When the clowns run wild
Frank LaRose is cooked if he campaigns for Senate like he runs the Secretary of State office.
In retrospect, letting partisan, power-hungry politicians oversee our elections was probably a mistake.
Take Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who withdrew the state from ERIC, the multi-state voter registration database that nabbed a Trump supporter who got sentenced this week to three years in prison for voting twice in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
That’s before mentioning the 14-point humbling he took on Issue 1.
LaRose announced his Republican Senate campaign with three years left on his second term as Secretary of State. I doubt many private sector bosses would tolerate employees undertaking a second full-time job on a whim, but it’s not like LaRose knows what it’s like to work in the private sector.
According to multiple sources, LaRose has had a lifelong ambition to become a Senator and had this race tabbed before he even won the Secretary’s job in 2018.
The ambition has proved costly for his day job. Interviews with a handful of former employees under LaRose paint a picture of low morale that started with former Secretary of State Jon Husted and has cratered under LaRose. Many key staffers have left despite the guarantee of a job through the rest of LaRose’s term in 2027.
“A big root of the problems in Frank's office started with Mandi Grandjean, former elections director,” said one source, granted anonymity to speak freely on their knowledge of the inner workings of LaRose’s office.
“Her staff hated her, and Frank had to beg people to stay on board. There were complaints about a hostile work environment that Frank didn't take seriously until shit hit the fan.
“They wanted to get rid of her, but then she got pregnant and (allegedly) threatened to sue if they fired her, so they promoted her to some bullshit position they made for her. [That] did wonders for morale. One of the most disliked employees in the office gets... a promotion? No one was happy.”
The promotion of Grandjean would come shortly before LaRose made the shocking decision to fire longtime spokesperson Rob Nichols after The Rooster reported on Nichols’ unprofessional social media behavior. Despite his flaws, Nichols was well-liked among coworkers and renowned for his loyalty to LaRose.
LaRose initially planned to suspend Nichols, only to reverse course and fire the longtime GOP operative in a futile effort to win the endorsement of Donald Trump, which is a starkly different tune than he had been singing three months prior:
Personnel problems have only compounded as LaRose has sought a higher office, with many of his public office lieutenants pulling double duty.
For example, Grant Shaffer, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and veteran LaRose campaign strategist Brett Buerck hate each other, according to one high-ranking Republican.
The animosity has stymied the LaRose campaign from choosing a manager, which is a rather important role when you’re looking to become the Senator of a state with nearly 12 million residents.
The problems go back to what I wrote in April about why I don’t believe Frank LaRose will ever be our Senator, primarily because he surrounds himself with unprofessional yes-men who behave like clowns.
In interviews with Republican operatives and former LaRose staffers, one name that embodied that ethos kept appearing: Alex Pavloff.
On the night LaRose declared for Senate, the campaign set up a conference call with various Republican leaders throughout the state. The Rooster got the drop on that meeting and leaked the details to Twitter.
The call had technical difficulties for two minutes before LaRose got on the line… only to be upstaged by “The Loophole,” a Garfunkel & Oates song about Evangelical women seeking anal sex as a way to preserve their sexual virginity in the name of Jesus.
The snafu made it all the way to The New York Post, which is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen after an ostensibly routine conference call,
The operator behind the curtain was Pavloff, who I’m told sees himself as a “Karl Rove type.”
Pavloff, like many people in LaRose’s inner circle, got his start in politics through nepotism. His uncle is a CEO, and his father was the longtime Vice Chairman of the Summit County Republicans, LaRose’s home county.
Pavloff showed the loyalty that LaRose values above all else when he was the only staffer to comment on the firing of Nichols while laughably citing LaRose’s “principles” on the matter.
A tipster alerted me that night of the failed conference call that Pavloff was a shady character and a potential content gold mine for his past antics. The source spilled, and The Rooster later confirmed via multiple other sources, that Pavloff is a deadbeat father who has only seen his child “maybe four times in ten years.”
The tipster also detailed that Pavloff, who plies his trades working for an anti-abortion zealot like LaRose, wanted the expectant mother to abort the growing fetus inside her. Two sources, speaking to The Rooster on a condition of anonymity, confirmed the story.
Other interviews described Pavloff as “disgusting” and “willing to fuck anything that walks.” One called Pavloff a “top-level narcissist” who is “as good a political operative as he was a husband and a friend.”
The last quote alludes to an infamous incident in LaRose circles when Pavloff wrecked the engagement between Kayla Atchison, a former Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee candidate, and Bill Albright, a current Republican candidate for the Ohio House who at the time was serving overseas with the United States Army.
Pavloff and Albright had been friends for years, coming of age together as one-time LaRose staffers. They had also served alongside each other in Ohio Young Republican leadership. (Pavloff is chairman emeritus to this day.)
Though Pavloff left his wife for Atchison, according to multiple sources, he would betray Atchison “four or five times” by cheating on her before finally bringing his newest girlfriend, Americans for Prosperity Deputy Legislative Director Hannah Kubbins, to an event featuring his boss Frank LaRose.
Pavloff christened the new relationship by bringing her to a Frank LaRose event and sitting with her at a table that included LaRose, Atchison, and Albright’s current Republican Statehouse opponent.
According to a source, LaRose said Pavloff would undergo “some human resource things” when he learned the scope of what had transpired at his table that night. It didn’t matter much to LaRose since Pavloff is still in his circle.
The moral code they’re trying to enforce on other Ohioans doesn’t apply to them.
After numerous requests to Pavloff for comment on various anonymous quotes I threw his way, he got back to me Tuesday afternoon with some absolute heat that starts with him using my government name as if that’s something I’m supposed to be ashamed of:
Hey Donald, Nearly everything you’ve said is either false, baseless hearsay, or a complete misrepresentation of the truth. With respect to one of the things you’ve said, please see that attached and act accordingly. This will be the last time we speak. Good luck.
In closing, he attached this affidavit for some reason:
It’s funny that, out of all the quotes I provided to Pavloff, he was only willing to sign an affidavit under the threat of perjury about something I’m not alleging.
Had he responded to my further messages, he would have understood that I wasn’t going to print that his ex-wife got an abortion; I was publishing that he pressured the mother of his child, whom he has seen “maybe four times in 10 years” to get an abortion when he found out the news.
But he didn’t want to talk about any of that.
The Rooster stands by everything reported in this story. Doubly so when it comes to Pavloff.
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Great work! It's important to get behind the scenes and shine a light on the rodents making the wheels turn for the slicks speaking into the mics at the podiums.