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One of the defendants in what's been called the biggest corruption scandal in state history talks about the case was no question off the table.

That's coming up this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler.

On the morning of July 20th, twenty twenty five people were arrested in connection with what federal prosecutors say was a sixty one million dollar pay to play scandal, quoting here, likely the largest bribery and money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.

It's connected to the sweeping nuclear power plant bailout law known as House Bill six.

Among those arrested, then speaker of the Ohio House, Republican Larry Householder, and the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, Matt Burgess.

Since then, two of those arrested, one cesspits and Jeff Longstreth have pleaded guilty.

One, Neil Clark died by suicide.

A five oh one C four nonprofit dark money group generation now entered into a plea deal, as did FirstEnergy, which agreed to pay a two hundred and thirty million dollar fine householder was removed from leadership and earlier this year expelled from a house.

But he has maintained his innocence.

So has Matt Baugus, though he hasn't been as visible.

This week, I sat down with Matt Borgias to talk about the case against him.

When you reached out to me, you said that there were no questions that were off the table.

But there are some things that you can't talk about.

And so we're going forward with that understanding here.

Let's talk about what you are alleged to have done as outlined in the indictment from last year, that you and the other defendants used bribes from first energy through dark money groups to expand Larry Householder's Power Speaker and pass the nuclear bailout law.

And that you all personally profited from that scheme.

It also says you were a lobbyist for first energy and that you offered Tyler Fehrman, a Republican consultant who says you were a friend, a fifteen thousand dollar bribe for information about the plans to take a repeal of House bill six to voters in twenty nineteen.

Remeron was wearing a wire.

So there's tape of you allegedly saying that if he was using a different word here messing with you and this is a quote, we will blow up your house.

Did you do these things?

Well, certainly was not involved in any of the absolutely not involved in any conspiracy to commit any crimes whatsoever.

Getting arrested a year and actually 13 months ago now was as big of a shock to me then as it is now.

I mean, I had I had no involvement in any of the I wasn't a part of team householder.

I was not a lobbyist for first energy, never was never worked for them.

You did not set up a lobbying firm and take on first energy as a client?

That is correct.

You did?

I did not ever at any point in time.

Despite what others have said in public filings and whatnot, they're incorrect.

I've never worked for first energy.

But with regard to the the FBI tape and the allegation that you paid Fermín or offered Ferman, fifteen thousand dollars is a bribe for inside information.

Is that true?

No, unequivocally false.

Tyler Fermín is a person who I've worked with for many years.

He had come to me for help when he's been out of work, which was a lot for him and had come to me in that particular instance, because he had been let go from his job at the Ohio Department of Public Safety and needed the job.

He told me because he was facing some very serious financial issues, said he was going to lose custody of his daughter if he didn't get caught up on his many thousands of dollars of child support payments that he was behind on.

Tyler was a friend.

He had done work for me in the past.

I'd paid him out of my own pocket.

I advanced him fees from other client work that he'd helped me with.

And and he knows that.

And he came to me with a very specific request.

And I sat down with him and tried to figure out how we could help him.

We did understand that we were on other sides of an issue that we were working on.

So I took great pains to make sure that those two things were kept completely separate.

I saw a lawyer's advice.

I asked and did they asked, too, and did review Tyler's employment contract, which set forth very specific things that he was and wasn't allowed to talk about.

And so moving forward, I did come up with a plan to help him with his situation.

And we made it very clear and this will all be, you know, on on the on as part of the evidence that eventually comes out.

Fortunately, there's a record of all this stuff.

I made it very clear with Tyler that we had to keep those two conversations separate.

Some of the things that are alleged in the even in the criminal complaint where the FBI agent said, I was asking Tyler about the number of circulators and the geographic focus of the circulators.

Like you said at the top, I'm not allowed to talk about the things that are that are in this evidence, but I can certainly tell you some things that are not.

And there's nothing like that that will ever come out because no questions like that were ever asked why this information was included in the original complaint.

