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Columbus, OH — According to a new investigation from Business Insider, J.D. Vance created a non-profit focused on combating the opioid epidemic that was a “charade” and “superficial,” bolstering himself and his personal ambitions. In its first year, the group spent more money paying Vance’s top political advisor than on programs to fight opioid abuse. Now, Vance’s campaign refuses to answer questions about the non-profit and hasn’t included his experience there on his campaign website. 

“Only a Silicon Valley millionaire like J.D. Vance would use Ohio’s opioid crisis as a way to bolster his political career and enrich his political cronies. Maybe if Vance hadn’t spent so much of his life in DC and San Francisco he’d realize that Ohioans need real help and not fraudulent grifters,” said Michael Beyer, spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party. 

Key points below:

Business Insider: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author JD Vance is running for Senate as a savior of the Rust Belt. Insiders and experts say otherwise.

Adam Wren and Meghan Morris

August 29, 2021

• After moving back to Ohio in 2017, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the opioid epidemic that he wrote about so wrenchingly in his memoir. He also raised $93 million to launch Narya Capital, a venture-capital firm focused on startups in the Midwest. The two projects are key chapters in his political biography — accomplishments he’s frequently cited to portray himself as a job creator and champion of the white working class. “What we need in Washington is not just leaders who talk about doing things,” he said on a recent campaign stop in his hometown of Middletown, “but have actually done them and will continue to do them.”
• Plenty of politicians seek to bolster their image by pointing to their business acumen and philanthropic efforts. In reality, though, it’s not clear what, if anything, Vance has achieved through his company or his charity. A review by Insider of Our Ohio Renewal’s tax filings showed that in its first year, the nonprofit spent more on “management services” provided by its executive director — who also serves as Vance’s top political advisor — than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse. The group, which has shut down its website and abandoned its Twitter account after publishing only two tweets, says it commissioned a survey to gauge the needs and welfare of Ohioans, but Vance’s campaign declined to provide any documentation of the project. A spokeswoman for Ohio’s largest anti-opioid coalition told Insider that she hadn’t heard of Vance’s organization.
• “This is a charade,” said Doug White, a nonprofit expert and former director of the master’s program in fundraising management at Columbia University, who reviewed Our Ohio Renewal’s tax filings for Insider. “It’s a superficial way for him to say he’s helping Ohio. None of that is actually happening, from what I can tell.”
• Over a martini with a Washington Post writer in early 2017, Vance expressed misgivings about running for office. At the time, he was looking to help his home state through his nascent nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal. “I’m not going to say that I’m never going to run,” he said. But he made clear what he thought of politics. “I think running a small nonprofit to work on the opioid crisis and bring interesting new businesses to the so-called Rust Belt — all of these things are valuable, if not more valuable, than running for office.”
• Our Ohio Renewal, Vance explained in August 2017, would identify “the things that have been tried, from prevention programs to physician training to treatment options, and trying to understand how well they are working.” Its mission statement was audacious: “Our Ohio Renewal is dedicated to promoting the ideas and addressing the problems identified in J.D. Vance’s #1 Bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, related to divides along racial, economic, and cultural lines.” It would engage in political advocacy across Ohio, including “fighting against opiate abuse.”
• In its first year, according to an Insider review of its public tax filings, the nonprofit brought in $221,135. Jai Chabria, the nonprofit’s principal officer, earned more in management fees — $63,425 — than the company spent on programming, which totaled about $50,000. Chabria, a former senior advisor to John Kasich and an employee of Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, is now advising Vance’s Senate campaign.
• But Our Ohio Renewal’s biggest problem wasn’t its spending; it was its lack of fundraising. The nonprofit raised so little in each of the last three years — less than $50,000 a year — that it wasn’t even required by the IRS to disclose its activities and finances. “It’s a pittance, given what they said they want to accomplish,” said White, the nonprofit expert who reviewed the organization’s initial filing. “This is a very small operation. They’re not doing much. I don’t think it rises to the level of fraud, but they are sitting around doing nothing.”
• The only accomplishments listed in Our Ohio Renewal’s 2017 tax filing are the $45,000 it spent for a survey of the “social, cultural and general welfare needs of Ohio Citizens,” along with travel and meeting expenses. Vance told Columbus Monthly that the nonprofit sponsored a yearlong residency for Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who treated patients at a methadone clinic in an underserved area of southern Ohio. But Our Ohio Renewal declined to respond to questions about its programs and finances, and Satel did not respond to Insider’s request for an interview.
• It looks different now, with him being a Senate candidate. […] Whatever Our Ohio Renewal did to fight the opioid epidemic, it did so without joining the state’s largest anti-opioid partnership. […] These days, Vance seems reluctant to even acknowledge his signature philanthropic effort. In the section of his campaign’s new issues page devoted to the opioid epidemic, the candidate makes no mention of Our Ohio Renewal. […] The nonprofit, he [Jivani] acknowledged, never lived up to the vision he and Vance hashed out that night in German Village. “It looks different now with him being a Senate candidate,” Jivani said.

