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We continue a series of conversations with the major party candidates for statewide office.

This week the candidates running for attorney general.

Their plans and positions and their own words.

This weekend, the state of Ohio and welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

We're continuing a series of interviews we do every four years, conversations with the candidates, specifically the ten major party candidates for the five statewide executive offices of governor, secretary of state auditor, treasurer, and this week, attorney general.

We're airing the interviews in the order that they were conducted, starting with the Democratic former Parma City Council member and now state representative from the 15th Ohio House District in Parma.

Jeffrey Crossman.

I think Ohio deserves an attorney general that tells the truth, gets the law right, and actually holds people accountable.

On that note, I think you're speaking primarily of the House Bill six case, the federal racketeering case that was called the largest corruption scandal in state history.

When it was announced that the case was proceeding in the federal court.

I'm wondering, though, what do you think a state ag can do about this?

Because you've demanded that your opponent incumbent, Dave Yost, do more.

You say he's dropped the ball.

What do you think a state AG can do?

Well, first of all, it's a pattern with Dave Yost.

Variety dropped the ball when it came to e Kot.

No one's been held accountable.

We haven't collected all the money that the state is owed for the fleecing of Ohio taxpayers over that issue.

He was on his watch when that happened.

And when he ran in 18 for attorney general, he promised he would hold people accountable.

He did none of that And then when the House Bill six nuclear bribery scandal came about, the largest in state history, he's not issued any subpoenas, as far as I can tell.

He's not done any actual investigation.

And I know he knows how to do that work.

He did it, as you know, against county commissioners and things when he was in Otter's office.

And he can refer those charges to local prosecutors to bring state charges.

And they have jurisdiction and they have the resources.

And so for me, it's inexcusable that to do such very so very little to protect Ohio taxpayers and to really root out the corruption that's been plaguing Ohio for the last 20 years.

So you don't think it's a hands off because it's a federal case issue?

No, I think they have jurisdiction.

I think that, you know, by the way, he should say that if that's the case, I don't believe that's the case because he's never lifted a finger really to do anything about it.

We saw that the CEO was doing some limited investigations, which I thought were kind of bogus to begin with.

I thought those two should have been independent investigations.

And you saw why Greg Price was overseeing an investigation that he'd participated in the activity.

So when I called for the investigation, a year ago, I called for an independent investigation, which Jennifer French said no to.

So, yeah, no, I mean, we saw that the Fed said, you know, put a pause on that one.

But, you know, the state hasn't done anything to fully investigate everything that's happened to root out the public corruption or even recommend changes in Ohio law to make sure this never happens again.

You and other Democrats are pushing this issue of a culture of corruption, state House and with House Bill six being a big part of that.

You're actually doubling down on that where other candidates are talking about it.

You've actually asked for investigations.

You filed lawsuits.

You've demanded the DeWine administration talk about what they knew and when, and also the CEO and other people.

But there are two current polls out once a Suffolk poll that shows only 4% of voters say corruption is the most important issue and it isn't even come up as an issue in the Emerson poll.

It's announced as we're shooting this on the previous Friday.

So what makes you think this is an issue that will help you win?

Well, I don't talk about accountability or excuse me, I don't talk about corruption.

Itself all the time.

I think it's important to bring up, even if it doesn't poll well, because it does have an economic impact on the state of Ohio.

There's a study out of the state of Illinois that shows that corruption in that state in Ohio is very similar, obviously, to Illinois.

$500 million in adverse economic impact of their state, $10.6 billion over the ten year study period that they did.

So this is having real impact on the loss of population, the loss of jobs in our communities.

So for, you know, political candidates, to simply not talk about it, I think is a waste.

I think we really need to educate the voters.

And this is the time to do it.

So, yeah, we're talking about the issues that are important to voters are on their minds.

We're also talking about this because we think it's important.

The issue of abortion doesn't have a direct connection to some statewide offices.

Democrats are, of course, making it a campaign issue.