I have no idea.

But moving forward, I'm highly confident that all of the facts will demonstrate that I wasn't involved in any crimes whatsoever.

Did you say this thing about blowing up his house?

Well, we did make a joke with each other.

And even the FBI's report, if you if you read the allegation, they even said he he knew it was a joke.

So unfortunately, sometimes people, I think, say things, you know, in a in a in a joking and kidding manner that they don't really mean I'm going to kill this guy if he says this or or whatnot.

And I used several examples of people saying things like that about me in a filing that I made with the Ohio Elections Commission.

And so, you know, did the words come out of my mouth?

Yes, they did.

But was there ever any meaning or ever any intent?

I've never threatened anyone in my life, and I never will.

And I certainly never did when it came to anything with Tyler.

One of the things that's happened more recently is that you met with assistant U.S. attorney Emily Clodfelter in December.

You said that she showed you pictures of checks that you say are political contributions she described as bribes.

You said in particular, she mentioned what she called a bribe that she said you offered to Attorney General Dave Yost , who had said in November when your attorneys filed a motion to dismiss it, a separate civil case, that you had paid a bribe.

It was recorded by the FBI, which we were just talking about there.

But he said in December at a press conference that no one had ever attempted to influence him with regard to the House Bill six referendum campaign.

The U.S. attorney later said they had not discussed Yoast with Yoast, with you, with Yoast, rather.

That was a conversation that they were discussing with Yoast about householder.

But that letter also said, and this is a quote, in the context of a racketeering conspiracy, you are responsible for the acts and statements of your conspirators.

Tell me about what happened here.

What's involved in this?

Well, that last statement was was a was a restatement of the facts of what actually happened.

Last December, I was asked to come after four months of not hearing a thing from anyone.

Literally, my lawyers and I were sitting around guessing reasons that they may have come up with to include me in this racketeering conspiracy.

We had really no idea what their theory was.

So they offered to have us come down and do what's called a reverse proffer, which we did.

And in the course of that reverse proffer, I didn't say a single word the entire time I was in the room.

I didn't even change my expression.

I just sat and listened to about a 90 minute presentation where I was led by assistant U.S. attorney Emily Glat Felter, and she laid out for us the predicate crimes.

So you need to at least two of these two have committed or agreed to have someone else commit at least two of these crimes in order to be included in a racketeering conspiracy.

And one of them was a charge that they laid out and put the definition of something called a federal program, bribery up on the screen.

I had never heard of that before.

I had no idea what it was.

We hadn't even considered that that might be one of the things that they would allege, but they did.

And they said that they had already interviewed one of the people I had written a political contribution check to and that he would testify against me at trial.

They said we know what he's going to say to a jury.

And and obviously that that took me aback.

I couldn't I was incredulous.

Leaving that meeting could not, for the life of me figure out why Dave Yose would ever say that he took a bribe from me.

Mean, that's just a ridiculous thing to even consider.

I didn't believe that he had actually said it this way in February when he was giving a press conference on another matter, he was asked a question about whether or not anyone had ever attempted to influence him or or pressure him to do anything with regard to the referendum campaign.

And he said that no one had and he has reiterated that many times since then.

So then we were had a situation on our hands where we realized, well, it appears that the attorney general may have given a statement, at least the the government has told us that the attorney general had given a statement to them .

And if that statement actually doesn't incriminate me, as they said it did at the reverse proffer, but it actually is exculpatory to me, they have to turn it over to us under what's called the Brady rule.

So we requested it and asked again and waited for months for a response until we finally got one where Miss GLADD Felter responded in a letter where she laid out a different version of what had happened and not not correct version of what had happened in that meeting in the reverse proffer and just said, oh, we never allege that.

And we never even asked the attorney general about you.

And look, my lawyers were there were six witnesses in the room.

People heard it.

And we weren't really thrilled about the prospect of having been lied to in a reverse proffer.

The purpose of.

