Dave Anderson The premiere of HBO’s new documentary “The Dark Money Game” shines a spotlight on FirstEnergy’s bribes-for-bailouts scheme in Ohio just days after President Trump revived a failed push to use federal emergency powers to bail out coal-fired power plants that FirstEnergy lobbied for extensively during Trump’s first term.
“Ohio Confidential,” the first film in acclaimed director Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary series about money in American politics, examines the federal racketeering investigation that exposed how FirstEnergy secretly paid millions of dollars in bribes to influence Larry Householder, the former Republican Speaker of the Ohio House. Householder helped secure a $1 billion ratepayer bailout for several nuclear and coal plants owned by a bankrupt subsidiary of FirstEnergy in 2019 via since repealed provisions of Ohio’s House Bill 6.
Householder is now serving twenty years in federal prison. FirstEnergy agreed to pay a $230 million legal penalty to avoid trial and admitted to its role in the Ohio scheme as part of a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement.
The utility also fired its CEO Charles Jones and top lobbyist Michael Dowling a few months after Householder’s arrest in 2020. Jones and Dowling were indicted earlier this year on federal criminal charges.
Gibney’s film describes how FirstEnergy secretly paid $60 million to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit named Generation Now that was controlled by Householder. Generation Now pleaded guilty to racketeering in 2021. The documentary accurately describes 501(c)(4) groups like Generation Now as dark-money groups that are part of a broken campaign finance system enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizen United.
Householder’s racketeering enterprise used a portion of the money from FirstEnergy to elect a slate of Republican candidates in 2018 who then voted to make Householder the new speaker of the Ohio House the following year. Money from the utility was then used to fund aggressive multi-million dollar campaigns to pass House Bill 6 and block a referendum petition that would have given Ohioans a chance to repeal the FirstEnergy bailout from reaching the ballot.
While “Ohio Confidential” is largely focused on the Householder scheme, FirstEnergy also admitted as part of its agreement with federal prosecutors that it secretly paid $5 million in 2017 to “a 501(c)(4) entity connected to federal official(s), on or about May 1, 2017, shortly after hiring a consultant with close connections to those federal official(s).”
Info found in company records made public through the regulatory inquiries and civil lawsuits FirstEnergy has faced during the fallout from the HB 6 scandal revealed that 501(c)(4) was the Trump-aligned America First Policies, as the Energy and Policy Institute detailed last fall. The $5 million dollar payment was part of a broader influence campaign by FirstEnergy that targeted the Trump administration in 2017-2018.
At the time, FirstEnergy was pressuring the Trump administration to use federal emergency powers to provide a public bailout for its struggling coal and nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy’s preferred solution was for Trump’s Department of Energy to invoke Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a power usually reserved for rare times when the power grid is threatened by an emergency like a hurricane or extreme weather event.
A leaked draft Trump administration memo from 2018 outlined a plan to use Section 202(c) and the Defense Production Act to bail out coal and nuclear plants, a plan that economists at The Brattle Group estimated could cost the public $10-17 billion per year.
Slides from a 2018 presentation to FirstEnergy’s board of directors by Dowling demonstrate the scant public support and broad-based opposition that FirstEnergy’s simultaneous pushes for state and federal bailouts for its coal and nuclear plants generated at the time:
Trump ultimately deserted his first-term attempts to deliver the federal bailout sought by FirstEnergy and other donors in the coal industry, amidst public opposition and concerns raised by White House insiders. In one FirstEnergy email from 2018, Dowling shared intel that Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow was worried “that a lot of people think it’s a bailout.”
Last week, Trump signed a new Executive Order, “Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid,” that effectively revives the earlier failed push to use Section 202(c) to bail out coal plants. The April 8th order was one of several pro-coal executive actions Trump signed on the same day.
Press contacts for FirstEnergy did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the order from the Energy and Policy Institute.
Trump also exempted seventy coal plants from Biden-era Clean Air Act rules requiring reductions in emissions of air toxins including mercury, a powerful neurotoxin. The Harrison Power Station and Fort Martin Power Station in West Virginia, the last two coal plants owned by FirstEnergy, are on the Trump administration’s list of exempted facilities.
Joseph Craft, the CEO of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners and major Trump and GOP donor, attended Trump’s signing ceremony for the pro-coal executive orders last week. Craft’s support for Trump during the 2024 election included a $1 million contribution to Elon Musk’s America PAC, which was first reported by Heated.
Speakers at the signing ceremony included Jeff Crowe, the General Superintendent for American Consolidated Natural Resources, the coal mining company that emerged from the bankruptcy of Murray Energy during Trump’s first term.
Craft and former Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, who died in 2020, joined FirstEnergy in lobbying Trump for a Section 202(c) bailout for coal plants during Trump’s first term. Murray contributed $1 million to America First Action, a Trump-aligned Super PAC in 2017.
Top photo of the now closed W.H. Sammis coal plant in Ohio was taken by the Energy and Policy Institute several years before the plant’s demolition