It appears to be driving some more younger voters and others to register to vote.

You called on Dave Yost to resign over suggesting that a ten year old rape victim who went to Indiana for an abortion did not exist.

This issue so potentially does impact the attorney general's office.

You as attorney general could be called upon to defend laws that might be passed by the legislature, which will most likely be dominated by Republicans, even after this election.

How are you going to do that when your perspective is different from the perspective of the lawmakers who passed the legislation you're having to fight for?

Well, let me say this.

First of all, a point of clarification I did not calling on Dave was to resign.

I thought he should apologize.

The Democrats have called on other Democrats have called on him to resign.

And that's, you know, within his own moral judgment, whether he should.

And that's up to the voters this fall.

Right.

But, yes, this issue of abortion is squarely on the ballot.

With respect to the AG's office, DeVos ran to court and implemented a six week abortion ban without notice to anybody.

The day the decision went down, that attorney general is going to be the person that actually reviews the ballot language when this ultimately makes it on the ballot, which I suspect that it will in the next year or two.

So and I don't trust Dave Yost and I don't think anybody that supports abortion trust him on this issue, obviously, either.

Look how he behaved on House Bill six when that repeal effort was on the books.

He rejected the language.

He delayed the language and denied those folks the opportunity, collect the signatures they needed to get it on the ballot.

So I expect him to be a complete obstacle to to abortion rights in the state of Ohio.

How would you go to court, though, and defend, say, an abortion ban if a legislature comes back and passes a total abortion ban?

How do you go and defend that when your perspective is different?

Well, there's pending litigation already.

There's a court case pending in Hamilton County.

Dave Yost is openly opposing that litigation, claiming that Ohio law does not protect women.

And we've seen the impacts, by the way.

We've seen the impacts.

If you looked at the story that came out of Cleveland.com yesterday, they cited the affidavits that were presented in that case, women with birth, fallopian tubes where young girls, high school girls on suicide watch with other women that have to forgo lifesaving cancer treatments because of the state of Ohio law.

There's been no clarification of Ohio law.

So I would go to court and make sure this clarification, there's clarity for physicians when they're performing this medical care in Ohio and what they can and cannot do under state law.

And I also will provide information to Ohio voters and Ohio residents where they can get the care they need, whether it's in state or out of state.

And I'll protect people's right to leave the state if that's where they have to go, even though this is a highly political issue, you would take that partizan stance.

I don't think it's political to say people have the right to travel outside of Ohio and get medical care.

I don't think that's political.

That's just, you know, that's being human.

We in the media often call the attorney general the state's top cop because you be in charge of law enforcement in the state.

You were not endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, but neither was your opponent, Dave Yost.

How do you.

He was a prosecutor, though.

So I'm wondering, how do you build your credibility with law enforcement since you'd be in charge of them?

Well, I've met with the FOP and I met with the other police union, PBA, and I was very candid with them.

And that, you know, they're the law enforcement experts.

I'm there to learn to and I want to work with them to come up with the right solutions that work for them and work for all of Ohio.

And how do you work with them when Democrats, for instance, have been proposing legislation that has been opposed by police officers?

I mean, Republicans have to.

But I'm thinking of some of the things that have happened recently on qualified immunity and things like that.

Well, the police in the state have made it clear that they feel like they have no home in any of these political parties.

And I think it takes someone to step in between and be a bridge, not be a wedge.

And I think, you know, an open mind and open heart and listening more than talking.

I think that's going to go a long way in building credibility with the law enforcement community.

Look, I've been working with the law enforcement community since I was on city council in Ohio.

You know, I have always supported the police and supported the work that they do.

And I know my community does as well.

So I'm here to listen.

I'm here to work with folks.

And I know smart enough that I don't have all the answers and I have to listen to people.

Another big part of the attorney general's office is the consumer protection arm.

And in fact, it may be the most active, most visible for many Ohioans.