That meeting was to inform me of what the government's theory in this case was, and in their estimation, they thought immediately afterwards they immediately began asking me to cooperate in offering the plea deals, which I rejected.

And and so the the issue there is when a defendant is in that sort of situation, they shouldn't be under the duress of a belief that the government is in possession of evidence that they don't actually have and that they're telling you that they do have and that they will bring to trial and use against you to try to influence your decision whether or not to cooperate with them and potentially plea to something that you don't believe that you ever did.

So I filed a complaint with the Office of Professional Responsibility about that.

And it's out of my hands now.

Someone else will determine whether or not what Micallef Filter did and that's what she did was appropriate.

And she'll have to deal with the consequences of that, whatever those are.

And you've said the U.S. attorney's office was trying everything under the sun.

Those are your words, to get you to plead guilty.

You say that they took prison time off the table.

They would allow certain conditions.

They said in a letter in July that you met four times to negotiate and even agreed to take a plea deal .

Is that true?

And it's not true.

No, it is not.

Why not, though, take the deal if prison time is off the table and you're allowed to make some concessions, conditions, whatever.

Why not?

Innocent people fight guilty.

People try to make a deal.

And the lesson that I want to teach my daughter when this is all said and done is when you're accused of something you didn't do.

You fight and you prove that you didn't do these things.

There are those who might have argued that it would be advantageous to just get it off the table and and not have to pay lawyers anymore and be done with it and try to move on with your life and move on with your life as a convicted felon for something that you didn't do is not the right way to handle something like this.

So I am fighting back.

I'm doing what I can.

I'm speaking out when appropriate.

The attorney, the US United States attorney's office put out a statement about me commenting publicly the other day is obnoxious statement about saying that I was trying to intimidate them, me, a single defendant, you know, on his own, paying for his own defense.

One single individual trying to intimidate the United States Department of Justice who has all the power of the United States government that they can exert on you.

It's just a ridiculous sort of a comment to make and not at all what what I'm trying to do.

Like I said, I made a complaint.

I filed it.

It's out of my hands now.

Someone else will decide what the ramifications of that is.

In fact, that statement, I'm going to read it directly from acting U.S. attorney Vaupel Patel.

From time to time charge defendants and their supporters seek to intimidate our prosecutors by making frivolous bar complaints, engaging in public smear campaigns or otherwise.

It doesn't work.

Such intimidation efforts ring hollow and are wholly inappropriate.

Our federal prosecutors are dedicated public servants who act with integrity and professionalism while pursuing one thing above all else justice.

What are unfortunately becoming all too familiar, intimidation efforts will not deter this office's vigorous pursuit of it.

Are you concerned, though, that your actions, which you say are in your own defense, will be seen as attempts to intimidate are being seen that way and will make things worse for you?

When this goes to court?

Well, if their definition of a complaint is that it's a slur.

Don't forget, I was charged via a complaint.

And so that gives you a little bit of a window into the way.

Maybe they think about what what a complaint involves.

But look, there's no effort on my part to intimidate anyone.

I mean, that's just absurd on its face to to even think that I would even believe that I could do that.

Something happened that was unjust and we thought inappropriate in a in a session that was very serious about what was going to happen with this case and with my life moving forward.

They lied about evidence that they said that they had, that they now have admitted that they didn't have.

And and I filed a complaint about it.

And like I said, that's as far as I'm concerned, that's that what I was pleased to read.

Assistant Sue Me acting U.S. attorney Patel said that there nothing is going to stop them in their pursuit of justice.

That's great news for me, because if what they really care about is justice and they're going to let all this wild rhetoric that's coming out of their office, you know, go by the boards.

Then when the next round of this comes out, they'll leave me out of anything moving forward.

Speaking of the next round, there are a lot of people who are expecting a superseding indictment which could charge other people in this case.

You were hoping to talk to the grand jury before that, but you say that that is not an opportunity that's been allowed to you.

