Next to gerrymandering, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision to condone unchecked dark money and paid corruption is the biggest systemic driver of dangerous and destructive political misrepresentation in Ohio and across America. This is a tragic verdict. One of the biggest bribery scandals in state history.
The central feature of the criminal extortion scheme was that FirstEnergy and now-incarcerated former Ohio House Speaker Larry Hausder laundered campaign funds and helped unwanted politicians run for office. In order to do so, he used a 501(c)(4) underground financial group. $1.3 billion in relief to the utility industry, paid for by consumers.
Major corporate black finance company
Householder’s underground finance group, Generation Now, has pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy that netted Householder’s political machine the equivalent of more than $60 million to make Householder speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives and pass relief. used by FirstEnergy to funnel bribes. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed the relief package the same day it was passed.
Generation Now’s $15 million was provided through another underground finance group, Partners for Progress. FirstEnergy donated $25 million to Partners for Progress from 2017 to 2019. A FirstEnergy lobbyist named Dan McCarthy was listed as a principal at Partners for Progress in 2017, then resigned to become DeWine’s legislative director and lobbied for passage of House Bill 6 relief. Some FirstEnergy executives were also involved in selecting his three directors for Partners for Progress, two of whom were his FirstEnergy lobbyists.
In 2017, FirstEnergy also donated $1 million to an underground finance group called Freedom Frontier that supported Republican gubernatorial primary candidate Jon Husted. The group then backed DeWine after Husted withdrew from the primary race as his running mate.
In 2018, FirstEnergy donated $2.5 million to a Republican Governors Association-affiliated underground finance group called State Solutions that supports Governor DeWine. In 2019, they donated $300,000 to another dark finance group called Securing Ohio’s Future, bringing the total dark money to support DeWine/Husted to nearly $4 million.
In 2019, FirstEnergy also donated an exhaustive $300,000 to an underground finance group called Liberty Ohio, which FirstEnergy lobbyists have tied up with current Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, calling the group the Huffman C4. ” was called.
As for traditional campaign finance, former FirstEnergy executive Chuck Jones, who is now indicted, hosted a fundraiser for DeWine at his home. The company also donated nearly $1 million in traditional campaign contributions to members of Congress, other officeholders, candidates and political parties. That includes FirstEnergy’s political action committee, which is largely employee-funded and contributed $25,202 to DeWine’s 2018 campaign and $10,000 to his inaugural committee. Mr. Jones will contribute his $12,700 in food and drinks to DeWine’s fundraiser, bringing his total traditional fundraising to $47,902. After the scandal broke in 2020, DeWine pledged to donate $35,000 of that money, noting that FirstEnergy executives had not been indicted at the time.
influence peddlers
The Dayton Daily News first reported that shortly before winning the 2018 gubernatorial race, DeWine met FirstEnergy executives at an RGA fundraiser in downtown Columbus on October 10, 2018. I met with Shortly after, FirstEnergy Solutions donated $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association, according to tax records.
On December 18, 2018, shortly after winning the 2018 gubernatorial election, Mr. DeWine, Mr. Husted, Mr. Jones, and the now-indicted FirstEnergy executive Michael Dowling met at the Columbus Athletic Club. That same night, Jones and Dowling went from that dinner to the German Village mansion of FirstEnergy lobbyist Sam Randazzo, where they negotiated a $4.3 million payment that FirstEnergy admitted was a bribe in a deferred prosecution agreement. It seems so.
When Randazzo was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in December 2023 on 11 felony counts of bribery and embezzlement, the charges date back to 2010, when Randazzo served as general counsel for Industrial Energy Corp. There were allegations that he had a corrupt relationship with executives. An Ohio user who was secretly paid as a consultant for FirstEnergy: Randazzo settled disputes over electricity bills on terms acceptable to the utility company, funneled the settlement money through shell companies, and skimmed a portion of it. stated in the indictment.
According to the state-level indictment against Randazzo, FirstEnergy paid Randazzo’s shell company $13 million from 2016 to 2019. Of that amount, Randazzo handed over $7.75 million to industrial users and pocketed the rest. DeWine’s chief of staff, Laurel Dawson, who is married to a former paid lobbyist for FirstEnergy, received a $10,000 loan from Randazzo in 2016, according to the indictment. That’s what it means.
In January 2019, when Mr. Randazzo was being elected PUCO chairman, he told Mr. Dawson, who was Mr. DeWine’s chief of staff at the time, about the $4.3 million payment, but the remaining millions received from FirstEnergy. He did not tell her about it, the indictment says. . She added that Randazzo did not report her payments to the Ohio Ethics Commission.
On January 28, 2019, a former aide gave Mr. DeWine a 198-page document reporting suspicious financial ties between Randazzo and FirstEnergy. But the governor’s office says Dawson never spoke to the governor about the $4.3 million payment until DeWine appointed Randazzo as PUCO chair. February 4, 2019.
