RICHMOND, VIRGINIA—Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat nominee for Virginia governor, has been called as a witness in a defamation lawsuit after Democrat operatives said her congressional reelection campaign drafted a 2022 Democrat party of Virginia press release that claimed a Republican “bloodied and beat law enforcement officers” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thomas Speciale, a retired Army intelligence officer and former Republican U.S. Senate candidate, appeared in court Friday, defending a list of 350 written questions he submitted for Spanberger to answer under oath. The questions grew out of a suit he has filed against the Democratic Party of Virginia alleging that the charge he engaged in violence defamed him. The attorney representing the Democratic Party of Virginia, Jeffery Breit, defended objections to the questions on the grounds of irrelevance.
Breit cited a press release Speciale had published about the case, warning that if Spanberger’s answers to certain questions became public, she would face harassment.
Speciale defended his list of wide-ranging questions, saying they may be relevant to show that Spanberger’s campaign, from which he says the press release originated, knowingly defamed him.
“The case is very specific to the Spanberger campaign drafting, editing and approving a press release which they sent to the Democratic Party of Virginia to publish,” Thomas Speciale, a retired Army intelligence officer and former Republican U.S. Senate candidate, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “They did this in a deliberate effort to conceal that the press release was from the Spanberger campaign.”
“The press release defames me, stating that I was a ‘notable insurrectionist who attacked the United States Capitol’ and that I ‘bloodied and beat law enforcement,'” Speciale added. “The truth is the exact opposite—I was warning the government of possible violence at the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI, and I was there trying to stop potential violence on January 6th.”
The FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
The Democratic Party of Virginia posted the press release on Nov. 3, 2022, five days before the midterm elections, in which Republican Yesli Vega was challenging Spanberger’s reelection to Congress. The party recently deleted the press release, which remains available on the Internet Archive.
Speciale told The Daily Signal he issued “an immediate cease and desist” letter in November 2022, which the party ignored, and he filed his defamation lawsuit in March 2023. “It wasn’t until discovery when the [party] revealed the Spanberger campaign was the source of the press release.”
According to court documents The Daily Signal obtained, former officials at the Democratic Party of Virginia and the 2022 Spanberger campaign confirmed the campaign wrote the press release.
“I wrote a draft of a press release that was then internally approved and sent along to the Democratic Party of Virginia as a draft,” Justin Chermol, press secretary for Spanberger’s 2022 campaign, said in a March 2024 deposition. He added that Campaign Manager Sam Signori and Communications Director Connor Joseph approved it. Signori and Joseph currently serve as campaign manager and communications director for Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign.
Gianni Snidle, then press secretary for the Democratic Party of Virginia, also said that the “Abigail Spanberger campaign” approved the press release. “I worked with Justin Chermol on it,” he added.
Speciale sought to depose Spanberger herself, but the Democratic Party’s lawyers presented a sworn affidavit from Spanberger saying she had no knowledge of the press release. The judge agreed to allow Speciale to depose her via written questions.
Neither Chermol nor Snidle nor Signori nor Joseph responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.
Upon discovering that Spanberger’s campaign drafted the press release, Speciale filed a separate lawsuit against Chermol, Snidle, and Spanberger. In January, the judge removed Spanberger from the suit after Speciale failed to serve her legal documents.
In a sworn testimony to the court, Darrell Smith testified that he and Speciale attempted to serve Spanberger in person in January 2024, but she fled from them. Smith acknowledged he did not obtain permission from the sheriff’s office to serve legal documents.
According to Smith, on Jan. 9, 2024, at the headquarters of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington, D.C., Spanberger entered the building and “saw Mr. Speciale. And all of a sudden, she turned around.”
“She literally was running away by herself in the rain, without her exec—with her exec following in her trail, trying to catch her with the umbrella that he was holding for her.”
Speciale told The Daily Signal that Spanberger “declined to answer the deposition questions, but we can not know if the answers to these questions are relevant or not until she answers them.”
He claimed the party is “actually trying to have Abigail’s answers sealed. I don’t know why yet except that Abigail is running for governor.”
In court, Breit cited concerns about Spanberger facing harassment if certain information—such as her phone number or the email she uses to communicate with staff—were to be made public.
Speciale noted that “this case was initiated before I even knew her campaign was the author of the press release,” and he argued that “it may be in the public interest that these questions be answered because she is running for governor.”
The Richmond City Circuit Court has scheduled a trial on the case from April 13-16, 2026.
Neither the Democratic Party of Virginia, nor the Spanberger 2025 campaign, nor the attorneys representing the party responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.