Frank LaRose willed a friend "some rope and a tree" in high school

And a friend willed LaRose a Confederate flag!

Ohio State Secretary of State Frank LaRose once gifted his friend “a rope and tree” in his suburban Akron high school yearbook. Another Copley High School student, Jacob Daniel Kroslak, willed a Confederate flag to a student only identified as “Frank.”

Screenshots obtained by The Rooster:

LaRose and his high school buddies probably weren’t the first Ohio teenagers to use blatantly racist language in their high school yearbook.

LaRose, for his part, claims “some rope and a tree” were an inside joke with a buddy, who drove around “with an unmounted tire in his car, and Frank used to joke he only needed a rope and tree to make a tire swing.”

Though LaRose “now understands how people could perceive those words, he didn’t understand the racial connotations at the time.”

We know this because, along with the screenshots from LaRose’s yearbook, The Rooster also obtained documents laying out LaRose’s public relations strategy should the comments ever become public from the “pre-scandal” onward.

It’s hilarious that after all these years, the three people LaRose’s circle could summon as character witnesses are his Boy Scout leader, an “African-American teammate from Special forces,” and a high school girlfriend listed only as “???” She’s probably from Canada and wasn’t available to talk on the phone that weekend.

Could LaRose not remember her name? Were they going to find a crisis actor? These are some questions that leaped to my mind when reading the document.

Some names on the list give us an idea of when this crisis management timeline was produced: Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio State Senate President Larry Obhof are listed as “GOP Leadership.” That hasn’t been true since term limits put Obhof out to pasture in 2020 and Householder’s RICO arrest in June 2020.

• Clarke (sic) is Neil Clark, the GOP super-lobbyist who was indicted alongside Householder before dying by suicide next to a retention pond in Florida while wearing a “Mike DeWine for governor” t-shirt.

• Borges is Matt Borges, the former Ohio GOP chairman indicted in the HB-6 scandal.

• Merle Madrid is a longtime GOP communications hobgoblin who has worked for former governor John Kasich and LaRose’s Secretary of State office. I once met him at the Bier Stube, not that he would remember. He was described as “the nicest guy in the world,” which might be true if you could blot out his career working crises like this one for the state’s hobgoblin cartel.

The images show how politicians meticulously arrange political leaders, thought leaders, and major donors to keep the ship aligned through the storm.

LaRose escaped the storm in 2020 when these documents were produced. But he should be forced to answer for these comments tomorrow as he oversees an election with roughly a million Black voters. He spent a lot of time preparing for these comments to become public. It seems like a lot of effort to defend what was ostensibly an inside joke amongst friends.

But we deserve to know what he ever did with that Confederate flag. Maybe it still hangs in the office from which he disenfranchises Black voters to this day.