quote:

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and 4 others arrested in $60 million bribery case
6-8 minutes

July 22, 2020 / 8:53 AM / CBS/AP

The powerful Republican speaker of the Ohio House and four associates were arrested Tuesday in a $60 million federal bribery case connected to a taxpayer-funded bailout of Ohio's two nuclear power plants. Hours after FBI agents raided Speaker Larry Householder's farm, U.S. Attorney David DeVillers described the ploy as "likely the largest bribery scheme ever perpetrated against the state of Ohio."

Householder was one of the driving forces behind the nuclear plants' financial rescue, which added a new fee to every electricity bill in the state and directed over $150 million a year through 2026 to the plants near Cleveland and Toledo. After Householder's arrest, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine called on him to resign.

Because of the nature of these charges, it will be impossible for Speaker Householder to effectively lead the Ohio House of Representatives; therefore, I am calling on Speaker Householder to resign immediately. This is a sad day for Ohio.
— Governor Mike DeWine (@GovMikeDeWine) July 21, 2020

Also arrested were Householder adviser Jeffrey Longstreth, longtime Statehouse lobbyist Neil Clark, former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matthew Borges and Juan Cespedes, co-founder of The Oxley Group, a Columbus-based consulting firm.
Bribery Investigation Ohio
This Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019 file photo shows Ohio State Representative Larry Householder (R), of District 72, stands at the head of a legislative session as Speaker of the House, in Columbus. John Minchillo/AP

Previous attempts to bail out the nuclear plants had stalled in the Legislature before Householder became speaker. Months after taking over, he rolled out a new plan to subsidize the plants and eliminate renewable energy incentives. The proposal was approved a year ago despite opposition from many business leaders and the manufacturing industry.

Generation Now, a group that successfully fought an effort to put a repeal of the bailout law on Ohio's ballot, was charged as a corporation in the case.

A criminal complaint filed by the FBI says Generation Now received $60 million from an unidentified company over the past three years. In exchange, Householder and the other defendants worked to pass the nuclear plant bailout and block attempts to overturn it.

Householder and the others used the money to preserve and expand his political power in Ohio, the complaint said.

FirstEnergy Corp., whose former subsidiaries owned the plants, donated heavily to Householder's campaigns and his backers in the Ohio House. The utility's political action committee contributed $25,000 to Householder's campaign in 2018, according to an analysis by Common Cause Ohio, a government watchdog.

Householder flew to President Donald Trump's inauguration on the company's plane in 2016.

FirstEnergy Solutions, the subsidiary which has since changed its name to Energy Harbor and now operates the nuclear plants as an independent company, spent millions on lobbying and campaign contributions while trying to persuade federal and state officials to give the nuclear plants a lifeline.

FBI agents were at Householder's farm in Glenford on Tuesday morning in rural Perry County. FBI spokesman Todd Lindgren said only that they were carrying out "law enforcement activity." The Perry County Sheriff's Office confirmed that it was assisting.

Attempts by the AP to reach Householder, Borges and Clark were unsuccessful. A message seeking comment was also left with the House communications office.

The defendants appeared in court and were not required to enter a plea. The judge ordered Householder released on his own recognizance and directed him not to obtain a passport, to restrict his travel to the southern half of Ohio and not to contact any other defendants. The judge also ordered him to remove any guns from his home.

Similar restrictions were imposed on Longstreth. The next hearing was tentatively set for Aug. 6.

Borges has increasingly been on the outs with the Ohio Republican Party establishment since it was taken over by devotees of President Donald Trump. He was recently censured by the party's central committee, including for helping launch a PAC in June to turn out GOP voters for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The PAC is backed by a group of prominent Republican operatives that include a former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.

Clark is one of Ohio's best connected lobbyists, representing a high-powered stable of clients from the pharmaceutical, gambling and alcoholic beverage industries, among others.

Cespedes is a former investment officer with the Ohio Treasurer's Office who was appointed by then-Gov. John Kasich as commissioner for the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, where he oversees a team effort to stop discrimination in the state. His term ends July 29.

Householder is a veteran state lawmaker who's in his second stint as speaker. He held the same position from 2001 to 2004. He left state politics more than a decade ago because of term limits and returned in 2016 and took up a contentious fight to win back the chamber's top job.

Householder famously released a campaign ad that showed him shooting a television that was airing what he called a commercial produced by "anti-Trump gun grabbers." In the ad, he boasted that he had the "highest NRA rating in Ohio's history."

