The Philadelphia GOP wants the city to fire an attorney under investigation for allegedly taking part in the spray painting of the words “Fuck Trump” on a grocery store in Chestnut Hill.
(Yes, he’s the guy wearing a blazer and an ascot while clutching a glass of wine in the surveillance video.)
But Joe DeFelice, executive director of the Philadelphia GOP, went farther than just calling for the firing of Duncan M. Lloyd, an attorney in the city solicitor’s office identified today in a Philadelphia Inquirer story as the guy on camera. DeFelice slammed the incident in its entirety, saying “Nothing can better represent the hysterical pearl-clutching of the ‘progressive’ elite” and calling it “an astonishing feat of idiocy.”
He went on, wondering in a public statement if “the extra glass of Shiraz gave him some sort of delusional confidence that there are no cameras on Germantown Ave.” (Ed. note: There’s no evidence that the lawyer was drinking Shiraz.) Here’s DeFelice’s statement in its entirety:
“If the image of an upper-middle class city attorney clad in a blazer and sipping wine while vandalizing an upscale grocery store with an anti-Trump message strikes you as perhaps the most bourgeois sight imaginable, that’s because it is. Nothing can better represent the hysterical pearl-clutching of the ‘progressive’ elite in response to this earth-shattering election, when residents of Chestnut Hill and similar neighborhoods across the country discovered – gasp – that other people have a voice too. The assistant city solicitor in question had ostensibly taken the law into his own hands, since a democratic election didn’t yield his preferred outcome.
“For somebody with extensive legal training to feel entitled to vandalize a newly opened super-market strikes us at the Philadelphia Republican Party as an astonishing feat of idiocy. Did the extra glass of Shiraz give him some sort of delusional confidence that there are no cameras on Germantown Ave? The taxpayers should be entrusting exactly none of our faith into this man. He should be fired from our city’s law department immediately.”
No one’s been charged in connection with the incident that police told The Inquirer caused between $3,000 and $10,000 to a Fresh Grocer located on the 8200 block of Germantown Avenue. Police confirmed to Billy Penn that they don’t often stumble upon surveillance footage featuring a person clutching a glass of wine.
“We currently do not keep track of wine appearances in surveillance footage, for vandals or other crimes,” a police spokesman wrote via e-mail. “However, I feel safe giving ‘not many’ as an answer.”
Here’s the surveillance released by police:
Craig Straw, first deputy city solicitor, told The Inquirer “Mr. Lloyd has already contacted the Philadelphia Police and is cooperating with them.” The office will decide on a “course of action” once more information becomes available.”
Lloyd didn’t respond to a request for comment.
