WATCH LIVE: President Donald Trump speaks to law enforcement at the MCCA Winter Conference
February 08, 2017
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CINCINNATI — In politics, logical and moral consistency often aren’t the highest priorities. That was starkly true in the 2018 campaign to make then-Rep. Larry Householder speaker in the legislative session that would begin the following January, according to evidence presented in federal court on Wednesday.
Householder is accused of racketeering in a scheme to use $61 million in utility company contributions to elect a legislature that would elect him speaker and pass a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout of failing nuclear and coal plants. At the time of his arrest in 2020, federal prosecutors said it was likely the biggest bribery and money-laundering scandal in the long history of public corruption in Ohio.
In 2016, a financially struggling Householder was running for his old Perry County House seat with an eye toward regaining the speaker’s gavel two years later. At the same time, Akron-based FirstEnergy was losing so much on its nuclear-and-coal-plant subsidiary that it was starting a process that would ultimately send it into bankruptcy. Prosecutors have suggested that the ratepayer subsidies made them easier to spin off.
Householder and the company’s executives quickly formed a relationship that appears to have been formalized on a joint trip to Washington, D.C., for Donald Trump’s January, 2017 inaugural during which they flew on private jets and enjoyed a series of fancy meals.
Just a few weeks later, two Householder-controlled 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups were founded — including one by a FirstEnergy lobbyist who would later become Gov. Mike DeWine’s governmental affairs director. Shortly thereafter, what would become tens of millions of FirstEnergy dollars started to flow into and between them, and becoming dark money in the process.
In U.S. District Court on Wednesday, federal prosecutors laid out in stupefying detail how the dollars traveled through the dark money groups, Generation Now and Partners for Progress, and into political action committees and limited liability companies with names like Hardworking Americans and Hardworking Ohioans.
Dark money groups don’t have to disclose their donors and in her opening statement last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Glatfelter said the entire point of sending the dollars on such a tortuous journey was to make them hard to trace. But on the stand, FBI Special Agent Blane Wetzel explained how he used subpoenaed bank statements, extracted text messages, emails and wiretaps to do so.
Wetzel testified that in early 2018, Householder was working to get a slate of House candidates through the May Republican Primary. The hope was also to get them through the November General Election, so they could vote to make him speaker the following January.
Glatfelter walked Wetzel through how dark money originating with FirstEnergy eventually ended up being spent on campaign ads. One, against Householder’s primary opponent, went after him for taking dark money.
In other words, dark money was being used to slam the use of dark money.
It slammed Kevin Black for “dirty money, dirty politics” over the funding — and because he had been supported by former Republican Speaker Cliff Rosenburger, who had been the object of an FBI investigation.
The latter criticism could seem ironic, given that Householder himself became the object of an FBI investigation in 2004 during his first stint as speaker.
But consistency and avoiding hypocrisy hardly seemed to be the point in a March 2018 wiretapped phone conversation between Householder and political consultant Neil Clark. The consultant was also charged in the case, but he died by suicide in 2021.
Referring to the ad attacking Black, Householder said, “I kind of like the word ‘dark’ because it means black.”
Wetzel, the FBI agent, also described a TV ad funded with Householder-controlled dark money that attacked Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley, a Democrat running against a member of “Team Householder” in the 2018 General Election.
The ad showed police cam video of Foley, who said he was stopped for speeding and that he passed a field sobriety test. The ad, however, said Foley had failed several tests and that he was “just another corrupt politician.”
It closed by saying “We can’t trust Drunk Dan Foley,” the Dayton Daily News reported at the time.
Householder’s own epic corruption trial resumes Thursday and is expected to last until March.
Political operative Juan Cespedes, who has pleaded guilty, is expected to testify after Wetzel’s testimony is complete.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.
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The web of conservative activist groups and donors informally known as the "Koch network" plans to oppose former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primaries, reported The Washington Post on Sunday — breaking a years-long silence as the network has sat out "overt" politics for a few years.
"The move marks the most notable example to date of an overt and coordinated effort from within conservative circles to stop Trump from winning the GOP nomination for a third straight presidential election," reported Isaac Arnsdorf. "Some Republicans have grown increasingly frustrated with Trump after disappointing midterm elections in which he drew blame for elevating flawed candidates and polarizing ideas. But absent a consolidated effort to stop Trump, many critics fear he will be able to exploit GOP divisions and chart a course to the nomination as he did in 2016."
The Koch network's plans were laid out in a memo released on Sunday by Emily Seidel, director of Americans for Prosperity (AFP) — the flagship group that coordinates the Koch efforts.
“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” said the memo. “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.”
The Koch brothers, Charles and David — the latter of whom passed away in 2019 — are billionaire business tycoons who built a network of chemical companies. For years, they were some of the most well-known right-wing megadonors and villains to liberal activists. After David Koch's unsuccessful run for vice president in the 1980s, the two largely tried to influence politics from the sidelines, supporting the Tea Party movement in the 2010s and pushing Republican candidates who supported their libertarian philosophy of government.
The Koch brothers, despite their efforts helping to make Trump's initial election possible in 2016, soured on Trump early in his presidency, and the feeling was mutual, with Trump publicly attacking them during his time in office.
