The announcement Monday of new felony indictments against players in Ohio’s massive bribery scandal is again raising questions about what Gov. Mike DeWine knew before and after he nominated Sam Randazzo to be the top utility regulator in the state.
DeWine made Sam Randazzo the head of PUCO. New allegations say Randazzo had a corrupt relationship with FirstEnergy dating back to 2010
in a scheme to pay more than $60 million in bribes in exchange for the 2019 passage of a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailoutOn Monday, law enforcement authorities led by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost again indicted Randazzo, this time on state felony charges. Also indicted were former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and former Vice President Michael Dowling. They all pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.
On Thursday, DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney said that as his boss was entering the governor’s office at the start of 2019, DeWine saw Randazzo’s relationships with FirstEnergy and big electricity users as a special qualification to be the top regulator. DeWine’s legislative affairs director, Dan McCarthy, had also been a FirstEnergy lobbyist. When he was, McCarthy founded Partners for Progress, a 501 dark money group that FirstEnergy admitted was used to funnel tens of millions of the corporation’s dollars into the effort to make Householder speaker and pass and protect the bailout. Once in the administration, McCarthy acted from that perch to help pass House Bill 6, the bailout legislation.
In January, as Randazzo was being vetted to chair the PUCO, he told Dawson, DeWine’s chief of staff, about the $4.3 million payment, but he did not tell her about the other millions he had received from FirstEnergy, the state indictment said. Randazzo didn’t report any of the payments to the Ohio Ethics Commission, it added.reporting shady financial connections between Randazzo and FirstEnergy on Jan. 28, 2019. But Tierney said that Dawson never told the governor about the $4.
“The Governor had previously stated he had a conversation with Laurel Dawson in November 2020 about Sam Randazzo when Mr. Randazzo’s property was the subject of a federal search warrant,” he said. “The contractual termination payment was part of that discussion.”
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