What do you do to make that office more transparent about the actions that you're taking and what happens to all those funds that you would potentially recover?

Where do those funds go?

How do you tell people about that?

Well, that is a very important function, consumer protection in the state of Ohio.

And you're absolutely right.

I you know, look at the legislative record I've had.

I mean, it's all been about transparency and good government.

So, you know, I'm open to suggestions and ideas on how we can do a better job in making sure Ohioans have the comfort that the moneys that are collected on their behalf are being used for the purposes that benefit Ohioans.

And is that an area that you think gets enough attention from attorneys general?

I mean, for a lot of people, things like suing over robocalls and things like that are hugely important.

Is that an area that gets enough attention or is it potentially neglected?

I think the it's a great question.

I think a lot of the stuff that the good work that's being done is neglected.

But that doesn't mean we should only focus on things that are going to get media attention.

I think you have to do all the good work to protect Ohioans, and that's the role the office devotes has filed lawsuits against the Biden administration over what he calls overreach, specifically on the vaccine mandate that the federal government had had and also in the lawsuit now pending over school nutrition funding and investigations into claims of LGBTQ based discrimination.

Now, that issue of federal overreach is an important issue, though.

You have called on us to drop that lawsuit over the Title nine school funding discrimination case.

What if that overreach is a Republican president overreaching What about the issue of overreach?

Don't you think it's important to define that as it terms states rights versus what the federal government can do?

Well, first of all, these are case by case decisions.

Right.

And filing a lawsuit to attack LGBTQ youth in this state is despicable.

It's just despicable.

Filing, participating and wasting state tax dollars on lawsuits like trying to overturn the 2020 election in Pennsylvania has no bearing on what happens in Ohio.

It's a waste of tax dollars.

DeVos's is nothing more than a political hack and nothing says hack to me than filing lawsuits just because you want to have a political agenda.

That's what those lessons have been about.

They're not about protecting Ohioans, about advancing the interests of Ohioans they're all about advancing his personal political pursuits.

You'll likely need Republican votes to win in this state.

So what do you want Republican voters to know about you?

Yeah, First of all, I'm not a wealthy person.

I came from just like them.

I came from a working class community and worked and earned everything I have in life.

And I know that's what most Ohioans have to do.

And I think it's important to have people that, you know, understand the values of Ohio representing them.

You know, a lot of these issues that we talk about, I don't frame them in Republican versus Democrat frames.

They're not right or left issues.

A lot of these things are just right and wrong.

And that's one of the reasons why I went after Larry Householder so hard.

It wasn't a Republican or Democrat thing.

We had Democrat Democrats saying, you know, stay away from it, too.

But I thought it was too important for Ohio to stay away from it, which is why I and that's how I'll run the office.

As well.

You know what's right and what's wrong.

And that's that's your true north.

You and the other Democrats in this race do have an issue, though, in that you are being significantly out fundraised by the Republican incumbents.

How do you get that message out?

Well, we're crisscrossing Ohio.

We're investing in a coordinated campaign along with other candidates.

And we're relying on the people to know the candidates and know what we stand for and what our values are.

You know, not every candidate with the most money wins.

We saw that in the primaries.

And, you know, we're we're we're hoping that our message is resonating with voters because we've met with lots of them across the state of Ohio.

Later this week, I talked with Dave Yost, a former newspaper journalist Delaware County auditor and prosecutor, state auditor and current attorney general.

Well, we've been establishing the foundation for the work that I want to accomplish from human trafficking through enforcing the rule of law and a number of things on environmental policy.

We are set up to make some real home runs.

And in the second term, also, we're not done with our work on opiates that settlement.

And one, Ohio's just got set up and just gotten started.

Same with PBMs and trying to reform that structure, which is distorting the health care marketplace immeasurably and hurting Ohioans in some cases.

I have to start by asking you about a story that Democrats, including the judge hearing the case involving Ohio's six week abortion ban and Hamilton County were saying that you should apologize for the case of the ten year old rape victim who went to Indiana to get an abortion.