Is that why you're talking now?

And isn't what you're doing here a little bit risky for your case?

I've asked three times now, as recently as last week, once again, to be allowed to appear in front of the grand jury to give my side of the story.

I don't believe the grand jury has heard the other side of the story.

I don't know if they have or haven't.

I really not sure what has been presented to the grand jury.

I can tell you what's in the complaint.

There's a lot of false information in the complaint, just things that I never said.

Quotes around, words that I never uttered, the insinuation that I asked about things that aren't true.

The a lot of other things as well.

I consider that sort of the the poison tree from which all the other things that have come from there are the fruit of.

And so I can't think of a reason.

And no one that I've spoken with can think can think of a reason, a good reason, at least, why a prosecutor would not want a defendant.

Usually it's the defendants pleading the fifth and trying to stay away from the grand jury room.

I can't think of a reason that they would not want a defendant to be able to go into a grand jury, because theoretically, I could go in and and incriminate myself.

I'd be under oath.

I would not be able to say, I'm sorry, I'm not answering your questions, you know, et cetera.

I was I wanted to do it voluntarily.

I still would love the opportunity to do that, because I think this is a group of people who can put a stop to what's going on here that may involve some outside factors that a grand jury hopefully would would see through and and understand that, at least as far as I'm concerned, whether or not there was a conspiracy going on, which there may very well have been.

I'm not saying there was.

I'm not saying there was not.

But people have now others have admitted to being involved in one.

So it certainly appears that there was one.

So I'm not disputing whether there was or wasn't.

I'm just saying I wasn't involved in it.

And I think that's what the grand jury needs to hear.

You have also said that your opposition to Donald Trump may have had something to do with this.

You were running an anti Trump super PAC before your arrest with the explanations that we've gotten from federal prosecutors and the things that you've just mentioned, the plea deals from Jeff Longstreth and wants us does generation now and from FirstEnergy most recently, that idea that Donald Trump and your opposition to him led to your arrest.

Isn't that a far fetched thing to say?

Again, you have to start with the idea that there's no evidence that I was involved in any kind of conspiracy whatsoever.

And so why was I included in this alleged enterprise?

It's really hard to know.

It's possible that there were some folks who labored under false assumptions or or belief that I was involved in other things.

They have now been disabused of any of that knowledge or any of that belief.

And then there's just a number of other things that just seem to much to be a coincidence, to not believe that there was some involvement there.

For one, as you pointed out, just a few weeks earlier, I had launched a pro Biden anti Trump super PAC.

I know that the the Trump campaign and his loyalists were were worried about that.

They said so and and and were upset about it.

I know that the.

Look, it's it's not like there's anyone on Earth who thinks that Donald Trump isn't the kind of guy who would get involved in that kind of thing.

And quite frankly, he had gotten involved directly in my race for state chairman a few years earlier.

He himself, as president elect of the United States, got on the phone and called all sixty six members of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee and asked them to vote against me.

OK, so he does he would reach down into issues and events that you think might be beneath him.

A few other things that happened, though, really kind of raised our eyebrows.

One, when the FBI agents were at my home, they identified the complainant in the case as the president of the United States.

That's what they said.

And it did cause us to have exactly that kind of reaction.

What are they talking about?

You know, how how could that what do they always say this?

Sometimes they say the complainant is the United States government or whatnot.

But no one I've talked to believes that that's what the FBI agents ever say other than the morning that they were at my house for some reason.

And then later on that day, the then United States attorney, David DeVillers, has a press conference and he stands up in front of the media.

You may have been there.

I don't know.

You certainly I'm sure you were at least listening.

We're all in shock trying to figure out what was going on.

And he stands there and he says a bunch of things to the press that were not factually accurate.

For one, he said repeatedly in that press conference that first energy was the only donor to generation now.

He said that a number of times when we know that that's not true.

He he he made a comment about the fact that FirstEnergy had not a generation now had not spent any money on social welfare programs except for that.

