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The 2024 race for U.S. Senate is underway, and two and a half years after his arrest, Republican former House Speaker Larry Householder goes on trial in the largest corruption case in state history with dark money in the spotlight.

All this week in the state of Ohio, welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler, a state senator from northeast Ohio is the first Republican to announce he's running against Democratic U.S.

Senator Sherrod Brown next year.

It's the second U.S. Senate campaign in two years for Matt Dolan, who came in third in the seven way Republican Senate primary last year.

Dolan, the Senate Finance Committee chair, who's also a part owner of the Cleveland Guardians, says he'll focus on inflation, immigration and what he calls Brown's blind loyalty to President Biden and the Democratic Party.

In last year's Senate race, he ran as a conservative alternative to former President Trump.

Dolan doesn't say whether that's his strategy this time.

Will you be running a campaign similar to the one that you ran last year where you were basically the alternative to your Trump supporting opponents that helped you toward the end of the primary?

But is that a strategy that you think would work in the general next year?

Well, look, everyone keeps telling my strategy.

I run my own campaign.

I am my own person.

I have my own experience.

And I don't let anybody else dictate what direction I'm going in.

And I think that more than anything was resonating with the Republican voter.

As you move to the general campaign.

You know, you're going to have me with a record of experience getting things done for all Ohioans, not just Republicans, not Democrats, all Ohio.

The Ohio Democratic Party said in a statement that voters have rejected Dolan's attempt to buy a US Senate seat once and that he's been a shill for corporate donors while Brown has been focused on working families.

It's likely other Republicans will enter that race, and Dolan is expecting an expensive campaign, saying he will have the resources necessary to win from donors and from his personal fortune.

After two and a half years, the trial connected to the largest corruption scandal in Ohio history is starting next week.

Republican former House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party chair Matt Burgess were arrested in June 2020 in a $61 million bribery scheme in exchange for passing the nuclear and coal power plant bailout known as House Bill six.

Other defendants have admitted guilt and one is dead, but Householder and Burgess have always maintained their innocence.

State House correspondent Andy Chow will be covering the trial and is here for a preview.

So let's go back in time to 2019 House Bill six passes.

And then there was an effort to try to overturn it.

Then that brought the effort to stop the effort to overturn it.

And then we end up in 2020 with Larry Householder, Matt Burgess and the other folks arrested.

So tell me, what does this trial really focus on here?

So a good way of looking at it is to look at how much money was coming in and what the purpose of that money was for.

And there are really three sections for that.

First, there is money that was coming in to this fiber 1c4 operated by Larry Householder, allegedly.

That was for him and his personal and political gain to help Larry Householder become House speaker again and therefore pass something like HB six.

Then the second round of money was for P six to advocate for it, to push lawmakers for it to gain public appeal for it, and then to also fight back against that referendum effort with that counter petition.

And then from there, it was to continue this going forward, to continue to help householder in any way possible.

In the end, federal prosecutors say is more than $60 million flowing through these different dark money groups into the pockets of Larry Householder and his, quote unquote, enterprise from First Energy and first energy has gone so far as to admit to this through their deferred prosecution.

Agreement for which you'll pay a $230 million fine.

And so this goes back even before 2019, before Larry Householder became speaker.

I want to ask you about House Bill six.

In this case, though, the judge, Judge Black, has told Householder that he can't be using House Bill six as a defense to defend his allegedly criminal actions.

So when you hear people talk about all the allegations that have come out against householder and then have rapped HB six into it, there have been plenty of people who have said, well, HB six was good policy.

That's something that I agreed with.

And with the with what the judge is saying and where the prosecution is probably going to land on this, too, is that it has nothing to do with whether people think that there should have been a bailout to save these jobs at the nuclear power plants.

What it has to do with is this bribery scheme where money was flowing through dark money groups and there is some sort of alleged pay to play scandal here, quid pro quo where householder was paid money to become House speaker and then in return passed legislation for FirstEnergy.

