Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate 79002-061 is back in the news.
Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, along with ex-Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges, recently lost their appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn their 2023 convictions for their part in the largest bribery scandal in the state’s history.
Add House Bill 6 to the pantheon of state scandals, which includes Coingate, ECOT, Bishop Sycamore High School and neo-Nazi homeschooling.
Householder was at the center of a caper in which Akron-based FirstEnergy spent more than $60 million to ensure he would recapture the House speakership in exchange for engineering the passage of House Bill 6, a taxpayer-funded bailout of two aging nuclear power plants owned by a FirstEnergy Solutions, a spinoff of FirstEnergy.
The measure would give FirstEnergy $1.2 billion in subsidies, paid for by consumers to cover the costs of the deteriorating plants.
Householder’s job was to block and tackle any legislative resistance to it.
He needn’t have worried. In 2019, 26 naive House Democrats voted for Householder’s return to the speakership (he was term-limited in 2004) in exchange for his support for labor issues and transparency, essentially letting him back into the henhouse.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that Householder’s attorneys told the Supremes his actions weren’t explicitly pay-to-play. They tried to thread the needle, claiming that Householder was just a legislator who supports utility companies, and if someone happens to make a campaign donation because of it, where’s the crime?
And they really thought that would work.
Over drinks and lobster bisque, undercover FBI agents captured Householder dead-to-rights on audio and video, essentially boasting that he was The Man.
After all, as Dizzy Dean said, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law in 2019.
But Householder and Borges were convicted of racketeering conspiracy in 2023, with prison sentences of 20 and five years, respectively.
Householder and Borges continue to claim his innocence.
For its part, FirstEnergy has paid $620.7 million in fines and settlements tied to the House Bill 6 scandal. Two of the company’s former executives are set to be re-tried in September following a mistrial in April. Another defendant, a lobbyist, died by suicide.
Householder’s attorneys recently announced he is planning to seek a presidential pardon.
In the past, the Supreme Court has stated that while a person does not have to admit guilt to receive a pardon, it carries “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.”
In other words, if it looks like a duck, it could be a goose, but yeah, it’s probably a duck.
There certainly have been cases when a person who received a pardon was unjustly convicted, or was punished excessively as it related to their crime.
This isn’t one of them.
Householder had no compunction in Ohio taxpayers holding the bag to prop up the rickety plants. Between 2020 and 2025, Ohioans paid $445,000 a day in surcharges, for a total of $500 million.
He has not expressed even a flicker of remorse because quid pro quo has long been the way of doing business.
Even so, Householder is seeking a pardon. Though drug dealers and rap stars have benefited, half of the most recent presidential pardons have been issued for white-collar convicts involved in multimillion-dollar rackets.
Pardons were granted to Ross Ulbricht who trafficked in drugs, stolen passports and Bitcoin scams on the dark web; Trevor Milton, who stole from investors; former White House adviser Steve Bannon, convicted of financial fraud; and former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017, but who just netted a $1.25 million settlement from the Justice Department stemming from an audacious 2023 lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution.
In February, the Cato Institute described the scale of the most recent crop of pardons as “unprecedented.”
“… Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government,” its report said. “In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering sum — composed of money owed to crime victims and to government treasuries — has been zeroed out by presidential edict.”
Prior to their pardons, Ulbricht was supposed to repay his victims $183.9 million. Milton was ordered to repay $676 million.
But these days, priming the pump for a pardon doesn’t come cheap. Gone are the days when you could slap Bill Clinton on the back with a six-figure check.
In recent years, families of some pardon petitioners have made donations to a pro-Trump super PAC, some for as much as $3 million.
Where’s an insurance agent from New Lexington, Ohio, going to get that kind of money?
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Householder’s get-out-of-jail-free card won’t be, well, free | Goshay
Reporting by Charita M. Goshay, Canton Repository / The Repository
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