We also know that that wasn't true, given the IRS his own definition of what social welfare programs are.

And so the question that.

Really, we started wondering is why did they rush this?

Why do they need to do this that day?

They're what they said publicly was, well, if we if we didn't act, everything would have shut down.

By their own admission, everything had shut down in March.

And so what was the motivation to move forward when he pretty clearly didn't know basic facts about the case that he was presenting to the public?

He had arrested the speaker of the House and others and said, set us on this path.

And he was saying things that weren't true if he knew they weren't true and was saying them anyway.

That's bad.

If he just didn't know, they weren't true because he hadn't he wasn't up to speed on his own case yet.

That's worse.

What in the world were they doing arresting and charging pe if they didn't even understand what was happening in their own case?

And those are the kinds of things that lead you back to, well, if none of those other things were true.

The Ohio Republican Party put out a statement, but put a post on YouTube, a very pro trump, very anti baugus Republican Party regime, put always in coordination with the Trump campaign, immediately put up a post on YouTube decrying the Borjesson company corruption scandal.

Their messaging was immediate.

It was pretty clearly coordinated.

And it does lead one to believe that the only reason to include me in this issue that I had no involvement in whatsoever.

If at any point in time was an attempt to try to shut down the PAC that Anthony Scaramucci and I and others were working on to try to defeat President Trump.

And don't forget the thing that we were focused on with that superPAC.

The the kind of soft Republican suburban voter.

That's exactly the voter that Trump lost in twenty twenty that caused him to lose the election, ultimately to Joe Biden.

And so I know that they were concerned about our efforts and whether or not that had anything to do with it.

We're going to find out.

And finally, you and Householder have both maintained your innocence.

And you actually will note that you were not mentioned in the first energy plea agreement that was most recently agreed to.

But so far as mentioned, Jeff Longstreth was once asked, but as a plea pleaded guilty.

The five oh one C four generation now has taken a plea deal.

FirstEnergy agreed to that 230 million dollar deferred plea agreement.

Neil Clark died by suicide.

I mean, it feels like there is a real serious I mean, this is very serious.

You're fighting for your life here.

Well, again, no question.

And look, I'm highly confident that once these issues are all vetted and all come out, that there won't be any, you know, criminal conviction or anything like that against me.

You have a an enterprise in a conspiracy to try them all together, but you still have to prove to a jury each individual's role in that conspiracy.

And that's just something the government would never be able to do with regard to me.

I think it may have just been too tempting to not throw me into something that I had a tangential understanding of in a tangential, you know, link to via some other client work that I was doing that caused them to to want to put me in this.

But at the end, again, like I've said all along, we're incredibly confident that we've looked at this thing up and down.

And look, I was offered some pretty generous plea agreements.

I consulted my attorneys on this from the very beginning and told them I can handle the bad news.

If you think there's something that I need to be worried about here, if there is something you think I need to own up to, even if it's something I didn't mean to do, but technically, some action violated the statute and they can, you know, get me on certain things.

I would have been the first person to stand up and said, I'll take my medicine.

What I did was wrong and and and and take responsibility for those things.

But I knew I never had and I know I continue to know that that's not the case.

And I'm going to keep fighting.

Whether people like it or not.

So you're not alleging that there wasn't, as federal prosecutors said, a scandal that was the largest corruption scandal in state history?

You're just saying you weren't a part of it?

That is absolutely correct.

There has been no trial date set for either Matt Baugus or Larry Householder on this show in March.

Former US attorney for the southern district of Ohio, David DeVillers, who announced the indictments and arrests in the case last year, said the pandemic has delayed the process, which usually takes about nine months to a year from indictment to trial.

And DeVillers said the investigation is ongoing.

So additional indictments and arrests are possible.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State Newstalk.

And you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the state wide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual.

Providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medd Mut.

dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now, with eight locations across the country, Porter Wright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

Morad Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 124000 members who worked to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OHEA dot org.