LOVELAND MAGAZINE

News and Events from the Loveland, Ohio Area

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Since 2004

Tag: energy bailout

  • FirstEnergy admits it controlled dark money group started by DeWine aide

    FirstEnergy admits it controlled dark money group started by DeWine aide

    BY: MARTY SCHLADEN and Ohio Capital Journal

    Columbus, Ohio – The mammoth scandal surrounding a 2019 energy bailout appeared to creep closer on Thursday to the administration of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

    FirstEnergy said in a deferred prosecution agreement that the man DeWine appointed to lead the Public Utility Commission of Ohio took a $4.3 million payment and then acted on behalf of the Akron-based power company instead of as the state’s top regulator. 

    That man, Sam Randazzo, has resigned. 

    But FirstEnergy also helped control a 501(c)(4) “dark-money” group started by a senior DeWine aide while he was still a FirstEnergy lobbyist, the agreement showed. The company passed a torrent of money through the secretive group as part of a successful $61 million effort to buy a $1.3 billion, ratepayer-funded bailout, the document FirstEnergy signed off on said.

    While Acting U.S. Attorney Vipal J. Patel slammed the dark money group, DeWine and the aide, Legislative Affairs Director Dan McCarthy, didn’t respond to requests for comment. DeWine has staunchly defended McCarthy since the scandal broke almost exactly a year ago.

    Patel held a press conference in Cincinnati on Thursday to announce that his office had entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with FirstEnergy. The company will pay $230 million and, if it lives up to the terms of the agreement, will have a charge of conspiracy dismissed.

    Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, has been charged in the case. He was stripped last year of his speakership and he was ejected from the House earlier this year.

    Two of Householder’s associates charged in the case have pleaded guilty and a third, Neil Clark, took his own life in March.

    For its part, FirstEnergy fired CEO Chuck Jones and two other executives and is conducting an investigation of its own.

    In Cincinnati Wednesday, Patel stressed that the investigation is continuing. But he wouldn’t comment on matters other than the agreement with FirstEnergy. 

    DeWine aide McCarthy hasn’t been charged and last summer, he denied wrongdoing. But Partners for Progress, the dark-money group he founded, was a topic of the prosecution agreement.

    Then still a FirstEnergy lobbyist, McCarthy founded it, “weeks after certain FirstEnergy Corp. senior executives traveled with (Householder) on the FirstEnergy Corp. jet to the presidential inauguration (of Donald Trump)  in January 2017,” the agreement said.

    The prosecution agreement added, “Although Partners for Progress appeared to be an independent 501(c)(4) on paper, in reality, it was controlled in part by certain former FirstEnergy Corp. executives, who funded it and directed its payments to entities associated with public officials. 

    “For example, FirstEnergy Corp. executives directed the formation of Partners for Progress and decided to incorporate the entity in Delaware, rather than Ohio, because Delaware law made it more difficult for third parties to learn background information about the entity. Certain FirstEnergy Corp. executives were also involved in choosing the three directors of Partners for Progress, two of whom were FirstEnergy Corp. lobbyists.”

    Millions would flow through Partners for Progress while McCarthy was its president and tens of millions more would later run through it and into the furious effort to pass the bailout after McCarthy resigned to become DeWine’s legislative affairs director in early 2019.

    The prosecution agreement also appears to refer to McCarthy as “Official Aide 1”  as he worked on DeWine’s behalf to help pass the bailout that DeWine would sign later that year.

    It cites emails among energy executives saying that Official Aide 1 and others were “fighting” to extend the term of a bailout of two failing nuclear reactors in Northern Ohio.  It also cites a text-message discussion between a FirstEnergy executive and the aide about language that would make the bailout harder to challenge in a referendum.

    And in the press conference, Patel said the scandal would never have happened if not for the dark-money group of which McCarthy was president and another, Generation Now, which has pleaded guilty.

    “This effort would not have been possible — both in the nature and the amount of the money provided — without the use of 501(c)(4)s,” Patel said.

    The acting U.S. attorney called the scheme, and even the name of McCarthy’s former dark-money group, dishonest.

    “These are supposed to be, according to the (tax) code, social welfare organizations. You all see a lot of social welfare going on? I don’t,” Patel said, adding, “What about these names? Partners for Progress? What are the partners here? The conspirators? What’s the progress? Passage of (the energy bailout) through bribery?”

    While DeWine’s office didn’t respond to questions on Thursday, the governor in February defended his legislative affairs director.

    “As far as I know, Dan McCarthy has been well-respected for many, many years, long before he started working for me as our legislative director and I have faith in his integrity,” DeWine said.

    For Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, a Democrat challenging DeWine in the 2022 election, that’s not good enough.