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Columbus, OH — Frank LaRose is having a rough week. After LaRose was called out this week for his hypocrisy on election integrity, Howard Wilkinson is out with a new column today exposing LaRose and the Ohio GOP for using a new radical anti-voter bill to help LaRose politically.

LaRose, facing a primary challenger to his right and facing pressure to embrace the Big Lie, is once again using Ohioans’ right to vote to further his own political ambitions. LaRose wants to talk about the success of the 2020 election, but as a Republican in 2021, also needs to be seen casting doubt on the results. So he’s using attacks on Ohioans’ voting rights to do it.

So, LaRose and his buddy Bill Seitz are pushing HB 294, an extreme anti-voter bill that would drastically reduce the ways Ohioans are able to vote and directly attack the methods of voting that made the 2020 elections a success. The bill is a wink and a nod to the Big Lie to shore up LaRose’s political support on the right. But Democrats quickly and loudly fought back against the legislation and put LaRose in a tough spot for attacking Ohioans’ right to vote, and he’s looking for a way out.

Here’s where HB 397 comes into play. As Wilkinson points out in his column, the new legislation goes even further than HB 294, but it’s also gone nowhere in the House. Wilkinson posits that LaRose and Seitz are using the new bill as a way to make their extreme anti-voter bill look moderate by comparison. But Ohio Democrats aren’t going to stand by quietly and Ohio voters won’t be fooled. Enough with LaRose’s political games. Ohioans’ voting rights aren’t tools for Frank LaRose to serve his own political ambitions and he needs to stop with the partisan games and instead do his job and stand up against lies being told within his own party about the 2020 election.

“And it seems to me that the incredibly antediluvian HB 387 could give some political cover to LaRose, a supporter of HB 294 who is running for re-election next year with a primary challenger – former State Rep. John Adams of Shelby County who is coming at him from the Trumpist right. Something tells me that HB 387 is more show business than legislative business,” writes Wilkinson.

Read more from Howard Wilkinson HERE and below:

• We are sitting here wondering if the Republican majority in the Ohio House is trying to pull off an elaborate bait-and-switch game in order to scale back early voting in Ohio.
• The fact of the matter is that voter fraud in Ohio – where no county has its vote tallying system connected to the Internet and where there is a paper back-up for every scanned ballot – is exceedingly rare. About as close to non-existent as you can get.
• According to Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who is supporting HB 294, there were only 13 cases of non-citizens who cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election in Ohio, along with another 104 who apparently were registered illegally. All were referred to the Ohio attorney general for further investigation.
• By the way, 13 out of 5.794 million votes cast works out to .0002%.
• Democrats may not have the numbers to stop the GOP in the Ohio legislature, but the Ohio Democratic Party will fight any attempt to rollback voter access, said party spokesman Matthew Keyes.
• Seitz said he believes HB 387 has no chance of passing. There seems to be little enthusiasm for that bill, except possibly among the sponsor and six co-sponsors.
• Seems to me that the only purpose of HB 387 is to die on the vine, but not until it makes HB 294 seen like a reasonable alternative.

• And it seems to me that the incredibly antediluvian HB 387 could give some political cover to LaRose, a supporter of HB 294 who is running for re-election next year with a primary challenger – former State Rep. John Adams of Shelby County who is coming at him from the Trumpist right.
• Something tells me that HB 387 is more show business than legislative business.

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Columbus, OH — Today, Ohio Democratic Party (ODP) Chair Elizabeth Walters announced the sale of ODP headquarters on E. Fulton St. in Columbus. The building has been sold to Fairfield Homes, a property management company and developer of affordable housing. The sale of the building comes as ODP looks to modernize its campaign operations with a greater focus on grassroots organizing in communities across Ohio rather than a more traditional centralized operation. ODP will maintain a smaller headquarters and will relocate to a different building later in the year.

ODP will use proceeds from the building sale to invest in a modern infrastructure that will help Democrats win up and down the ballot and hold Ohio Republicans responsible for the many ways they’ve betrayed Ohio voters.

“The Ohio Democratic Party has been lucky to call our headquarters on East Fulton Street home for many years, but our focus moving forward is being headquartered in the communities we’re fighting for. ODP is excited to modernize our campaign operations and show voters we’re on their side by showing up in their communities and standing up for their priorities,” said Chair Walters.