Randazzo spent the rest of that year and part of the next drafting and publicly lobbying for corruption remedies, according to the state indictment. This relief measure was passed and signed into law in July 2019.
The head of the household and four others were arrested in July 2020. But Dawson didn’t tell the governor about the $4.3 million payment until the following November, after the FBI searched Randazzo’s apartment.
DeWine is staunchly defended Just as Mr. Dawson defended Mr. McCarthy, a former aide and lobbyist for FirstEnergy’s underground bribery ring. McCarthy resigned in September 2021, but DeWine kept Dawson on staff as an advisor, earning him more than $180,000 a year. In September 2023, DeWine appointed McCarthy to the State Horse Racing Commission.
What has happened since then?
Although the nuclear power portion of Ohio House Bill 6 was ultimately repealed after the scandal broke, the law that devalued the state’s renewable energy portfolio remains in place, allowing two coal-fired power plants built in the 1950s to survive. The same goes for relief in other locations (one of which is in Indiana).
Householder and former state Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges are serving 20 and five years in federal prison, respectively, for their roles. Two other lobbyists also cooperated and are awaiting sentencing, while a third died by suicide in June 2021 while wearing a “DeWine for Governor” T-shirt. Randazzo died by suicide on April 9, 2024.
FirstEnergy shareholders have filed a lawsuit, with Mr. DeWine being subpoenaed and Mr. Husted required to submit an affidavit, and the case is ongoing.
Asked this week about an Oct. 10, 2018 RGA fundraiser with FirstEnergy executives, DeWine claimed: I have no objection to that. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember the meeting. ”
Regarding the Dec. 18, 2018, dinner with FirstEnergy executives, DeWine said he did not remember Randazzo’s name coming up.
Asked this week about FirstEnergy spending $4 million in dark money to support his gubernatorial bid, DeWine claimed he didn’t know about it.
That’s right, Jean.
After Randazzo’s death, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said the state’s prosecution would move forward and that Jones and Dowling, who have pleaded not guilty, would continue to face their day in court.
Ken Parker, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said his team also continues to pursue the broader corruption case.
citizens united
In 2010, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy made one of the most absurd, naive, and devastatingly stupid statements I’ve ever read in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, calling Citizen He issued a landmark campaign finance decision in United v. Federal Election Commission.
“We now conclude that independent spending, including by corporations, does not lead to corruption or the emergence of corruption. The fact that they have access does not mean that these officials are corrupt…Furthermore, the appearance of influence or access does not cause voters to lose faith in our democracy. No,” Kennedy insisted.
What combination of hallucinations and delusions did Kennedy use to make that unpleasant declaration?
As then-Justice John Paul Stevens soberly observed, the majority’s Citizens United decision was a “denial of the common sense of the American people.”
This entire underground political bribery and money laundering scheme in Ohio was made possible because a narrow majority of Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court held that for constitutional purposes, corporations are people and money is speech. This is only because he declared it to be so.
They followed the Citizens United decision with the SpeechNow.org v. FEC appellate decision that came months after Citizens United, and the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC decision with an additional Article 5 uphold. It followed several other judgments that removed all liability for expenditures. 4 votes.
Taken together, these decisions pave the way for wealthy individual donors, corporations, and other funded special interests to spend unlimited amounts of dark money on elections. And oh, has that ever happened?
Since the Citizens United decision, outside groups have funneled billions of dollars to influence American elections.
Consider just the race in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat. Also, consider spending outside of elections in support of or against candidates. In 2004, that amount was just over $45,000 for him, according to OpenSecrets.org. In 2010 it was about $3.5 million. In 2016, it was over $54 million. By 2022, it was just shy of $100 million.
Restoration of expression
This is so beyond ridiculous that there are no words to describe it. The gerrymandering of district maps to ensure supermajority party power is closely tied to the campaign finance system that enables this type of pay-to-play corruption to flourish in government.
If we are to truly save Ohio and the American Republic by restoring true representation of our people and their interests to voters, we must address harmful gerrymandering and corrupt political spending as a top priority.
This should have been done here in Ohio nearly four years ago when the FirstEnergy scandal first broke. But supermajority Republicans sided with DeWine and instead spent 2021 and 2022 imposing even more unconstitutional gerrymandered maps. And while they find time to indulge in all the culture war distractions on their radical right-wing menu, they do absolutely nothing to address endemic public corruption.
This persistent and belligerent misrepresentation of the people of Ohio and our best interests has only had dire public consequences, and as a seventh generation of Ohioans who moved here with their families in 1805, To me, all of that is very disconcerting in the eyes of the public.
Get the morning headlines delivered to your inbox
