Time now to break down some interesting political developments in the last few days and this midweek with our good friend Ryland Barton, who is a senior editor with NPR state's team.

Good to see you, Island.

Good to see you, too, Renee.

So let's begin with the news concerning a first term, Louisville Democrat Daniel Grossberg, who we reported about this story a little earlier in our newscast this evening, who was looking at some claims against of sexual mishcon possible investigation by the Legislative Research Commission, the ethics commission, and a suspension from the House Democratic Caucus.

Break this all down for us.

Yeah, this story comes from the herald-leader.

Alex sequester there reported this out yesterday, but there are four different sources that have said that there is this investigation going on.

One source that confirms there is an investigation going on that the LRC, the Legislative Research Commission, is looking into these allegations.

And and three people who share their stories alleging that Representative Grossberg had engaged in really looks like inappropriate text messaging with these staffers.

Text these texts have been reviewed by the Herald-Leader.

These sources describe the his conduct as weird and creepy happened late at night.

Grossberg has denied any wrongdoing, but this is because the allegations this is something that's triggering investigations by not only by the LRC, but now the Democratic caucus in the House has one temporarily suspended Grossberg from the caucus, but has asked the Legislative Ethics Commission to look into this.

And and and really, Democrats right now are kind of taking a little bit of a wait and see approach to to see where these investigations land at this point.

GROSSBERG as you said, he's a first term Democrat.

He won in 22, defeated long term longtime representative Tom Birch in a primary election.

And he's been a very vocal member of the of the Democratic caucus.

Also in this reporting of which the Herald-Leader reported that Grossberg had been briefly suspended from caucus meetings earlier this year.

It was unclear what that was about.

And there's a couple of different renditions of what exactly happened there.

In one, Representative Pamela Stephenson said that this concerned a possible they were reviewing any an inappropriate car purchase possibly.

Obviously, I mean, it seems like this was ultimately determined to be fine because he was allowed to back into the caucus.

But he had said that it was actually about him pushing for the legislature to adopt a resolution condemning Hamas in the in the attacks on Israel last October 7th.

Another representative has disputed his claim in that.

So there's a lot of back and forth on that part as well.

But yeah, we're still trying to figure out exactly what happened here and where these what happens next with these allegations.

A developing story, indeed, and we'll keep our eyes on it.

Next topic, Andy Beshear.

But it's not the veepstakes that we're going to talk about, although that might be a postscript to what we mentioned.

He has blasted his predecessor, former Republican Matt Bevin, for using state aircraft for campaigning and fundraising purposes.

But it has been discovered that Andy Beshear himself has been accused of the same thing that he had blasted his predecessor of doing.

Sort this out for us.

Yeah, this was a big this is a big hit during any of this year's 2019 campaign against Matt Bevin.

He really railed against Bevin for his usage of the of state aircraft for campaign purposes or flying the state plane and then going to a nearby fundraising event.

Even even if the plane did, the travel was then reimbursed for.

But it was a it was a political moment, ended a lot of traction.

It really I think it really put that in on his heels and led to all sorts of calls for a review of how the state plane is used and and through the reporting of Joe Song to Kentucky Public Radio, he determined that actually Beshear has been using state aircraft for very similar purposes, you know, flying to a place for official business.

But then there happens to be some private or campaign business that is nearby, say, a fundraising event.

And he did the math here to determine how much money Matt Bevin raised back in 2018 through this method and how much Andy Beshear raised.

And it's almost exactly the same that it was about 915,000 and Beshears is about 898,000.

So, you know, this is it's just a it's this is a campaign this was a campaign promise of this year that he wouldn't do this.

It's something that he has not followed through with.

And, you know, he's responded saying that, you know, everything's been above board and they you know, they documented and recorded and paid for all this properly.

Yeah.

And so let's just real quickly talk about Andy Beshear is still the veepstakes prognosticator should continue.

And we understand that Vice President Kamala Harris going to make an announcement a little sooner than she had said could come next Tuesday.

What do you make of that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a little bit of a smaller field right now.

So North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper himself dropped out of the veepstakes.

But Andy Beshear is still kind of at the top of the list right now, along with Pennsylvania Governor Roy SHAPIRO, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.

And but the Harris campaign has said that they will be having holding campaign events starting next Tuesday with that vice presidential candidate, that nominee who would become leader, the official nominee of the Democratic convention later.

So we should have some announcement before Tuesday.

And that's going to be where we're.

Thinking that's going to be in Philadelphia.

Yeah, There's some wondering whether or not that means that that that event is a coming out ceremony for.

Yeah, for Roy, for Josh SHAPIRO.

Who knows?

You know, where else where else would Harris have an event like that besides some sort of swing state where she's trying to garner voters.

Could be all kinds of political calculus behind that, that move.

Okay.

Real quickly, 30 seconds.

We heard from some county officials earlier this week in Frankfort during a legislative hearing.

Once again, a common refrain is we need more money because of overcrowding and increased expensive to operate jails.

This is not a new refrain from them.

We've heard this before for years.

It's not.

And this was something that, you know, years ago a lot of there's a lot of bipartisan support on trying to reform Kentucky's criminal justice system to try to decrease the amount of people in their house in county jails.

About 40 people who are in state custody are actually housed in jails.

And so the jails are responsible for that.

So jails are asking for the state to chip in more money to help pay for that.

But also, it's important to remember the state keeps on adding new crimes and enhancing crimes.

We saw this during this legislative session, which leads to more people spending more time in jail, really exacerbating the situation.

Yeah.

Well, Rowland Barden, as always, it's good to talk to you and thank you for your perspective.

Appreciate it.

Good to see you, Renee.