The wages of sin
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost pretends Leslie Wexner is beyond his paygrade, while House Majority Whip Josh Williams has a no-good, very bad day.
An “enforcement investigator” from the Department of Ohio Homeland Security emailed me Thursday afternoon.
As you might imagine, it caused a few heart palpitations before I realized a flashbang wasn’t going to be thrown through Hilltop Husband’s dining room, where I ply my trades.
I understand anyone who read Thursday’s dispatch and thought I had gleefully busted a couple of low-rent henchmen for fishing without a license. That would be a failure in my writing to express the seriousness of the wrongdoing, as you can see here in this redacted email:
A thing to know about me is that I rarely empty the full clip of damaging information into my little missives.
Not as some Machiavellian tactic, but because I’m perpetually concerned about relating complicated, nuanced political topics to well-intentioned citizens with normal brains.
In this case, it proved fortuitous, as I forwarded more damaging information to Ohio Homeland Security about Jacob Owens, the famous henchman that Ramaswamy reportedly moved to Ohio to work on his detail, despite Owens never holding a basic license, let alone any that would have allowed him to carry standard henchman weapons.
As of late Thursday afternoon, it would appear that Owens and ARK Protection Group have reached the frantic stage of deleting or scrubbing social media posts documenting Owens’ illicit work for the company.
As a Twitter Law cum laude graduate who once pondered becoming a criminal defense attorney until I saw my fate in Better Call Saul, it’s never ideal when you reach that stage.
The cover-up is worse than the crime. And in this case, deleting does nothing since Big Tech companies will turn over any relevant data to law enforcement—sometimes without a subpoena.
Through that lens, it’s not looking good for ARK Protection Group, which makes Ramaswamy’s decision to retain its services after Postal Inspectors pinched a less-famous henchman on Dec. 30 even more baffling.
Oh well! Not my problem.
Attorney General Dave Yost: I don’t have any power to investigate Ohio’s richest man, if that were something I were interested in doing, which I’m not, so please stop asking.
Two of Ohio’s most shameless politicians, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and House Majority Whip Josh Williams (R-Sylvania), held a press conference yesterday about Williams’ hodgepodge of ideas to “crack down” on (Somali-owned) daycare fraud.
Their willingness to participate in the charade is easy to understand from their perspectives.
Williams is running for Congress, and Yost is probably eager to show Ohio’s hog voters that he’s taking baseless allegations from the stupidest people alive seriously.
I didn’t even bother watching the pony show on my phone. I wasn’t pacing outside the Warren G. Harding Media Room to talk about allegations of widespread Somali daycare fraud that have yet to produce one (1) named suspect.
Yost, to his credit, stood and talked.
My first question probably surprised him. Earlier in the week, a Republican hitter admitted that at least one of Yost’s big-wig donors was pushing the idea that he should run for governor as an independent.
I asked Yost if there was any chance that could happen… and his answer fell well short of anything that could be described as a “reflevixe ‘no.’”
Still, it’s hard to envision it happening.
But Yost’s ego is swollen enough to think he could win in that scenario, rather than all but guaranteeing a victory for Dr. Amy Acton. He also has a motive, as he’s not running for any other office, and every statewide Republican except the term-limited governor threw him in the garbage to throw their hands around a notorious conman like Vivek Ramaswamy.
That decision looks a lot more hasty, reckless and stupid than it did in May 2025, when Ramaswamy’s hangers-on successfully bullied a handful of political perverts in a basement under Broad Street.
But I wasn’t in the Statehouse on Thursday to gauge Yost’s gubernatorial dreams.
I was there to show that, unlike my alleged right-wing counterparts, I take my grievances to the top of the potem pole—never trying to push my agenda outside a daycare of all places.
My grievance with Yost is the same as with most right-wing thinking: Why is Ohio’s top cop entertaining baseless allegations of widespread daycare fraud instead of doing something worthwhile, like investigating Leslie Wexner, whom the FBI considered Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator as recently as 2019, when we still haven’t learned why Trump’s Justice Department failed to make an arrest?
Is it because Wexner donated $5,000 to Yost’s campaign coffers in 2022? Because I didn’t even realize until after the encounter that Abigail Wexner, who we also know has lied about when she stopped associating with Epstein, also donated $5,000 on that same day?
Yost used a familiar political trick: Claiming not to know the richest man in Ohio cut him a campaign check. And you know what? That could be true!
As I’ve explained before, Wexner only has longstanding relationships with House Speaker Matt Huffman and Columbus Congresswoman Joyce Beatty. He’ll simply cut a check to the rest on a whim.
Asked again about the morality of the money in his account, Yost tried to deflect. It defies logic as to why Yost didn’t offer any defense of Wexner’s money if he believed him to be a humble thong salesman with nothing to hide.
But Yost wouldn’t be a powerful politician in Ohio if he didn’t catch a convenient case of amnesia when asked about that famous business titan who earned his fortune by being better at capitalism than his peers.
Most infuriating, however, Yost played what I’ve dubbed “the smol bean card.” That’s when politicians suddenly act like they’re powerless when confronted with Wexner’s specter.
It’s the last resort for cowards. But it’s especially pathetic since Yost isn’t just any other politician.
He has investigatory powers. He has the weight of the state behind him. Theoretically, he is the only Ohioan out of 11 million souls that could hold a billionaire like Wexner to account—if that’s something he were interested in doing, which he’s clearly not.
Still, I can’t be that mad with him.
Yost offered a textbook representation of the limitations of conservative politicians.
They’d rather shuck and jive and prosecute fictitious criminals belonging to marginalized groups rather than weigh their souls against a wealthy monster like Wexner.
It makes me sick. But apparently, rural voters can’t get enough of it.
Rep. Josh Williams’ no-good, very-bad day.
As it turns out, the ramifications are still ongoing for Senate President Rob McColley suborning Ohio’s tepid anti-gerrymandering regulations for his personal ambitions in November.
As The Rooster exclusively detailed, McColley seemingly cleared the way for a Congressional run in Ohio’s 9th District by mandating that his underlings add as many of his current Senate district into the new 9th District above anything else.
Longtime Ohio hobgoblins Bob Paduchick and Colton Henson were seen as the driving force behind McColley’s maneuvers, since they saw his potential Congressional campaign as a lucrative payout.
McColley’s wife, however, never got on board, despite a free trip to the nation’s capital to meet Congressional wives who explained that having your husband working in the cocaine swamps of Washington, D.C. wasn’t so bad after all.
Either McColley threw in the towel like a dog, or Trump made the decision for him by refusing to endorse him after being uninspired by a run-of-the-mill cracker from Napoleon during a meeting in D.C.
Regardless, McColley was set to be on the outside looking in with Vivek Ramaswamy set to resurrect Josh Mandel as his running mate in Cleveland last week. That train was so far down the tracks, according to multiple sources who spoke to The Rooster, that Ramaswamy’s campaign had the Mandel logo ready to debut in Cleveland, the backyard to Mandel’s home in a Joe-Biden-loving suburb of Pepper Pike.
Thanks to Ohio’s premier pervert anthropologist raising the black flag and sparking a chain reaction that sent Mandel back into Hell at the last possible moment, we’ll never know how McColley would have ultimately felt about running for Congress, given that neither Trump nor DeWine had any judicial seats to award him.
Regardless, it would appear that Paduchick went to work recruiting another ostensible candidate that he could treat like a cash cow.
