Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced in federal court on Thursday to a maximum of 20 years in prison for his role as ringleader in a $60 million bribery scheme.
Householder, a Republican, was the mastermind of a pay-to-play conspiracy involving a $1.3 billion bailout for two of FirstEnergy’s nuclear power plants—a plan that helped him gain the speaker’s gavel in the Ohio House of Representatives in 2019.
Mr. Householder, a onetime insurance agent from an impoverished rural county in southeast Ohio, had been House speaker from 2001 to 2004. He left his legislative seat because of term limits and faced a federal corruption investigation after leaving the post then, but was not charged.
After returning to the legislature in 2016, Mr. Householder secretly spent millions in 2018 to support Republican candidates for 21 seats in the State House — more than a fifth of the 99 seats — who would back his insurgent campaign to again become House speaker. He spent more millions on a media campaign to push the nuclear bailout law to passage, and then tens of millions on a scorched-earth crusade to undermine a ballot initiative that threatened to undo it.
By the time he was arrested in July 2020, Mr. Householder was soliciting secret contributions from others seeking legislative favors — and plotting to change the State Constitution’s term limits clause to extend his tenure by 16 years.
Fifty House Republicans later voted to replace then-Speaker Ryan Smith with Householder in 2019, many of them doubtless out of gratitude for the campaign contributions he pushed their way.
According to the Columbus Dispatch:
Akron-based FirstEnergy, which bankrolled much of the operation along with its subsidiary FirstEnergy Solutions, admitted in July 2021 that it bribed Householder and another public official: ex-Public Utilities Commission of Ohio leader Sam Randazzo. The company agreed to a $230 million fine. Randazzo, who has not been charged, says he did nothing wrong.
After sentencing, U.S. marshals led Householder, 64, who has not admitted to the crimes, away from the courtroom in handcuffs, and he was remanded to jail.
“Beyond financial greed, I think you just liked power. You weren’t serving the people. You were serving yourself,” U.S. District Judge Timothy Black, a former Democrat candidate for the Ohio Supreme Court, said at the sentencing.
“You know better than most people how much that money could have meant to the people of Ohio,” Black opined. “How many lives could you have improved but you took that away from the people of Ohio and you handed it over to a bunch of suits with private jets.”
In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said Householder “acted as the quintessential mob boss, directing the criminal enterprise from the shadows and using his casket carriers to execute the scheme. This allowed him what he thought was plausible deniability for the crimes committed at his direction.”
Householder wasn’t the only Ohio political figure implicated in the corruption scandal. A Jury found former Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges guilty in March of this year. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday. Political consultant Jeff Longstreth and lobbyist Juan Cespedes were arrested in July 2020 and pleaded guilty. They testified against Householder and others involved in the bribery scheme and face up to six months in prison. Former lobbyist Neil Clark, who had maintained his innocence, committed suicide in July 2021.
This week’s sentencing will wrap up a sordid and embarrassing chapter in Ohio Republican politics. For many years I’ve referred to the Ohio Republican Party as the Ohio Mafia because of this type of behavior. The strong-armed tactics of Householder, Borges, and others were emblematic of 1990s and early 2000s politics in Ohio. Hopefully, Householder’s sentencing will be a wake-up call to current members of the legislature and future elected officials. As God said in the book of Numbers, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” You may get away with your crimes initially, but God sees all, and he will eventually impart justice.
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