To quote you for an appearance on Fox News, quote, Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication, I know the cops and prosecutors in the state.

There's not one of them who wouldn't be turning over every rock looking for this guy and they would have charged him.

I'm not saying it could not have happened.

What I'm saying to you is they're not is not a damn scintilla of evidence.

And you said shame on the Indianapolis paper.

Who ran the story?

And you said they had an obvious ax to grind.

There was an arrest in the case.

You said, quote, We rejoice any time a child rapist is taken off the streets.

But you did not apologize Why didn't you apologize?

Karen, I don't understand what it is you think I need to apologize for.

What?

And that was in untrue or inaccurate at the time, etc.. By the way, you conflated two separate interviews.

Well, yes, there was a Fox News interview, and then there was the statement that you made afterwards.

True.

But the default question, the impression is that you denied the existence of this ten year old girl when there are ten year old rape victims.

And as a prosecutor, you certainly know that.

Of course I know that the quote, you just didn't say that, nor did anything else in that interview, which I brought helpfully a transcript Okay.

Nothing in here was untrue.

Nothing in here.

We didn't even know the identity.

I still don't.

Of that poor victim So you're asking me to apologize for saying what was true when I said it Respectfully, that's not very fair, and you're misreading my comments.

Let me ask you about the again, the Hamilton County case involving the six week abortion ban.

And there's some other information in that that directly relates to the guidance you gave in July after all of this happened, where you said that there are exceptions in the six week abortion ban and you offered some guidance on those exceptions.

The affidavits in the Hamilton County case say that there are two more minors who have left the state who have abortions to women with cancer, who couldn't get abortions or cancer treatment, all pregnant, three women with fetuses with severe abnormalities that couldn't get abortions.

So based on that guidance you gave in July.

Are doctors not following the law or are they too afraid of what the consequences are?

Is the guidance that you've given clear?

Well, you've read it.

I hope it's posted on the website.

I think it's very clear.

Could the law be constructed better?

I'm sure it could be.

And I suspect the General Assembly will revisit some of the questions that have arisen.

But look, for 50 years, we didn't have a debate about abortion in this country.

Was taken out of the democratic process.

It was the discussions that we had happened in court between opposing sides.

Now, for the first time in 50 years, the vast majority of people that don't want to think about this are confronted with what are what is the morality of the thing and what should be society's response.

We're going to have those conversations.

It's an atrophied debate and it's past time for us to pick it up and and go there.

Now, my role in all of this is the chief law officer of the State is to defend the law as it is passed by the General Assembly, not to put my $0.02 in or to make the law conform to my beliefs.

On another case.

Your opponent, Jeffrey Crossman, says you've dropped the ball in the House Bill six federal case that he says that the state has jurisdiction and could have prosecuted people on and done more to root out corruption.

Is that a possibility?

Could you be doing more on the investigation into the nuclear bailout?

Law and some of the things that have resulted from the investigation?

I wonder why you're asking Jeffrey Cross his questions, but I'm happy to answer.

I'm the only one, actually, who did take action.

I went to court when nobody else was moving and successful fully got rid of the nuclear bail out, the nuclear subsidy.

We also won a.

Got rid of the decoupling, which is probably too complicated to explain here.

But the bottom line is about $2 billion that would have come out of Ohio ratepayers pockets over the next ten years or so isn't coming out.

Why not?

Because of my part.

It not because of the actions of the general assembly or anybody else, but because Dave Yost went to court.

Dave stood up.

Dave Yost one so respectfully Mr. Crossman doesn't know what he's talking about.

We in the media often call the attorney general the state's top cop because you are in charge of law enforcement in fact, you've got the pin on there that looks like a law enforcement pin there.

You were not endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

Neither was your opponent.

Do you have any idea why and how do you how do you work together with law enforcement to make sure that you have the credibility that you need with them?

Well, in Ohio, law enforcement happens at the local level.