And it should be said there are House Bill six defenders, but House Bill six doesn't look the same way it did.

I mean, the nuclear power plant, part of that, the bail out part is done.

Yeah.

There are still bailouts for to coal fired power plants.

There were the ending and the curtailing of energy efficiency programs.

This was a sweeping energy bill.

It was a huge energy bill.

And the thing to keep in mind is all the things that HB six accomplished were things on the legislative agenda for first energy.

So there was sort of this clear breadcrumbs leading back to first energy from the beginning.

Speaking of first energy, the case and the deferred prosecution agreement on the $230 million fine led to a huge shakeup.

At first energy.

Yeah, first energy.

Their former CEO was booted.

There were two executive vice presidents who were also fired.

There was another CEO that took charge.

And then he has also resigned to lots of different board of trustees.

Members have been changed, too.

There's been a big shakeup at first energy.

They really say that they're pushing forward on accountability and transparency to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again.

And this is a federal trial.

The rules are different for federal trial.

We won't see pictures from federal court and that sort of thing.

How long do you expect this to go on and who do you expect to hear from during this trial?

So the the prosecution and the defense have set aside about 4 to 6 weeks to allow this trial to go forward.

There's millions of documents to pore over and to go over.

I think what's the most interesting thing here in the trial?

Brief is what do these undercover officers have to say and what kind of evidence are they going to bring forward in the trial brief, it says that there are secret recordings that happened with the defendants.

And if those are played in court, that's going to be really interesting.

And we've also heard that Attorney General Dave Yost has been subpoenaed.

There are some lawmakers who've been subpoenaed as well.

Yeah.

And there's apparent Lee, some other people that we don't even know of who have been granted immunity.

So there are some like backdoor deals that may have happened.

And so is there going to be some surprise witness to take the stand who may have played a role in all of this, that we now that now comes forward and we learn even more that we didn't know before.

This case is incredibly complex, but it's also historic.

Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to watch.

Like you said, this has been known as the biggest corruption scandal in Ohio history.

So to see it all play out is going to be really interesting.

For years, Democrats have attempted to point out the connections between the House Bill six case and prominent Republicans beyond Householder and Baucus, 58 House and Senate Republicans voted for the sweeping energy law in 2019, along with 12 Democrats, most of whom represented districts near the nuclear power plants.

With Walters chairs, the Ohio Democratic Party.

And she says she thinks voters who have not acted on Democrats messaging on corruption will see things differently as this case goes forward.

It's one thing to have accusations and ongoing investigations.

It's quite another thing to have a criminal trial play out.

And so I think as much as Republicans have wished this would go away for the last two years, I think the more important question for them is why it hasn't and why more of them haven't come clean about what they knew and when and tried to help speed this along to get restitution for Ohio voters who've been paying literally paying the price from utility bills, taxes, all these things that are going out to essentially pad the pockets of corporate leaders.

So I think that, you know, I'm.

The realities are that while I'm you're right to ask the question about why these issues don't necessarily play out in the bigger scheme of things, early voters make make decisions on a lot of issues.

There's not one single thing that drives a decision.

But the more important thing for us, right, is we're going to keep holding Republicans accountable for betraying working Ohios will Ohioans full stop.

Meanwhile, a group of House Republicans who backed Representative Derek Marron for speaker say they're introducing a bill to change some rules related to lobbying, campaign finance and other ethics issues.

They're also hoping to change some House rules to give the two thirds of Republicans who voted for Marron, two thirds of House committee chairmanships and two thirds of seats on committees.

Representative Bill Plummer, who ran for speaker against Marron and now Speaker Jason Stevens, says now is the time to make changes to bring more transparency to state government, but also to, as he says, decentralize power concentrated in the speaker's office.

This caucus is going to start addressing problems.

You know, we are the integrity caucus and as represented, Manchester said, people have made complaints in the past that we never addressed issues.