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Uncle Joe faces the right-wing zealots: State of the Union 2023 will be a tightrope walk
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Uncle Joe faces the right-wing zealots: State of the Union 2023 will be a tightrope walk
February 05, 2023
Facing a Republican-controlled House, a looming partisan budget battle and a swarm of GOP-led investigations, Joe Biden's 2023 State of the Union address looks to be a tightrope walk. Political and ideological tension in a divided Congress has reached a level not seen in many decades — but if White House briefings are any indication, Biden's determined to waltz right over them with an optimistic grin on his dad-visage.
Biden has only just begun his awkward courtship with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, following the latter's week-long torment at the hands of his own party's radicals — but the two are still at the delicate "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" phase of budget talks. Meanwhile, 20 GOP attorneys general are threatening pharmacists who distribute abortion pills under new FDA approvals. And Democrats are mounting a ferocious defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the "Squad" member who was booted from the House Foreign Affairs Committee on a party-line vote. And that's not to mention the House Oversight Committee's investigative insurgency, targeting the Justice Department's open case files and the president's own son.
Of course we don't know exactly what Biden will say, or how the speech will go over in the chamber. There's still time for Biden's speech to change dramatically. With a Republican response — to be delivered by newly-elected Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly Donald Trump's White House press secretary — expected to hammer him on inflation, can a bit of Biden soft-talk diffuse a debt ceiling showdown? Can he tease high-profile executive action on policing and gun reform without triggering reactionaries on the right? Will another rookie lawmaker's outbursts elicit chamber-wide groans?
Here's everything we know so far — and our best guess at the rest — about the president's upcoming speech.
What will Biden talk about?
SOTU addresses are generally a president's best shot at party pace-setting in the first weeks of a congressional session -- a forum for economic bragging and budget begging, where White House agenda priorities come into focus. Biden is expected to announce some top-line administrative policy changes and do some legislative wishcasting, thereby setting the stage for his likely re-election campaign in 2024. (Don't expect him to announce that decision quite yet.)
Policing and gun control
Police reform and gun control efforts are both stuck in the legislative mud, both nationally and in the statehouses. Biden is facing renewed calls from key Democratic groups to wield executive action on the two issues, where partisan gridlock and gun-lobby dollars have otherwise crippled progress.
With the nation still traumatized by the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of a Memphis police unit last month, Nichols' parents will attend the State of the Union as guests of Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus. According to Politico, the CBC wants Biden to address police reform directly in his speech.
"They want action," Horsford said of his conversations with the Nichols family. "The action is legislative action; that's here in Congress and at the state and local level, they want executive actions that still can be taken by the president and his administration."
Meanwhile, a coalition of 117 gun safety groups have called on Biden to make good on last year's historic gun reform passage, with real-world implementation announcements. In its Jan. 31 letter to the White House, the Time is Now Coalition asked Biden to enforce the new assault-weapon import ban, boost FTC regulation on gun ads aimed at minors, and appoint a gun czar. The coalition also wants the president to ask Congress for $5 billion in violence prevention funding.
But in a Jan. 24 briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre basically punted the gun issue to Congress, in an almost explicit acknowledgment that major progress is now unlikely. The president "is going to continue to see what other executive actions can be taken from here," Jean-Pierre said. "But at the end of the day, we need Congress to act. We need legislation that can be signed into law."
Keep the aid flowing to Ukraine
At some point this year, Biden will ask Congress to continue funding US aid to Ukraine, as it maintains its ongoing defense against Russian attacks. Ukraine was front and center in Biden's speech last year, and his pledge to continue support for the war effort this year will need to overcome waning Republican support.
The debt-ceiling showdown
A vague post from the White House earlier this month dropped one important hint: Biden's likely to try using the presidential bully pulpit to defuse impending budget brinkmanship.
"He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats, and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out," the White House said in a Jan. 13 release.
Biden's SOTU comes fast on the heels of his meeting with McCarthy last Wednesday, where the two began talks aimed at staving off a potentially disastrous showdown over raising the debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's Jan. 19 warning that the U.S. had hit its $31.3 trillion borrowing cap was expected, but GOP hardliners in the House are demanding budget cuts before raising that cap. To be clear, the debt ceiling isn't some constitutional requirement. . It's an artificially imposed limit, and since the 1960s lawmakers have raised that limit about 80 times.
With the announcement that Gov. Sanders would deliver the GOP response from Little Rock, the top two Republicans in Congress — McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — signaled key phrases we're likely to hear from her: inflation, surging crime, border crisis, failing schools.
When is the State of the Union address?
Biden will address both chambers of Congress in a joint session on Feb. 7, beginning at 9 p.m. ET in the House chamber. McCarthy will gavel in the session and join Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as Senate president, on the House dais.
SOTU speeches usually last about an hour, although presidential winds have trended longer. Former President Bill Clinton holds the records for both the longest and second-longest recorded addresses, in 2000 (one hour, 29 minutes) and 1995 (1:25) respectively, according to UC Santa Barbara research. Richard Nixon went the other direction in 1972, wrapping it all up in just 28 minutes. Recording technology was unavailable for George Washington's 1790 address, but its text ran just 1,089 words — shorter than this article.
How to watch
Essentially every TV news network will broadcast the address live, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. CNN viewers won't need a login to watch. All those networks will also stream the speech on their websites and through the apps available on Roku, FireTV, Android TV, Apple TV and similar devices or streaming services.
Easiest of all, though, is the White House YouTube channel, with ASL interpretation available. Keep an eye on the White House Facebook and Twitter accounts for a fresh link on the day of the speech.
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