It's all in the game, right?

Frank LaRose's suspect hiring practices, Justin Bibb caught in 4K, and the HB-6 investigation takes another step toward Governor Grandpa Sleepy Tea.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has spent the better part of a year galavanting around the state in a fruitless pursuit of his life ambition to become a United States Senator.

If you work in the private sector, you can probably imagine what would happen to office morale if the head honcho spent his days out of office, doing whatever he could to earn a political promotion that probably won’t include you.

The Rooster dropped the dime in August of last year:

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.”

Again, Ohio probably erred by making our chief election official an elected position. It’s somewhat surprising that it took this long for morale to be thrown in the shitter as the office was overseen by power-hungry jackals who only saw the well-paying job as a stepping stone on their path to higher office.

But that’s a column for another day!

In October, Jesse Balmert and Haley BeMiller of dispatch.com confirmed the turnover churn in the office:

High turnover and low morale have rocked the Ohio secretary of state’s office under Republican Frank LaRose, who has struck an increasingly partisan tone as the state’s election chief amid his bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown next year.

In recent months, a dozen officials in LaRose’s office who handled elections, communications and other duties have left, taking with them years of experience in running Ohio’s elections. But the staffing problems extend even further, leading to delays and communication problems with local boards of elections.  

“How many more dedicated and talented staff members will it take walking out the door before management takes a serious look at the source of the problem and finally creates a solution?” wrote former deputy elections administrator Luke Scott in an exit interview.  

The distillation of the problem can be explained in LaRose firing longtime press secretary Rob Nichols after The Rooster exposed his pseudoanonymous Twitter account and anti-Trump tweets, in an effort to curry the endorsement of the Golden King.

Nichols was well-liked among colleagues, and they were shocked when LaRose changed course from suspending Nichols to firing him. The decision rang doubly hollow when, months later, Trump lied to LaRose’s face about not endorsing in the Senate race, which LaRose relayed on national television, only to have Trump endorse Bitcoin aficionado Bernie Moreno hours before a federal fundraising deadline.

Nichols, for all my criticisms and clashes of him, was at least competent in his job. But I met his replacement, Melanie Amato, during a Ballot Board meeting in November when she became the latest LaRose stooge to fail at keeping me from pestering the boss:

Amato would later tell the Ohio Highway Patrol about the incident that I was the one who initiated contact with her, which is a lie that the prestige of her office allows her to tell despite video evidence to the contrary. I wouldn’t have made it this far in the game if I was putting my hands on people.

But at the time, I didn’t know anything about Amato. When I identified her, a member of the Patriots Caucus informed me that she used to work as a spokeswoman for the Columbus Division of Police.

Naturally, I thought she left that job of her own volition since it’s almost impossible to lose your job with the department. One infamous example involves Randall Mayhew, a Columbus cop who earned reinstatement despite “soliciting” sex workers while on duty.

Amato, however, lost her job in less than a year for gross negligence of duty and doing a hit-and-run in her division-issued police car.

We know this thanks to a public records request for Amato’s police personnel file that The Rooster finally obtained yesterday after filing the paperwork on Nov. 21:

We can see some of the effects of her incompetence in reporting on police activity during her tenure from outlets traditionally friendly to the police’s version of events.

From Cole Behrens of dispatch.com in January 2023 (emphasis mine):

Columbus police are investigating after a Newark man was killed early Sunday morning when a wrong-way driver crashed head-on into his vehicle on a ramp to Ohio Route 161 on the city's Northeast Side.

[…]

Columbus police did not identify the wrong-way driver in the news release, nor did they explain why they did not identify the driver or whether that driver was injured in the crash.

The investigation into the wrong-way crash is ongoing is all a Columbus police spokesperson would say Sunday.

Or this story, from the police-friendly Bethany Bruner, in February of 2019 (emphasis again mine):

The Columbus Division of Police's first-ever group of lateral transfer officers from outside law enforcement agencies has lost more than a third of its members within their first four months.

[…]

"The current job market is extremely competitive and challenging for employers in virtually any field," the Department of Public Safety's statement said. "As with any other first-time venture, we expect there to be areas for improvement and correction. We will continue to look at those opportunities to make this program successful as one piece of our larger recruitment efforts."

Columbus police did not respond to a request for an interview for this story.

It’s revealing how quickly Amato drew the ire of her bosses by not adequately spinning narratives or massaging local reporters, who, again, are already conditioned to see police as trustworthy protectors of the city.

But she did herself no favors by also being terrible at every other duty of a press secretary. The final straw just happened to be when she left work and damaged company property—all without informing her superiors.

However, despite the routine incompetence and disregard for her bosses’ instructions, Amato was allowed to save face by tendering her resignation over two weeks later.

Amato’s resignation letter from the Columbus Division of Police could have fit on the back of a bar napkin.

Amato’s personnel file is close to 80 pages long, and most of it isn’t good. You can read the full file over here.

I’ve been fired from a job before—most notably the union electrician apprenticeship when I bombed on Urban Meyer without realizing he had a business relationship with my contractor. It sucks if you can believe that.

But reading through the file and seeing how Amato was terrible at every aspect of the job while also routinely being insubordinate, you start to wonder how she got any job in the industry again, let alone one with the Secretary of State’s office.

Maybe she’s a helluva an interview! She did beat out four other candidates for the police propagandist position. She was also technically allowed to say she resigned from the position, which could be for a variety of reasons easily explained to any potential interviewer—especially one in an overworked, overstressed office that was already stretched thin.

It’d be one thing if this was a one-off hiring. Instead, it’s a somewhat disturbing pattern for a statewide executive who has spent his adult life in politics preparing for this moment.

One lobbyist described LaRose’s hiring practices as “The Island of Misfit Toys,” which would help explain his disastrous Senate campaign and how a lowly sewer blogger duped his team into naming a fictitious pastor as his Miami County Campaign Captain.

Amato is merely a symptom of that disease, but the case is the perfect distillation into why I declared LaRose’s Senate campaign dead-on-arrival months before it began.

Justin Bibb! was on the hunt for strange at a Drake concert two hours before a mass shooting erupted in the Warehouse District

Mayor Justin Bibb and an unidentified woman in Detroit on January 8th, 2023, at 11:43 p.m.