Well, we're going to address issues from now on.

This is very important for us to speak up and be a unit.

We are on the eve of a very important criminal trial, which is embarrassing to my side of the aisle, the Republican side of the House involved in this trial, the Republican side of the aisle now is going to fix those problems.

We're committed to fixing these problems and having total transparency involving lobbyist and all these dinners that people go to.

You know, you name the problems we've seen recently, our intentions to fix that because we're honest people and we've been elected by honest people and we don't stand for these games anymore.

You know, this is one of the leaders priority bills, as he mentioned.

The timing, you could say the timing looks a little fishy, but the timing is tied to this trial.

The trial we've been waiting for two years for this trial.

Householder championed House Bill six as speaker and both Marin and Plummer voted for it.

Plummer voted to expel Householder and 2021 Marin voted against that.

Plummer says the Marin group is reaching out to Democrats to push Stevens to change the House rules, saying that Democrats are likely to support that decentralization of power.

But some Marin supporters, including Representative Gary Click, a guest on last week's show, are concerned about the promises they say Stevens must have made with Democrats to get all 32 of them to vote for him.

House Minority Leader Allison Rousseau said there was no grand deal.

As for the package of ethics law changes introduced by Marin's group, Walters said it was, quote, really great when Democrats introduced it.

Dark money was the subject that panelists hope to shine a light on at the Columbus Metropolitan Club this week.

And with the householder trial starting on Monday, there were a lot of questions about that case that came up to former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, David de Villiers, who actually filed the House Bill six case.

Former Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Commissioner Ashley Brown, now with the Harvard Electricity Policy Group at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

And Cathy Anne Kowalski, a lawyer who also writes for the nonprofit Energy News Network, which advocates for clean energy policy.

My statehouse news bureau colleague Joe Ingles moderated the event and asked what the impact of the House Bill six case will be on dark money in the future.

In the long term, I don't think much in the short term I think it did.

I think there was more scrutiny.

I hope and think that both state and federal prosecutors, investigators will kind of look at dark money groups.

And what we're really talking about in this case, in most cases are 51c for us.

And as was said that you do not have to divulge your your donors to these groups.

And you could have donors, you could have a bunch of people donating 50 bucks, thousands of people, or you could have one donor or one benefactor.

And, you know, there's no way of finding out what it is.

If and until you execute a search warrant or subpoena documents.

And at that time, the CAS other back and pretty much you know people go go running.

So the bottom line is, I think in the short term, I hope that prosecutors and agencies look at these things and scrutinize these as the perfect animal, the perfect entity to launder money, because that's what you're doing.

You've got the money going in from the bribe to effectuate whatever needs to be done to the bribing.

Right.

And these dark money groups, these 51c fours, are used to that, which by definition is money laundering, that there's a bribe and you're hiding the nature and source of those that the assets, which is the definition of money laundering through the C force.

Either of you have anything to add to that?

I know you've covered this, Kathy.

I mean, when you asked what effect will the trial have?

If householder and gorgeous are not found guilty.

I would be afraid that you would have more entrenchment in the use of dark money if they are found guilty.

I think there may be this higher level of scrutiny.

David referred to, but I think a lot is going to depend on the outcome of the trial.

Ashley is the former head of the puco.

You know, the rule that that agency plays in making, you know, policies.

The former head of the puco is at least implicated in some way in this.

We don't know.

He hasn't.

There's no charges or anything else.

But we know from the court documents that there are that there was some role that he played in all of this.

Are you surprised?

And what do you think about the way the Puco was involved in what we're seeing right now in the court documents?

Well, of course, we don't know exactly what role the former chair you're talking about.

That remains to be seen.

And yet, obviously, the first energy is admitted to bribing him.

He denies that he was bribed.

But they made a series of decisions which were clearly favorable to him.

And it's also factually established that he received the 4.33. with the $4.3 million payment just before he was appointed to the commission.