    “Today’s charges make clear that this corruption case reaches the highest levels of government in Ohio,” she said in a statement. “Enough is enough. It’s time for Gov. DeWine to come clean about his knowledge and involvement in this scandal.”

  • After financing xenophobic campaign, FirstEnergy deplores anti-Asian bigotry

    After financing xenophobic campaign, FirstEnergy deplores anti-Asian bigotry

    By Marty Schladen and Ohio Capital Journal

    There has been a terrifying surge in violence against Asians over the past year, prompting one Ohio company to take a stand on an issue it was arguably on the other side of in 2019.

    Meanwhile, Ohio’s lieutenant governor is digging in over comments he made last week. (Ohio Lt. Gov. bashes China on coronavirus, won’t address Trump)

    There has been a drumbeat of random violence against Asians throughout the coronavirus pandemic. 

    Earlier this month, a man went on a shooting rampage in the Atlanta area, killing eight. Six of those victims were Asian women. Then on Monday, sickening surveillance footage showed a man in New York kicking a 65-year-old Asian woman in the stomach and then twice kicking her in the head and saying “you don’t belong here.

    The attacks are part of an alarming trend. Nearly 3,800 instances of anti-Asian hate — most of them verbal — were reported to Stop AAPI Hate over the past year. The organization said many more unreported incidents have undoubtedly taken place.

    Researchers have linked the increase in anti-Asian hate to former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding the coronavirus. He repeatedly referred to it as the “China virus” and the “Kung flu.”

    Last Friday, one Ohio company condemned violence against Asians.

    “FirstEnergy condemns the rise in violence across the country and stands firm in our support of the Asian-American community — which includes many of our employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders,” the company said in a tweet.

    As Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy institute flagged over the weekend, that’s a far cry from the tone of FirstEnergy-financed advertising during the 2019 fight over House Bill 6 — a $1.3 billion energy bailout that morphed into one of the biggest corruption scandals in Ohio history.

    After Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bailout law, FirstEnergy and related interests funded a furious fight to stop a citizen initiative to repeal it. Much of the campaign consisted of bogus claims that the repeal effort was really a Chinese conspiracy to take over Ohio’s power grid. Some of the rhetoric in the million-dollar campaign might even have surpassed Trump’s.

    “They took our manufacturing jobs,” one spot ominously opens. “They shuttered our factories. Now they’re coming for our energy jobs. The Chinese government is quietly invading our electric grid.”

    As the ad makes these assertions, it flashes video of Chinese President Xi Jinping at a Communist Party function.

    In another ad meant to scare Ohioans from signing the petition to repeal the bailout, the FirstEnergy-funded effort again falsely linked bailout opponents to China.

    “Warning!” it said. “Don’t give your personal information to the Chinese government. Don’t sign their petition allowing China control over Ohio.” 

    Asked about the contrast between the stance FirstEnergy took last week and the advertising campaign it helped fund in 2019, a spokeswoman said that the company is under new management.

    “FirstEnergy’s new leadership team is fully committed to diversity and inclusion and condemning violence and discrimination against Asian Americans,” the spokeswoman, Jennifer Young, said in an email. “We stand behind our statement and will continue to support and foster a workplace and world where all races, ethnicities and other targeted groups are valued and respected.”

    Indeed, in October the company fired CEO Chuck Jones and other top executives after an internal investigation found that the company had made a $4 million payment to DeWine’s appointee to Ohio’s utility regulator just before the HB 6 fight heated up. 

    As FirstEnergy works to move past the rhetoric of 2019, Ohio’s lieutenant governor is digging in on rhetoric from last week.

    On Friday, as FirstEnergy was denouncing anti-Asian violence, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted tweeted a story about Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without providing evidence, Redfield claimed that the coronavirus had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — a claim the World Health Organization called “extremely unlikely.”

    Despite that information being in the Axios story, Husted tweeted the story with the question, “So it appears it was the Wuhan Virus after all?

    Ohio Sen. Tina Maharath, D-Columbus, is the daughter of Laotian refugees. She told the Associated Press that Husted’s comments echoed Trump’s and only aggravated anti-Asian sentiment.

    Husted denied that.

    “I was just pointing out that this is an international crisis, in my opinion, that the Chinese government is responsible for and I wanted an independent investigation,” he told the AP. “So I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything that the political left or political right thinks that I might have from that tweet other than to draw attention to the issue.”

    In an article in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, virologist Angela L. Rasmussen said that the “virus probably evolved in a bat host until an unknown spillover event into humans occurred.”

    She called claims that the pandemic started with a laboratory accident or intentional engineering “outright ridiculous conspiracy theories.”

    As for placing blame for the pandemic on government responses, there seems to be plenty of that to go around. 

    Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, last weekend suggested to CNN that Trump’s bungled response to the pandemic may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. A Trump supporter, Husted has avoided criticizing Trump’s coronavirus response.