In October 2025, the federal government was heading toward a shutdown. The fight was over whether to extend the health insurance tax credits that were about to expire.

Lloyd Smucker sent his constituents a newsletter about it. In it, he wrote that "Liberals demanded taxpayer-funded free health care for illegal immigrants."

On October 8, the editorial board of LNP | LancasterOnline — the daily paper in his own district — published an editorial saying that wasn't true. The headline was blunt: Smucker and other Republicans "are lying about shutdown and Democrats' health care aims." The text was blunter:

"Congressman Smucker is lying to his constituents about the health care battle being fought by Democrats."

It added that Smucker and his fellow Republicans were "playing a cynical game of Twister, stretching and contorting reality to sell a falsehood."

That is a hard thing to read about yourself. A member of Congress has a lot of ways to answer it. He can write a rebuttal. He can demand a correction. He can go on the radio, which Smucker does regularly. He can hold a town hall and take the question in front of the people who read the paper.

He did something else. The next day, his attorney sent LNP a letter demanding an apology and a retraction. The paper declined. On February 2, 2026, Smucker sued LNP Media Group for defamation in Lancaster County Court, seeking more than $250,000.

Who he hired

Smucker's legal team includes Villanova-area attorney Wally Zimolong and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II — the former attorney general of Virginia, who later ran Trump's immigration agencies and needed special permission to practice in Pennsylvania for this case.

That is not a hometown libel lawyer. That is a national conservative legal figure brought in to sue a Lancaster County newspaper over an editorial.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, run by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, logged the suit as a press-freedom incident and placed it in the broader pattern of officials moving to punish outlets that covered them critically.

The thing the editorial said he was wrong about

It's worth stopping on the actual claim, because it's checkable.

Immigrants in the country illegally cannot buy the coverage at issue. The Kaiser Family Foundation's fact sheet on immigrant health coverage states it plainly:

"Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in federally funded coverage including Medicaid, CHIP, or Medicare or to purchase coverage through the ACA Marketplaces."

They cannot enroll, and they cannot get the subsidies. So "taxpayer-funded free health care for illegal immigrants" was not what Democrats were asking for in the shutdown fight. They were asking to extend the enhanced tax credits that lower premiums for people who are eligible.

There is one narrow exception, and it's the hook Smucker's lawyers hung the case on. Emergency Medicaid reimburses hospitals for emergency treatment of people who would qualify for Medicaid except for their immigration status. It pays the hospital. It does not enroll anyone in anything. LNP's own reporting had acknowledged that some federal money therefore reaches the cost of treating noncitizens indirectly — and Smucker's complaint argues that because the paper's newsroom knew that, its editorial board knew "lying" was false when it published the word.

What the paper said

LNP executive editor Tom Murse's response was short and rested entirely on the First Amendment:

"The Oct. 8, 2025 editorial expressed an opinion on a matter of public concern, which is the purpose of editorials. Under the First Amendment, expressing opinions — including characterizing one side's positions as false — is protected speech and does not constitute defamation."

Media lawyer Eric Feder, asked by WITF to assess the case, called it "exceedingly weak." As a public official, Smucker has to prove actual malice — that the paper published something it knew was false or seriously doubted was true. Feder said that standard is "very difficult to establish."

Pennsylvania passed a law about this in 2024

Two years ago Pennsylvania adopted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, an anti-SLAPP statute that took effect on July 17, 2024. SLAPP stands for a lawsuit whose real purpose isn't to win — it's to make speaking expensive.

The law lets a defendant sued over speech on a public issue file for early dismissal, freezes the costly discovery process while that motion is pending, and shifts legal fees to the plaintiff when the claim fails at that stage. Attorney Garen Meguerian, writing in the Bucks County Beacon, called Smucker's suit "almost a textbook example" of what the statute was written for: an opinionated editorial, grounded in disclosed reporting, about a federal policy fight, aimed at a sitting congressman.

Where it stands — and this part cuts his way

In early July 2026, the judge denied LNP's motion to dismiss. Smucker's office put out a statement quoting the ruling:

"Smucker's characterization had a substantial factual basis, such that LNP's accusation of 'lying' could be understood as a provably false assertion of intentional dishonesty."

That's a real win for him at this stage, and it deserves to be said straight. A judge found his newsletter claim wasn't baseless enough to make "lying" automatically protected opinion.

It is not a verdict. Denying a motion to dismiss means only that the case may proceed. LNP appealed to the Pennsylvania Superior Court the following Monday. The paper is now spending money on appellate lawyers over one sentence in an editorial.

Which is the point of a suit like this, whoever wins. Smucker's statement closed by saying "a free press plays a vital role in our democracy, and with that role comes a responsibility to report the truth accurately and fairly." The mechanism he chose to enforce that responsibility is a quarter-million-dollar damages claim against a local newsroom in a business that has been shedding reporters for twenty years.

The paper he's suing is the paper that prints him

Here's what makes this one strange.

LNP | LancasterOnline is not a hostile national outlet that parachuted into Lancaster County. It is the paper that publishes Lloyd Smucker's own writing. In February 2025 it ran his column making the case for Elon Musk's DOGE, in which he wrote that "DOGE operates with full transparency" and that Americans "should be applauding DOGE's efforts." The opinion page he is suing gave him a thousand words to say so.

It's also the paper that has been doing the reporting on him. LNP is where the story of his largest donor came out — Adam Kidan, whose $21.7 million in restitution to a murdered man's sons Trump erased with a pardon, and whose money Smucker's campaign said it is keeping. In that same coverage, Smucker accused the editorial board of using "tactics used by tabloids" and said America is a land of second chances "except in the view of LNP | LancasterOnline's editorial board if you happen to be a conservative."

And it's the paper whose editorial board keeps pointing out that he won't face his constituents. Smucker has not held an in-person town hall open to any interested constituent since April 2014, when he was still a state senator. He does tele-town halls where his own staff pick which callers get to ask a question from forms submitted in advance.

Put those together and you get the shape of it. He will not take an unscreened question from a voter. He will not debate the editorial board in the space they offered him. He will sue them.

Not the only one

Smucker isn't alone in reaching for a courtroom. Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn is being sued by a tenured professor who was fired hours after she tagged his employer from her government account — a case about an official using her platform against speech. Texas's Lance Gooden is on the receiving end of a defamation suit after calling a Dallas philanthropist a fraudster on television.

The difference here is direction. Smucker is the one who filed, and the defendant is the newspaper his own constituents read to find out what he's doing.

Lancaster County residents can decide for themselves whether "Liberals demanded taxpayer-funded free health care for illegal immigrants" was accurate. What they shouldn't have to wonder is whether the paper that covers their congressman can afford to say so next time.

Source

Dan Nephin, "Congressman Lloyd Smucker sues LNP | LancasterOnline claiming editorial defamed him," LNP | LancasterOnline, Feb. 2, 2026, with additional reporting from WITF and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Photo: LNP | LancasterOnline.