Free Republic

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on Wednesday did his bit to amplify a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants legally present in Springfield, Ohio are stealing and eating pets, ducks and geese. The conspiracy has been debunked by the Springfield mayor, city manager and chief of police, as well as by Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. Yost is looking to succeed DeWine as governor in 2026. “Citizens testified to City Council,” Yost posted on X Wednesday. “These people would be competent witnesses in court. Why does the media find a carefully worded City Hall press release better evidence?”

On Sept. 23, 2020, McKenzie K. Davis, a lobbyist with the Success Group, registered to lobby the administration of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on “covid response.” The timing is curious because only six weeks earlier, federal authorities announced they’d arrested then-Speaker Larry Householder and four associates in what they said was “likely the largest bribery and money-laundering scheme ever in the state of Ohio.” Also implicated in the corrupt scheme was the company on whose behalf Davis had registered to lobby: Akron-based FirstEnergy. Davis’s ties to the bribery scheme, as first reported by the Energy and Policy Institute, run deeper...

...“FirstEnergy condemns the rise in violence across the country and stands firm in our support of the Asian-American community — which includes many of our employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders,” the company said in a tweet... As Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy institute flagged over the weekend, that’s a far cry from the tone of FirstEnergy-financed advertising during the 2019 fight over House Bill 6 — a $1.3 billion energy bailout that morphed into one of the biggest corruption scandals in Ohio history. After Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bailout law, FirstEnergy and related interests funded a furious...