The state attorney general supports that.

We for instance, don't have any original investigatory or prosecutorial jurisdiction.

We have to be invited in.

That being said, I and my team are regularly working with law enforcement all across the state.

And I'm very proud of the close relationship we have.

If you talk to cops on the street, they know that I stand up for them, particularly when other politicians are saying defund or that they are a bunch of thugs or operating with malintent I believe that they're a noble profession.

Far as labor unions, you can ask them what their issue is, but it doesn't have anything to do with law.

Enforcement.

Another big part of the attorney general's office is the consumer protection arm.

And for a lot of people, that's potentially the most visible part because that's where you settle claims against companies and you bring in money.

How have you made that office transparent and accessible to people, telling people what you do with the money that you do recover?

Well, we communicate obviously with through the press, through the media, with individual cases as they come up.

A lot of our consumer protection cases are individual things, bad builders or rip off artists that have a small number of things.

We also have large issues.

For example, the identity breaches that happen from time to time where we go to to bat for them or product liability cases, for example, the vaginal mesh a case that we want a significant settlement on.

What about robocalls?

What's going on with those?

You have had a suit to try to stop all the robocalls that people are getting now along with the political world because people are getting sweeping.

We established a standalone unit for a robocall enforcement.

I have helped build a 50 state coalition of attorneys general to fight about this.

We work closely with the federal government and the enforcers there as well as the the good players in the telecommunications industry.

These robocalls are not coming from the good players and Verizon is not helping them.

They're working with us to try to shut these things down.

We've won a number of legislative victories at the state and federal level, and most importantly, recently filed a lawsuit against a company that an operation that was responsible for billions of robocalls and not surprisingly, the person who is known to us had previously been in trouble.

And we're going to we're going to shut that down.

You'd find some lawsuits against the Biden administration over what you called outreach or overreach, rather, specifically on the vaccine mandate.

You got a win on that one.

And over new rules, this is the current one requiring schools to investigate claims of LGBTQ discrimination or risk losing millions in food programs funding.

Why should the Ohio attorney general be involved in these cases?

Why do you claim that there's overreach here?

Because the government is only allowed to do the things that it is permitted to do through the Constitution.

The limitations on the the actions of government is essential to the rule of law.

We don't have federalism.

We don't have separation of powers.

We don't really have accountability.

If anybody can do anything or if judges are free to rewrite the laws as they see fit.

So we don't join every lawsuit.

There have been 49 lawsuits against the Biden administration by attorneys general.

We've joined 23 19 of them.

We specifically declined to join because I felt that they were either not well-founded or overtly political And several others, we weren't even asked to join.

But the bottom line is, I will always fight for the rule of law and have departed for my colleagues in several instances.

The Affordable Care Act case, I was one of two Republican attorneys general who said no Fifth Circuit, you shouldn't be striking down the entire Affordable Care Act because of one unconstitutional provision.

And the Supreme Court ultimately sided with my view on that.

We declined to enjoin to join Texas's lawsuit after the 2020 election and asking for certain states votes to be thrown out because we didn't believe it was well founded.

Again a position that the United States Supreme Court agreed with.

And finally, on that note, to close here, the five executive statewide Republican officeholders have all been endorsed by former President Trump.

And I'm asking all of you kind of piggybacking on what you just said, with no evidence to support Trump's claims of a stolen election, do you affirm the results of the 2020 election and that Joe Biden did indeed want win?

Yes.

Next week, our Conversation with the Candidates series continues with the major party contenders for secretary of state.

Republican incumbent Franklin Rose and Democratic challenger Chelsea Clark Early voting starts October 12th.

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 Web site at State News dot org and follow us on the show on Facebook and Twitter.

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

What do you make of all those who might support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutuel, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at med mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP, now with eight locations across the country.

Porter Right is all legal partner with a new perspective to the business community more at Porter right dot com and from the Ohio Education Association representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OHEA.org.