But when it was virtually was pretty clear he was going to be appointed.

So that's suspicious.

A couple of things are sort of disappointing to me about how the commission has handled this.

One is they're five commissioners.

And by the way, I was never the chair of the commission.

I was a commissioner, and the chairman is one in regard to policy.

The Chairman is only one of five members.

What's amazing to me is that the others, all with one single exception, consistently voted with the way that the chairman who's under suspicion was was voting, and there was no discussion at commission meetings about what was going on.

So you have to ask the member, what's the point of having five commissioners if four of them just follow the lead and don't do anything else?

As for the questions about accountability, Davila said first energy has been held accountable through the deferred prosecution agreement.

So they have been held accountable through the deferred prosecution agreement to some extent.

So I know everyone here has a DPA and they're like, they're getting away with it because you can't send an entity to prison.

All right.

So I want I can talk about forever, but you look at certain you want to punish the enterprise or the entity to such an extent, get a punch in the stomach hard enough where it's never it's not doesn't want to do it again.

Right.

But you don't want to kill it because you don't want all these people to get fired.

You want all their vendors to lose their jobs.

You don't want to completely kill for energy in and of itself because it will hurt that and it will hurt the consumer.

It will.

But can you hurt it enough or you're getting some sort of restitution to the consumer where you put where you're looking over it by way of a deferred prosecution agreement?

If they were prosecuted, no one go to prison and they'd be on probation to a judge.

Right.

In this case, it'd be Judge Black.

Judge Black has got like six people, probation officers that look at things, a deferred prosecution agreement would.

It means the Department of Justice is overseeing it or they're hiring some.

They're forcing FirstEnergy to hire a law firm to oversee it.

And so now you got DOJ with like a hundred people looking over your shoulder every day or a law firm that has got an incentive to find that you screwed up.

Looking over your shoulder every day.

I would prefer to be on probation than have a DPA with DOJ looking over my shoulder because they can and they will.

If they screw up, they'll come another ten years, getting out a couple of hundred million dollars in fines and that happens.

It happens a lot.

So Depay's aren't as nice as you think.

A lot of people don't want DPS because of the DOJ oversight and the.

And I didn't I was not part of pop star who was my immediate successor, worked on the DPA.

But trust me, there were there were a lot of people within the Department of Justice and the Energy consultant saying, all right, how do we hurt this company so bad that it survives?

And it came up with ever I'm not figure how many hundred million dollars to do it that's that came up.

You know, it's interesting setting aside the DPA and whether the fine that they had to pay, which just given the size of the company is sort of like you were out getting a parking ticket, but setting that aside for a second, here's another place where right where we're Ohio regulation is just simply failed because the Ohio commission has a number of powers it could invoke.

You know, I mentioned the past firing a border person.

What was the first energy board of directors doing while this was going on?

These guys are making a lot of money, doing literally no oversight.

Or if they weren't doing oversight, then they were complicit in the crime one way.

Either way, they shouldn't have been there.

So but that's one possible another.

Is this the scenario that they just did?

Well, this is pointing out, which is, you know, that the people could lose their job.

That's not going to happen with the utility.

What's going to happen is the commission could put and the commission has in the past for small utilities has done it for a company this size.

But it's a think about it could put it into receivership.

Most of the employees the company can't just go away because of all of its obligations to the public.

But those are going to be taken care of.

What you want to do is remove the top management.

No employees are going to lose their job.

Equipment isn't going to disappear.

Somebody is going to take over that company ultimately.

And there's a procedure under Ohio law that that could be done.

What how could that how could a Public Utilities Commission see a company pleading guilty to crime of this dimension and then literally do very little about it?

Then they can say they did nothing.

They have these four marginal investigations that are stopped for the moment, but there are tools that the commission has.

The Legislature years ago gave the commission tools.

This is exactly the case where they ought to be used and they're just not using it.

They're not doing anything of that level of consequence.

