🚨Emergency Rooster: Dusty Dave Yost finally does something useful for once in is life 🚨

Jon Husted... call your office, sir!

Like most red-blooded Americans, I planned to spend my Super Bowl Monday, which should be a federal holiday, doing zero work and riding my bike 20 to 30 miles.

Little did I know that Ohio Attorney “Dusty Dave” Yost actually planned to do something useful for perhaps the first time in his political career.

From the Office of the Attorney General:

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — A former chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, two former FirstEnergy Corp. executives and two entities have been indicted by a Summit County grand jury as a corrupt enterprise for their alleged role in the House Bill 6 scandal, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh and Summit County Sheriff Kandy Fatheree announced this morning.
 
“This indictment is about more than one piece of legislation,” Yost said. “It is about the hostile capture of a significant portion of Ohio's state government by deception, betrayal and dishonesty. Shout it from the public square to the boardroom, from Wall Street to Broad and High: Those who perversely seek to turn the government to their own private ends will face the destruction of everything they worked for.”
 
Charged with a combined 27 felony counts are Samuel “Sam” Randazzo, former PUCO chairman; Charles “Chuck” Jones, former CEO of First Energy; Michael Dowling, former First Energy senior vice president of external affairs.
 
Two companies controlled by Randazzo – the Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio and IEU-Ohio Administration Co. – are also named in the filing. Both are alleged to be shell companies created solely for furthering Randazzo’s alleged criminal activity. 
 
“Jones and Dowling actively worked to spend FirstEnergy money to improperly influence Randazzo to exercise the authority of PUCO chairman to advance FirstEnergy’s regulatory and policy agendas,” the indictment says. Specifically, the indictment accuses the enterprise of engaging in a scheme to corrupt the PUCO chairman and ratemaking policies, stealing millions of dollars from FirstEnergy and a nonprofit trade group, and tampering with government records.

You can read the full indictment, courtesy of Andrew Tobias of cleveland.com, over here.

I’ll give Yost this much: He’s actually gone beyond earning cheap headlines while doing nothing, which is one of his time-tested political tricks. But I still think it’s telling that the plotters of HB-6 had zero worries about Yost uncovering their scheme, and they would have been right about that if it weren’t for the meddling FBI!

Yost, in his typical partisan fashion, stopped short of indicting Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, who is the odds-on favorite to succeed Governor Mike DeWine in 2026 if he isn’t criminally charged in the largest bribery scheme in state history that we know about.

But Yost doubled down on Sam Randazzo, the corrupt former PUCO chairman already federally indicted after First Energy admitted to paying him a $4.3 million bribe days before his appointment to head the utility regularity commission over pleas from watchdog groups.

But Yost also nailed two former First Energy executives who appeared in a meme shared by former CEO Chuck Jones celebrating their ostensible success of a criminal racketeering scheme:

Word of advice from Twitter Law Criminal Defense 101: Don’t make memes about your federal racketeering plot and share them on unencrypted group messages.

Jones, along with Randazzo, have been dead men walking for years. I’m honestly surprised they stayed in the country and didn’t bribe some foreign country without an extradition treaty to avoid dying in prison. But it’s clear that these guys were not nearly as smart as they thought they were, so here we are.

The biggest name in the bunch, though, is Michael Dowling, who, at first glance, appears to be down the totem pole from Jones and Randazzo as First Energy’s Vice President of Bribes.

And that’s true to an extent. But talking with people who have followed this investigation every step of the way, Dowling was always the biggest piece of the puzzle in the sense that he was the bridge between First Energy and their stooges in Ohio government.

We already knew, thanks to reporting from Jake Zuckerman of Ohio Capital Journal in August 2022, that Jones and Dowling were instrumental in saving Randazzo’s appointment to the PUCO chairmanship despite his long and infamous ties to the fossil fuel industry in the state.

After winning a close race, DeWine, Husted, Jones and Dowling celebrated over dinner at The Athletic Club in Columbus. The next day, Jones sent Randazzo the text message (above) indicating they discussed the open PUCO seat.

In January of 2019, the FirstEnergy officials texted one another trying to fill not just one but two open PUCO seats, all the while mentioning phone calls with “DeWine guys” about it.

“That’s their plan but nothing certain until Sam’s [Randazzo’s] meeting [with DeWine],” Jones texted Dowling. “Four people in DeWine world, you, Sam, and I know about this.” The PUCO seats would eventually be filled by Randazzo with another commissioner renewed.

This is another example of why I would bulldoze the Columbus Athletic Club on my first day as mayor. The Republican cabal perverts love that den of iniquity!

But with Dowling’s indictment, it’s a “look out below!” situation as white-collar criminals are not the types willing to spend a life in prison for politicians who wouldn’t do the same for them.

An exhibit from the Larry Householder trial. Dowling is seen in the top right corner.

Dowling had his hands in the mud from the beginning of the scheme, as evidence in this federal government exhibit from the Larry Householder trial, showing Householder lieutenant Jeff Longstreth, who has since pled guilty to his role, coordinating with Dowling about the launch of Generation Now, the dark-money group at the center of the bribery operation.

A federal government exhibit.

And here, eight months later, we see Dowling talking with an unidentified number about total expenditures to date with Generation Now:

And this, folks, is why “Boomers doing RICO crimes on unencrypted text messaging” is one of my favorite genres of pornography.

Dowling was also pointing out to his co-conspirators that DeWine’s chief of staff, Laurel Dawson, married to First Energy lobbyist Mike Dawson, was critical in mustering a state plane to Chicago to ferry state legislators back to Columbus for the key vote on HB-6:

You don’t need to hold a cum laude degree from the prestigious institute of Twitter University Law School, as I do, to see how bad things look for anyone involved. Jones and Dowling’s saving grace, at the moment anyway, is that they’re being prosecuted by Dusty Dave Yost and not the federal government, though that could certainly change.

But you can read the full indictment for yourself and see how obviously connected the DeWine administration was to the passage of HB-6. And while I won’t believe we’ll see DeWine indicted until I see it, I am growing more optimistic that at the very least, Husted is some serious shit.

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand” is the timeless Watergate saying that seems to apply here. These guys were so used to shady public-private dealings that they regularly communicated on unencrypted channels about the largest bribery scheme in state history that we know about.

The corruption is stunning. But thankfully for us, these guys never entertained the possibility of being caught. While Yost can ride the FBI’s coattails and use it as gubernatorial campaign fodder, we can only hope that Dowling spills the beans and bridges the gap from First Energy into the seedy public underworld.

Because right now, no matter what Husted may say publicly, he’s sweating more than he ever thought possible. And that, my friends, is a win in and of itself.

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