaign to promote universal masking.
Ryan also co-signed a letter in June 2020 that urged Lebanon County residents to ignore Wolf’s mitigation orders after Lebanon County was the last county to be moved into the green phase.
The letter said Wolf “has lost all credibility” and “deserves only to be ignored.”
Pa. Republican lawmakers and the U.S. Capitol attack
As part of WITF’s commitment to standing with facts, and because the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was an attempt to overthrow representative democracy in America, we are marking elected officials’ connections to the insurrection. Read more about this commitment.
Rep. Frank Ryan (R-Lebanon) is one of several dozen lawmakers who signed a letter asking Congress to object to Pennsylvania’s electoral college vote –despite no evidence that would call those results into question.
This supported the election-fraud lie, which led to the attack on the Capitol.
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