Jack Ciattarelli’s lawyer told Mikie Sherill to cease and desist. Her lawyer said no.
Mikie Sherrill’s campaign won’t stop accusing Jack Ciattarelli of supporting 10% sales tax, her lawyer says.
Jack Ciattarelli’s lawyer is calling on U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s campaign to stop saying that he supports a 10% sales tax increase for New Jersey.
Sherrill’s lawyer said the campaign has no plans to end the attack.
The gubernatorial candidates are both promising voters that they’ll make the Garden State more affordable — a pivot from Gov. Phil Murphy, who openly stated in 2019 that addressing high taxes wasn’t the state’s priority.
So Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, and her backers have seized on Ciattarelli mentioning a 10% sales tax at a rally earlier this summer, particularly since a new attack ad with audio of the Republican speaking at the rally came out last week.
Ciattarelli’s campaign lawyer argues in a cease-and-desist letter that Sherrill is intentionally lying about Ciattarelli’s remarks, but Sherrill’s team stands by their words — and points to similar remarks he’s made in the past.
Both sides are calling the other “desperate.” Here’s what’s going on.
What did Jack Ciattarelli actually say about a 10% sales tax at the rally?
In June, an attendee at a Bergen County campaign rally asked Ciattarelli if he would consider eliminating state income tax in favor of a higher sales tax. The candidate responded by saying he recently came back from a fundraising trip in Tennessee, where there’s no income tax.
“What Tennessee has is a 10% sales tax on everything, including food and clothing,” Ciattarelli said before citing New Jersey’s 6.6% sales tax, which has an exemption for food and clothing.
“I will work with the New Jersey State Society of CPAs; we’re going to look at what other states do and every option is on the table,” he continued. “So you have my word that we’re going to look at every option as to how to better fund our state government.”
He added that “at the very least” he wants to “restructure and simplify” the state’s income tax rates. He pointed to Pennsylvania’s flat income tax rate and also floated three brackets for income taxes between 3 and 5%.
What are Mikie Sherrill and her backers saying, and why is this coming up now?
A new anti-Ciattarelli ad paid for by a super PAC backed by the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) that came out last Wednesday carefully says the Republican nominee is “talking about a 10% sales tax.”
It goes on to include an audio snippet from the June rally of Ciattarelli decisively saying: “a 10% sales tax on everything, including food and clothing.” The implication is that he’s calling for that policy in New Jersey, even though he was describing Tennessee in that sentence.
Sherrill’s campaign also said in a press release on Thursday that he put the tax increase “on the table.”
But Sherrill took the messaging tactic a step further by saying in a campaign post on X on Friday that Ciattarelli is “pushing” the tax increase for food and clothes.”
Her campaign website also links to a 17-page document called “Jack Facts” that claims on the first page that Ciattarelli “even proposed a 50% sales tax increase on essential goods like food and clothes,” though his full quote from the rally, on Tennessee’s 10% tax, can be found later in the document.
Sherrill’s campaign and the state Democratic Party both shared an article about Ciattarelli’s comments published in The New Jersey Independent the same day the DGA-backed attack ad came out. The publication is funded by American Independent Media, a nonprofit funded by “a complex web of Democratic-aligned PACs and big-money donors,” according to a Columbia Journalism Review study about “pink slime journalism,” which presents itself as local news but has a partisan slant.
Ciattarelli said that the Sherrill campaign’s claims are “desperate.”
“I was just talking about what other states did, I never said that I endorsed that approach here in New Jersey, but they’ve turned it into something else,” he told reporters on Thursday.
He repeated that he believes “all options should be on the table” but said “that doesn’t mean I’m putting in a 10% sales tax including on food and clothing.”
Sherrill’s backers have responded to Ciattarelli’s clarification by leaning into their message even more, with the state Democratic committee sharing a video on Saturday that spliced together footage from Thursday with Ciattarelli mentioning the 10% sales tax and saying “all options should be on the table.”
What did Jack Ciattarelli’s lawyer say?
Mark Sheridan, counsel for Ciattarelli’s campaign, wrote in a letter on Saturday to Sherrill’s campaign attorney that their team welcomes “spirited debate” but “will not tolerate the repeated false statements and misrepresentations.”
He called for Sherrill to stop “her repeated false statements” and said she knows they “are demonstrably false.” He pointed out that the DGA was more careful in their wording in their attack ad, seemingly “aware of the consequences of making such false misrepresentations.”
Sheridan called for Sherrill to remove the statements from her website and X feed and said she can’t “publish lies about Jack Ciattarelli and his proposed policies without repercussion.”
How did Sherrill’s campaign respond?
Sherrill campaign spokesperson Sean Higgins said it’s “a desperate dodge from a desperate candidate,” and her campaign attorney Rajiv Parikh said in a Monday letter to Sheridan that his legal correspondence was “generally unremarkable” and “has no merit.”
Parikh defended the “Jack Facts” posted on the campaign website and cited instances when Ciattarelli made similar remarks while campaigning for governor, including in 2017 when Ciattarelli said he would “look to other states” for “fiscal management policies” and in 2021 when Ciattarelli said discussions about raising sales tax “should be on the table.”
Parikh also cites a radio appearance in April 2024 in which Joe Piscopo asks Ciattarelli if it’s possible to cap property taxes and cut income taxes, and Ciattarelli responds: “You bet it is. Joe, I just came back from Tennessee. There’s no income tax there.”
“That sure sounds like a proposal,” Parikh argued in his letter.
Parikh said that Ciattarelli should “cease his loose talk about higher sales taxes” and release a plan that would restructure taxes and balance the budget without a 10% sales tax if he has one.
“In the meantime, the Sherrill campaign will continue to educate New Jerseyans about Assemblyman Ciattarelli’s insistence on pushing the Tennessee 10% sales tax proposal to the center of the state’s policy debate,” he added.