FirstEnergy Gave $1 Million to Boost Ohio Lt. Gov Husted’s Campaign Before Scandal, Document Shows

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A surge in FirstEnergy political spending ahead of the utility’s push to secure a legislative bailout for its nuclear power plants included a $1 million dark money contribution to support the campaign of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s eventual running mate.

Records show Jon Husted worked behind the scenes to bail out the company’s nuclear power plants. The million dollar donation was secret — until now.Ohio Lt. Governor Jon Husted at the Governor’s Inaugural Gala, January 7, 2023, in the Atrium at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio.

Neither Husted nor DeWine, whose campaign also benefited from a previously reported $1 million in dark money from the utility, has been implicated in the scheme in which eight people, including the state’s former House Speaker Larry Householder, have been indicted. The document and others reflect a major commitment by FirstEnergy to Husted’s political future. Before 2017, the company’sA spreadsheet details dark money expenditures by northeastern power company FirstEnergy as it sought to secure a $1.3 billion bailout for its struggling nuclear power plants. The sheet reveals a previously unreported $1 million donation to benefit the candidacy of Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.

The document details once-secret contributions to groups supporting “everyone from the mayor of Akron to President Trump that FirstEnergy made to secure bailouts for its soon-to-be bankrupt coal and nuclear plants and to gain influence on other key issues,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute.

Finding out all the details about the dark money spending behind HB 6 is like peeling back the layers of an onion, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio. Lawmakers repealed HB 6’s $1 billion-plus in subsidies for FirstEnergy’s former nuclear power plants and its recession-proofing provisions in 2021, eight months after the arrests of Householder and others..” He did not respond to Energy News Network questions this week about whether that includes both the law’s subsidies for two 1950s-era coal plants and its gutting of Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.

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