Gov. Mike DeWine continues to praise and support an aide who he said knew about a $4.3 million payoff by FirstEnergy to DeWine’s pick to lead the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — the entity that decides how much FirstEnergy can charge customers. The aide knew about the payment, but didn’t tell DeWine until the FBI searched the regulator’s home nearly two years later, the governor’s office says.

Now the aide, Laurel Dawson, isn’t talking. And DeWine’s office won’t say if the governor ever punished her for not telling him of the payment, which is part of a huge bribery and money-laundering scandal that has already sent two to federal prison. 

In defending the conduct of Dawson and DeWine, the governor’s press secretary said law enforcement hadn’t yet called the payment a bribe. That suggests that the governor thought such a payoff was OK in the absence of police stepping in and calling it a crime. 

The press secretary, Dan Tierney, disputed that DeWine even had a role in the case, even though the governor salted his administration with people with ties to FirstEnergy, received campaign support from the utility, met with its two top executives just before taking office, signed the corrupt bailout legislation within hours of its passage, and briefly defended it even after federal indictments were handed up.

“It is ridiculous and patently false to assert the Governor had a role in bribery schemes, either those alleged or already adjudicated in criminal court, that enriched other persons, and no such court case makes any such allegation,” Tierney said in an email.

Links to the governor

Those initial indictments came well over three years ago, when former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, former Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges, and three others were indicted in what federal prosecutors called one of the biggest bribery and money-laundering conspiracies in state history. In a deferred prosecution agreement, FirstEnergy later admitted to paying more than $60 million in bribes in exchange for a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout to a subsidiary it was trying to spin off.

Householder and Borges were convicted by a jury last year. The former speaker was sentenced to 20 years in prison and the former chairman to five. Two of the others pleaded guilty and await sentencing, while the third died by suicide.

But it wasn’t until December that the feds indicted Sam Randazzo, DeWine’s pick to head the PUCO, on charges including bribery and wire fraud. Then last month, state authorities indicted Randazzo and former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and former Vice President Michael Dowling, the executives who paid Randazzo $4.3 million just before DeWine nominated Randazzo to be the state’s top utility regulator.

From that perch, Randazzo helped draft and lobbied for the corrupt bailout, while also doing any number of other valuable favors for the Akron-based utility, the indictments allege.

The new indictments brought renewed attention to the role the DeWine administration played in the scandal. The governor appointed Randazzo knowing that he had long been a paid consultant to FirstEnergy, one of the biggest utilities in the state.

Also, Dawson — the chief of staff who waited nearly two years to tell DeWine about the $4.3 million payoff to Randazzo — was married to a former FirstEnergy lobbyist whom the state indictment said had gotten a $10,000 loan from Randazzo a few years before DeWine took office. It’s unknown whether Dawson’s husband ever paid that money back to Randazzo, who’s gotten well over $10 million from FirstEnergy under shady circumstances, according to the state indictment.