Consumers may end up getting, you know, stop having to pay certain money.

But what's clear is that all the all the remedies that government in general, not just DOJ, have to remedy the situation, are not being put to work.

I just I hundred percent agree receivership monitor ship.

I mean those are things they need to look at that could still to some extent happen and you're right we we not make anymore but DOJ is saying, hey, hold off for a little bit.

Let us let us work on this and we'll see what how the chips fall.

The panelists also talked about how hard it is to track dark money.

You know, you you will have bits and pieces that come up and it's kind of like, where does this fit?

You know, what's what's the story here?

And you'll see, you know, like in Firstenergy's case, we had this pattern over the course of a decade where there were efforts to try to get all the different things that were in House Bill six.

And they kept not succeeding until House Bill six rammed through.

Right.

Right.

And then it's like, where do we find these things?

What can we trace?

But can't we trace, you know, when when the complaint came out.

Well, David was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.

They had $6 million.

All I could trace was about 3 million, you know, so a lot of this gets hidden.

But it's you know what can we piece together?

What can we find?

Who were the players?

And there were some strange patterns we found, too, not just from FirstEnergy, but political parties involved.

Certain a certain law firm showed up multiple places.

So different things.

And and then you're like, okay, how does this work?

Remember, it's not just the one key for this case, FirstEnergy.

They're pass through.

So money going to first energy.

It came from a number of other see for us not necessarily directly from generation out the C for generation now didn't come directly to from FirstEnergy it went through some passed pass through C for us with ridiculous names and then it didn't necessarily go to buy commercials and things from generation now went to other passes and when you're doing that in a practical if you're doing an investigation as a prosecutor and FBI agencies, you've got to get all that stuff together when you don't even have the the ability to look at their donors and you don't.

You know, and I'll say this for a time period, I think still today you don't even for a51c for even with the IRS, you don't have to declare your donors.

You just have the money come in.

You don't have to identify who they are.

And so even if I were to get a judge or U.S. attorney to sign off on letting me get the tax records, because even as a prosecutor, even as the United States attorney, I still have to go through hoops to get federal income tax records.

And even if I got it, it wouldn't say anything.

It wouldn't tell me who the donors were.

The only way in I'll be able to find out is is if I do a search warrant based on that particular C four, or maybe I do a subpoena, but they're not going to there dirty, right?

They're not going to really tell me the records.

I can look at the money going into banks.

You know, we could try to do that.

But even those situations then kind of the case out of the bag because we're not even with banks, even when the subpoena says, please do not disclose this, depending on the banks, we don't know if they really will or won't.

And the forum closed with a question many have.

Is this trial the end of the case or will other people face charges?

I'll be very careful what I say here.

So I will say that even when we first announced the arrests and the complaint, the one thing we put forward was this is the beginning of the investigation to large extent.

And it really was because it went from a cover we were hiding everything to over where we could actually go talk to people and and do search warrants and things.

And then I indicated clearly we have the bribes that that that we've charged, you know, that we've alleged we don't have any bribery.

And no one from FirstEnergy has been charged yet.

Right.

Except now that they've charge to a deferred prosecution agreement.

That's just the entity.

Now, none of the individuals have been charged at least of yet.

So the quick answer your question is you're absolutely 100% right.

The caveat is, wait, it's still going on.

There's still an investigation.

There has been I have the utmost trust in Ken Parker.

I have the utmost trust in the FBI that been investigating this and the associates on this case.

I truly have been off the case since I've been since I've resigned, since the president fired me.

But at the same time, I have I'm telling you, these these are extremely intelligent, extremely trustworthy individuals.

And they'll get to the bottom us.

But they're slow.

They're the government.

You can see the full forum on dark money at the Columbus Metropolitan Club's YouTube channel.

That's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our Web site at state news dot org and follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

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Peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at med mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter Wright Morris and Arthur LLP now with eight locations across the country, Porter Wright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OHEA.org.