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...