Ohio’s next U.S. Senator, Jon Husted. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)
“No comment.” That’s all Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said and walked away. Only at the tail end of DeWine’s press conference last Friday, to announce Lt. Gov. Jon Husted as his pick to replace J.D. Vance in the U.S. Senate, was the elephant in the room even acknowledged. What was the governor’s response to the federal indictments handed down (the same day) against two former FirstEnergy executives tied to the biggest public corruption scandal in state history?
DeWine’s response was no response. His briefing was about Husted’s promotion not the stain of malfeasance on their watch that the federal indictments underscored. Both men revert to a predictable default setting when it comes to questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the FirstEnergy scheme to bribe lawmakers into giving it a massive state subsidy. Deny. Deflect. Dismiss. No comment.
The pair insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that they knew nothing about anything corrupt in the legislation written by and for FirstEnergy that they were instrumental in passing and signing into law. DeWine and his LG maintain they conducted themselves properly and did right by Ohio with energy policy that just happened to include an extravagant gift from the state to a utility that donated richly to their campaigns.
They either outright refute the logged meetings, phone calls, emails and text messages shared with FirstEnergy brass before, during, and after the company’s billion-dollar nuclear plant bailout was enacted — or feign amnesia about their chumminess with generous GOP donors even as FirstEnergy’s devious pay-to-play arrangement was underway to enrich investors and hose ratepayers.
But as court documents indicate — in the state and federal trials of defendants who got caught up in the nuclear bailout scam — DeWine, and especially Husted, had their fingerprints all over the dodgy FirstEnergy legislation while it was being created and passed through the legislature to benefit the utility and Republican sugar daddy. Like many Ohio Republicans, DeWine and Husted had lengthy relationships and intricate business dealings over the years with the head honchos at FirstEnergy.
Their coziness with ex-FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and Senior VP Mike Dowling appeared to reach its peak in 2019 with passage of House Bill 6 to prop up the utility’s two aging and uncompetitive nuclear power plants in Ohio. So when federal prosecutors announced that Jones and Dowling — at the center of a $60 million bribery plot to buy off state officials for a $1.2 billion bailout — had been slapped with federal racketeering charges, the top state officials who made that bailout happen must have squirmed.
Their political patrons, already facing related charges on the state level, could well implicate the guv and his Senate-appointee in the developing federal cases. No wonder Husted is hightailing it out of Ohio before the boom lowers. But the senator-to-be, who has managed to skate around his deep entanglements in some of the state’s biggest scandals, (e.g., the notorious ECOT online charter school he championed without accountability that ripped-off a ton of taxpayer money for phantom students) may not be able to slide so deftly around his role as a pivotal player in the FirstEnergy scandal.
Publicly released court records suggest Husted, in close contact with FirstEnergy execs, was leading the behind-the-scenes efforts to push the tainted HB6 through the legislature and onto the governor desk ASAP. Detailed evidence contains a slew of FirstEnergy texts referencing “State Official 2,” confirmed as Husted, that show how involved the LG was in not only lobbying for arguably the most corrupt piece of state energy legislation ever, but for making the nuclear bailout bill even beefier by extending the FirstEnergy payouts in the legislation a few extra years.
Although Husted had to trim his sails on that front, FirstEnergy leaders chortled in text messages that the LG was in their corner “fighting to the end” to give the company everything it wanted and more. Who cared if Ohio ratepayers were on the hook for hundreds of millions in new monthly surcharges on their electricity bills? Husted wasn’t working for them. He was helping FirstEnergy boost its profit margin in an unprecedented bribery and money laundering fraud perpetrated on everyday Ohioans.
Of course, Husted defaults to denial about any knowledge of the corruptness that permeated FirstEnergy’s bid for bloated state subsidies from the very beginning. It’s a dance he and DeWine do whenever pervasive state scandal threatens to puncture the governor’s folksy persona or the LG’s image as the telegenic GOP Golden Boy who checks off every box that matters to deep-pocketed powerbrokers lining up to make a killing on custom-made government policy.
As Husted heads to Washington he takes a political skills set honed in shameless service to: an unscrupulous utility that tried to buy a gravy train ticket from the state with secretly-funded legislation, to a crooked for-profit charter that bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, to a billion-dollar voucher boondoggle funding private religious schools in a scandal waiting to explode, to the fossil fuel industry’s anti-wind and anti-solar propaganda machine after publicly supporting renewable energy.
Husted will fit right in with the Republican Senate majority carrying water for the highest bidder waving a campaign check, capitulating to the tyrant trashing the Constitution with impunity, and brushing aside telling stains of gathering malfeasance with “no comment.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.