At the time he left office, he and several top advisers were under federal investigation for alleged money laundering and irregular campaign practices. The government closed the case without filing charges.

Householder is the second Ohio House speaker to come under investigation in just over two years.

Former Republican Speaker Cliff Rosenberger was investigated in 2018 amid an FBI inquiry into his travel, lavish lifestyle and a condo he rented from a wealthy GOP donor. Rosenberger, who has maintained he broke no laws, has not been charged, but the investigation remains open.

BigDave posted:

Hey have you guys heard about what's going on in Ohio?

Their House Speaker just got indicted for bribery, he was part of a $60 million dollar scheme to defraud a bailout of some Ohio nuke plants. No guesses for what party he belongs to.

Hot Karl Marx posted:

https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/sta...ber%3D1271pti15

Trabisnikof posted:

SpaceSDoorGunner posted:

https://youtu.be/L1_Rx_wpcG4

shame on an IGA posted:

UP THE BUM NO BABY posted:

https://twitter.com/ReutersUS/status/1289025547171966976?s=19

Midjack posted:

how has he not been pardoned already?

A Bad Poster posted:

Just give Donny an easy way out of the presidency without looking like a loser, and he'd happily leave. It's been clear since day 1 that he hated the job, he just wants people to cheer for him.

UP THE BUM NO BABY posted:

https://twitter.com/ReutersUS/status/1289025547171966976?s=19

Nick Soapdish posted:

https://twitter.com/DavidLarter/status/1289131983893868545?s=19

That's not good

Nick Soapdish posted:

https://twitter.com/DavidLarter/status/1289131983893868545?s=19

That's not good

ded posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/health/first-dog-dies-coronavirus-wellness-trnd/index.html

yep

quote:

It's unclear whether Buddy died from complications of the coronavirus, which he most likely caught from his owner, Robert Mahoney, who tested positive this spring, or whether he died from lymphoma.

Milo and POTUS posted:

At least it's not cold. Or at least the coldest part of the year. Silver lining and all that

facialimpediment posted:

Baseball was already screwed, they're now very close to being hosed.

https://twitter.com/Ken_Rosenthal/status/1289201470579945473?s=19

Nick Soapdish posted:

https://twitter.com/DavidLarter/status/1289131983893868545?s=19

That's not good

Platystemon posted:

Something may have been lost in translation, but “I have mould in my lungs” doesn’t come across as “I got a garden‐variety infection from wearing a dang mask”.

It comes across as “I am literally a corpse”.

Madurai posted:

I imagine swimming any armored vehicle is terrifying 100% of the time.

Duzzy Funlop posted:

As much as I love to poo poo on Trump, I'm legit longing for the day that the entirety of the US finally ends up taking Covid seriously. Countless people dying for no reason whatsofuckingever because of orange pissbaby has been infuriating from the get-go, as it drat well should have been.
What's added to my anxiety since the end of June / early July is the fact that my job now, in part, depends on the US getting control of this shitshow.

And here we are, the last day of July, 20k new infections, and 500 dead, with only 15 loving states reporting yesterday's numbers, and the majority of the worst-hit states (with the exception of FL and AZ) are still to come.

That's not even including the human misery we're about to face due to the eviction crisis.

Jesus loving Christ, it's so viscerally-infuriating that the "leader" of a nation cannot be loving bothered to tell people to wear a mask, socially-distance, and wash some loving hands.
Oh my loving days. This is not healthy.

quote:

Though Kushner’s outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level.

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get poo poo done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.

The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace.

According to one participant, the group did not coordinate its work with a diagnostic-testing team at Health and Human Services, working under Admiral Brett Giroir, who was appointed as the nation’s “testing czar” on March 12. Kushner’s group was “in their own bubble,” said the participant. “Other agencies were in their own bubbles. The circles never overlapped.”

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

quote:

So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

quote:

Perry also had an account on social website https://www.furaffinity.net under username “knives0011,” where he shares photos of himself in military garb which match his Twitter profile picture. In his blog on the site, he shares in a post dated 7 years ago that he would be going to Texas soon, and in another post from the same year he talks about his military experience.

“I have been dumped while I was in Afghanistan and my own parents made it pretty clear that when I better stay in the army,” Perry writes. “because when I get out that is it they are not going to help me out and I am going to be living in the streets like [those] vets you see begging for your change addicted to drugs because that is there only way put of the pain that they feel. All in all I am hosed.”

Madurai posted:

I imagine swimming any armored vehicle is terrifying 100% of the time.