Underreporting in the Underworld: High Bridge Consulting’s Phantom Paper Trail
Columbus-based Republican operative Elephant in the Room returns with information that might interest federal and state tax investigators.
The Friday dispatch will be the July Mailbag.
You can submit your questions anonymously through the Jotform.
An eclectic mix of political and non-political questions always makes the mailbags fun to write and (hopefully) read.
You can skip directly to this week’s tell-all from The Elephant in the Room by clicking here.
Some housekeeping items that you might have missed over the weekend…
As Patriot Wire members learned first, State Senator Nathan Manning (R-North Ridgeville) is vacating his Ohio House seat after Governor Mike DeWine appointed him to the 9th District Court of Appeals.
The Republican Senate Caucus is expected to appoint State Rep. Gayle Manning (R-North Ridgeville) to finish the term. Manning is already running for her son’s vacated seat, and an Aug. appointment will allow her to run as the incumbent in November. She faces State Rep. Joe Miller (D-Amherst), a longtime Social Studies teacher in the region.
N. Manning’s exit is a major blow to Speaker Matt Huffman, who, it must be noted, has never supplied a solid alibi for April 19, 1995. The 52nd House District will now be a likely Democratic flip without the “Manning” name in the fray. Whoever the local Republicans appoint will face Democrat Mike Baker of Elyria
Said one House Republican to The Rooster: “[The Democrats’] path to 40 seats [in the House] is wide open.” Breaking Huffman’s supermajority would be no small thing—especially with the anti-Huffman faction, already 13 strong, likely to grow after losing seats in November.
Senator Jon Husted, who has a diarrhea-splattered blanket where his brain is supposed to be, suffered some unfavorable headlines over the weekend.
Husted’s Franklin County campaign captain, Andrew Havas, resigned over revelations that he was jailed after allegations of sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old when he was 22 in 2008.
NBC reported that Havas later pleaded down to a simple misdemeanor assault charge and was sentenced to 90 days in Mahoning County Jail.
His wife, meanwhile, didn’t seem to see anything wrong with her husband “consensually dating” a 15-year-old:
It’s weird then that Havas would resign—and that Husted would accept it—if being jailed over “consensual dating” of a 15-year-old in a state where the age of consent is 16. But I understand how it’s easier to blame the fifth-ranked political blogger in Ohio rather than a husband.
Still, if Havas’ conduct is unbecoming enough to cost him a volunteer role with the Husted campaign, it’s not looking good for the several Republicans with Havas money on the books.
Some highlights:
$19,778.75 to State Senator Michel Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester); he’s also co-hosted fundraisers for her, per multiple sources.
$12,986.42 to Republican Attorney General candidate Keith Faber
$9,202.52 to Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley
$7,500 to State Senator Al Cutrona (R-Canfield)
$5,789 to House Finance chairman Brian Stewart
I believe in second chances. I believe in third, fourth and fifth chances, too. I also believe that it’s never too late for someone to change.
But none of that can happen without atonement. And judging by his wife melting down on my Instagram account, it’s evident that Havas doesn’t concede that it’s impossible for a 15-year-old to “consensually date” a 22-year-old. Can’t say that I’m shocked he found himself in the orbit of influential Ohio Republicans.
This, however, is a great example of why the State Legislature gets the Hell out of Columbus from late May to December in election years.
Unfortunately for Senators Cutrona and Reynolds, they’ll have to come back to Columbus for a single session to appoint Gayle Manning to her Senate seat. I’d suggest they donate that molester money to charity before then.
Anyway, the main event today is Columbus-based Republican operative The Elephant in the Room, with some revelations about Speaker Matt Huffman, House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe, and High Bridge Consulting that might interest the federal and state tax collectors.
As always, freelancers at The Rooster have been compensated at a fair market rate for their labor, an arrangement made possible through the generosity of the Patriots Caucus—the brave and noble soldiers who sustain a unique voice in Ohio politics.
Underreporting in the Underworld: High Bridge Consulting’s Phantom Paper Trail by The Elephant in the Room
Power in Columbus is rarely wielded by the people whose names are printed on the ballot. True control lives in unvouched invoices, unmapped corporate pipelines, and the deliberate silence of shadow ledgers.
It is an architecture built entirely on the convenient assumption that regular citizens will never take the time to audit the receipts, read the fine print, or cross-reference the public disclosures.
For the last three weeks, this column has systematically dismantled that assumption.
We began by mapping the establishment's foundational architecture, tracking the corporate-fueled Money Machine that keeps Ohio’s ruling class entirely insulated from the electorate's actual desires.
Next, we turned our attention to the psychological infrastructure of the status quo, pulling back the curtain on the Strategy Group’s fake polling racket—a manufactured reality weaponized to freeze donors, intimidate potential challengers, and rig primary contests long before election day.
Finally, we put a face to the machine, exposing House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe as the definitive Statehouse swindler. As the primary target of our ongoing investigation, Dittoe has spent years operating as the ultimate backroom mechanic, quietly pulling the levers of institutional power from the immediate perimeter of the speaker’s podium.
But a political machine can manufacture all the dark money, rigged data, and institutional leverage it wants; it still requires an execution arm on the ground to deploy those resources.
It requires operational entities that can place bodies into legislative districts, oversee campaign operations, craft messaging strategies, and absorb millions of dollars in street-level expenses without leaving a conspicuous paper trail for reporters or regulators to follow.
This week, we are stepping directly into the fire to expose how an elite political consulting racket down in Columbus has been operating in flagrant violation of Ohio’s campaign finance laws for years by keeping its true revenue almost entirely off the books.
It is time to talk about High Bridge Consulting.
A Mirage on East Broad Street
If you navigate the Columbus political ecosystem for even a single afternoon, you know High Bridge. They are the premier, institutional campaign muscle for the Ohio Republican establishment.
They are the tactical unit that Speaker of the Ohio House Matt Huffman frequently and openly refers to as his “big gun” when he needs to protect an incumbent from a grassroots primary or drag an establishment-backed candidate across the finish line.
They are omnipresent, immensely influential, and whispered about with a mix of reverence and fear. Yet, if you log onto the Ohio Secretary of State’s online campaign finance database, High Bridge Consulting practically ceases to exist as a functional political operation.
The Ohio Secretary of State’s online search portal serves as the state’s definitive public ledger, tracking the financial lifelines of state politics. Because the digital archive only contains campaign finance reports from 2020 through the present day in 2026, it represents the complete modern footprint of High Bridge’s electoral operations. When you run a comprehensive query for High Bridge Consulting within that state database, the results are shockingly barren.
The official state record claims that over the last six consecutive years—encompassing multiple high-stakes, multi-million-dollar election cycles—High Bridge Consulting has brought in campaign consulting revenue from a grand total of three political clients in the entire state of Ohio: “Friends of Susan Manchester,” “The Republican Senate Campaign Committee” (RSCC), and the “Protect Our Constitution” political action committee.
When you isolate individual legislative candidate committees, the disclosure becomes downright farcical. State Representative Susan Manchester is the only legislative candidate in the entire State of Ohio who explicitly discloses paying High Bridge Consulting for campaign services on an official financial disclosure report over the last six years.
To demonstrate just how thin this public paper trail truly is, The Rooster has pulled the official state data. The entire public financial footprint of this political juggernaut is contained within a single, sparse state document, preserved here for public scrutiny:
I mean, the ledger reads less like the record of an elite political operation and more like a bookkeeping glitch.
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