The many donors out there to the Graham Platner Senate campaign who might be upset about the incredibly poor vetting that was performed on their candidate might be interested to know about evidence of malfeasance and corruption by one of the primary vetters that has just been revealed by an interesting source. And that source is someone familiar to longtime readers of NewsBusters. None other than Mike Elk (pictured) who earned the reputation as perhaps the most lethargic labor reporter in the world but definitely at Politico where he briefly worked about ten years ago. However, despite his reputation for lethargy, on Wednesday Elk perhaps redeemed himself by making a shocking revelation about one the main vetters of Platner in his Payday Report publication: "Platner’s Guru Daniel Moraff Asked Me to Lie for Him (I Didn’t)." In the news about Graham Platner, one name keeps coming up that is familiar to those of us in Pittsburgh: Daniel Moraff. The Wall Street Journal labeled Moraff “The ‘Mad Scientist’ Behind Graham Platner’s Scandal-Plagued Rise.” Moraff recruited Platner after seeing a video of him advocating for Frenchman Bay. Moraff told The Wall Street Journal that he spent only a few days vetting Platner, but was convinced that he was the guy they needed after seeing only a video of him. ​I first got to know Moraff when he worked on Summer Lee’s first campaign for state representative. Later, he was dismissed from Summer’s campaign for reasons that were never entirely clear to me, and it remains a subject of debate here. ​I didn’t know Moraff well, but would occasionally see him around town. We weren’t close friends, but when we ran into each other, we would often talk politics and share a few laughs. As a journalist, I saw him as a source, not a friend. Can you feel the angry Platner backers already taking notes? The former lethargic Politico labor reporter continues with his saga of corruption: ​In September of 2022, I was down in Rio de Janeiro when I received a message from Moraff saying he needed to speak to me urgently. I tried to blow him off because I was deep into covering the election of President Lula and didn’t have time. In November, after Lula’s election, he contacted me again, and I agreed to talk to him. ​What happened next shocked me and raised questions about what may have happened in his work for Platner. ​Moraff told me he was recruiting Brian Pietrzak, a General Electric locomotive factory worker and UE member, to run for Congress in Erie. He said he wanted Pietrzak to run as an independent. While researching Pietrzak, Moraff found anti-Trump quotes he had given Payday and asked me to delete them. ​In October of 2020, Pietzrak spoke at a Biden rally at Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, PA, where he blasted Trump at length. ​“No union member should vote for Trump,” Pietrzak told Payday Report in October of 2020. ​Moraff explained at length that Pietrzak’s quote against Trump could hurt his chances of appealing to Trump voters in Erie. I told him deleting a quote as a political favor would violate journalistic ethics. He insisted I do it even after I said no. ​Cajoling me, Moraff told me that, “No one would know that I deleted the quote.” I told him that wasn’t the issue, and that it was unethical, so I refused. He told me to forget the conversation and never mention it to anyone. It's important to know Moraff asked me to lie for a candidate he was recruiting. ​Given what happened with Platner, I think the incident with Moraff asking me to lie is important. If Moraff felt comfortable asking me, someone that he didn’t know that well, to lie, it means that he possibly got influencers and journalists in the past to lie on his behalf. When I heard that Moraff was involved in vetting and recruiting Platner, I recalled this experience. It showed me that Moraff was willing to lie to get someone elected and to ask journalists to do unethical things to help sell those lies. Hmmm... It would be interesting to find out if Moraff asked journalists other than Mike Elk to lie and, if so, did they comply. In any event this revelation shows that Moraff was at the very least corrupt. We already knew that Moraff and his companion did not appear to take the vetting of Platner very seriously as you can see in the following video when they both giggled like goofy teenagers when asked about the vetting process. However, Elk provides us (and especially potential attorneys for a possible class action lawsuit by the donors) solid proof of outright corruption. Daniel Moraff gives off a vibe of self-satisfied cleverness, a confidence that he is more clever than everyone else, and that his cleverness alone will be sufficient to avoid error. pic.twitter.com/DWoOotMfFQ — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) July 8, 2026 Exit question: Will Politico cite this breaking story provided by their former lethargic labor reporter from whom they parted on not the best of terms?