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Columbus, OH — Frank LaRose’s partisan political hypocrisy is once more on display for all to see. LaRose continues to try to claim credit for a successful 2020 election while also supporting a bill that would attack the voting methods that made the election a success, including dropboxes, early voting and absentee voting. The bill — HB 294 — is a wink and a nod to the Big Lie, part of a nationwide effort to appease the failed blogger from Florida in a direct attack on Ohioans’ right to vote.

And LaRose will always put his political ambitions above the needs of Ohio voters. He is pushing this bill to shore up his political support, especially now that he has a primary challenger. It was never about election integrity at all, and Ohio media is starting to call him out on it.

As LaRose tried to brag yesterday once again about the success of the 2020 election, Darrel Rowland from the Columbus Dispatch tweeted: “Guess that means we should rip it up and add a bunch of new restrictions, huh?”

LaRose cannot continue to try to spin both the 2020 election and the harmful GOP anti-voter bill in his favor, he must be forced to answer how future elections will be made more secure by directly attacking Ohioans’ right to vote. And he must be held accountable for continuing to talk about election integrity while sharing a stage with Jim Jordan, one of the leading proponents of the Big Lie, and sitting by silently as his fellow Republicans like Josh Mandel and Jane Timken call the results of the 2020 election into question and promote false claims.

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Columbus, OH — In case you missed it, Ohio Capital Journal wrote today about more shady dealings involving Mike DeWine, even as he finds himself embroiled in the biggest public corruption scandal in state history.

Marty Schalden writes about DeWine’s recent move to restart a major contract with Centene — a company responsible for defrauding Ohio taxpayers out of millions of dollars — after the company hired one of DeWine’s buddies to lobby for them. Earlier this year, Centene paid a more than $80 million settlement over claims the company defrauded the state’s Medicaid program out of tens of millions of dollars. But once the company hired DeWine’s longtime friend, the company once again secured a lucrative state contract.

“So you might think — especially heading into a tough election year — that DeWine would want to avoid any appearance of impropriety or special dealing. But it turns out that Centene hired an old friend of the governor to lobby on its behalf just as Yost’s lawsuit was about to be filed,” writes Schalden.

And, as is par for the course for DeWine and his Administration, they’re not answering any questions about the shady dealings, thinking that if they just continue to ignore these scandals, they’ll go away on their own. But Ohio voters deserve answers and Ohio Democrats are going to continue to push for them.

“It’s hard to keep up with all of the corruption scandals Mike DeWine finds himself at the center of. DeWine’s statehouse is mired in bribery schemes, shady dealings involving multi-million dollar contracts for friends of the governor and the biggest public corruption scandal in state history. Ohioans deserve answers, and while DeWine seems to believe he’s above the rules, Ohio Democrats won’t stop pushing for them until DeWine is held accountable,” said Matt Keyes, spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Read more from Ohio Capital Journal HERE and below:

• The administration of Gov. Mike DeWine had just restarted a massive contract with Centene Corp. Only six months earlier, Attorney General Dave Yost agreed to accept $88.3 million from the company to settle claims that it had defrauded the state’s Medicaid program of tens of millions of dollars. 
• DeWine was already embroiled in a historic energy scandal in which his appointee to the state’s utility regulator took what Yost called a $4.3 million bribe and did favors worth hundreds of millions to FirstEnergy, the company that paid it, the company and federal prosecutors said in a deferred prosecution agreement. It was part of a broader conspiracy to pass a $1.3 billion bailout law that DeWine signed.
• So you might think — especially heading into a tough election year — that DeWine would want to avoid any appearance of impropriety or special dealing.
• But it turns out that Centene hired an old friend of the governor to lobby on its behalf just as Yost’s lawsuit was about to be filed.
• Kiggin and DeWine’s spokesman didn’t respond to questions for this story — including whether it’s proper for an old, close friend of DeWine to hire himself out to big corporations to lobby the governor on their behalf. But it’s clear that Kiggin  and DeWine go back.
• As with Kiggin and DeWine, Centene won’t say what DeWine’s friend did on the corporate dime. But Kiggin was on the Centene payroll during the critical period in March when, just after Yost accused the company of massive fraud, the state Medicaid department suspended a contract it was negotiating with Centene’s subsidiary for 2022.
• In addition to Kiggin, Neidorff and Centene have paid some others connected to DeWine.

• They include Dan McCarthy, who is now DeWine’s legislative affairs director. In 2018, while he was still president of the lobbying firm the Success Group, McCarthy was registered to represent Centene.
• Now two of McCarthy’s former Success Group colleagues — Mike Toman and Anthony Aquillo — continue to lobby the DeWine administration on Centene’s behalf. 

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