Where Does a Pro-Nuke Group Begin and a GOP Politician End?
What little information is publicly available about a dark-money group indicates deep ties to the Ohio House speaker’s political machine.
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Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
One of the nation’s largest electric utilities poured money into the campaigns of state legislators in Ohio last election cycle. Now a dark-money group linked to senior aides of the statehouse speaker is pushing to prop up two of the utility’s struggling nuclear-power plants using ratepayer funds.
The group, Generation Now Inc., has purchased a host of radio, television, and social-media ads boosting House Bill 6, a measure that would use a fee levied on Ohio electricity customers to subsidize the state’s clean-energy producers—which it defines to include nuclear. The legislation is widely seen as a lifeline for FirstEnergy’s two nuclear plants in the state, which are on track to shut down absent state intervention.
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