The jury deliberated for nine days. It could not agree. And so in March 2026, after a six-week trial in Akron that laid bare in painstaking detail what prosecutors described as the most audacious corporate corruption scheme in Ohio history, the case against two of the principal architects of that scheme collapsed into a mistrial — and the men who allegedly bribed their way to a billion-dollar legislative windfall walked out of the Summit County courthouse without a verdict against them.
They did not walk free for long.
On June 3, 2026, an Ohio grand jury returned a new indictment against Charles "Chuck" Jones, the former chief executive of FirstEnergy Corp., and Michael Dowling, the company's former top lobbyist and senior vice president of external affairs. The new charges were unsealed the following day, bringing 22 combined criminal counts — bribery, engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, conspiracy, telecommunications fraud, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, and, for Dowling, 14 additional counts of tampering with records. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost stood alongside Summit County Prosecutor Elliot Kolkovich to announce the reindictment, and the words he chose went to the heart of what this case has always been about.
"The roots of this complex case haven't changed," Yost said. "FirstEnergy was hijacked by two scheming executives who sought to control the regulator that influenced the company's stock prices. I'm confident that Ohio's ratepayers will get justice when the facts are unearthed in the courtroom."
Ratepayers. The word is easy to skip over in the press release boilerplate of a corruption announcement, but it is precisely the right word. The FirstEnergy scandal was not an abstraction. It was not a victimless clash of power players in the upper floors of corporate and government office towers. It was a scheme paid for — in part — by ordinary Ohioans on their electricity bills, and it produced legislation that would have transferred over a billion dollars in costs onto those same customers to bail out nuclear plants that the market had already rendered uncompetitive. The corruption at the center of the case was breathtaking not merely in its scope but in its brazenness: a $4.3 million payment, a regulatory appointment, a legislative maneuver, and a campaign to bury the public's attempt to undo it. Six years later, two of the men who allegedly engineered that scheme are headed back to trial.
The Architecture of House Bill 6
To understand what Jones and Dowling are alleged to have done, it is necessary to understand what House Bill 6 was — and what it cost.
In 2019, FirstEnergy faced a crisis. The company had two nuclear power plants in Ohio — Davis-Besse near Toledo and Perry north of Cleveland — that were hemorrhaging money. The plants could not compete in wholesale electricity markets that had grown increasingly favorable to cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. FirstEnergy's leadership wanted a bailout. The question was how to get one through a legislature that would, under ordinary circumstances, have no interest in compelling ratepayers to subsidize uncompetitive power plants for a profitable utility corporation.
The answer, prosecutors allege, was to buy the outcome.
The target was Sam Randazzo, a veteran Columbus lawyer and lobbyist who had spent decades navigating Ohio utility regulation. Randazzo was well connected to both industry and government. He was also, as subsequent events would demonstrate, available for purchase. In early 2019, FirstEnergy made a $4.3 million payment to a consulting company controlled by Randazzo. Weeks later, Governor Mike DeWine appointed Randazzo to chair the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — the state agency whose primary function is to regulate utilities including FirstEnergy. Prosecutors allege the payment and the appointment were not coincidental. They allege the payment was a bribe, and that Randazzo, once installed as the state's top utility regulator, delivered regulatory and legislative favors in return.
The legislative centerpiece was House Bill 6. The bill, signed into law in July 2019, included a $1 billion ratepayer-funded subsidy for FirstEnergy's nuclear plants, buried among other energy provisions. It also included a series of measures that reduced support for renewable energy development and energy efficiency programs, transferring the benefits of those reductions to FirstEnergy's conventional generation assets. The bill was the product of a $60 million dark-money lobbying campaign funded largely by FirstEnergy — a campaign that prosecutors allege was itself part of the corrupt scheme.
At the center of that campaign was Larry Householder, then the Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. Householder, prosecutors alleged, orchestrated the acceptance of the FirstEnergy money, used it to elect allies to the Ohio House, leveraged those allies to pass HB6, and then directed a dirty tricks operation to defeat a ballot referendum that would have repealed the law. In August 2023, after a jury found him guilty of racketeering and bribery, a federal judge sentenced Householder to 20 years in federal prison. His co-conspirator, lobbyist Matt Borges, received five years.
Householder is now in federal custody. Randazzo is dead — he died by suicide in December 2023 while facing both state and federal charges. A fifth figure originally charged in the scheme also died by suicide after pleading not guilty. The criminal accountability for the HB6 scandal has thus far been purchased at a terrible human cost, and the two executives most directly responsible for initiating it — Jones and Dowling — have yet to face a final verdict.
The Mistrial and What It Left Unresolved
The state prosecution of Jones and Dowling proceeded separately from the federal case against Householder. Whereas the federal prosecution focused on Householder's end of the scheme — the legislative machinery of dark money and House floor votes — the state case centered on the specific corrupt transaction at its origin: the $4.3 million payment to Randazzo and the subsequent regulatory and legislative benefits FirstEnergy obtained in return.
The case carried a threshold legal question that proved, in the end, to be the undoing of the first prosecution: was Randazzo a "public official" at the time the $4.3 million was paid? Under Ohio's bribery statute, the crime requires that the payment be made to influence a public official. Randazzo received the payment before his appointment as PUCO chairman, when he was still a private lawyer and lobbyist. Prosecutors argued that the payment was a bribe in anticipation of his appointment — that the deal was made with the explicit understanding that Randazzo would be appointed and would deliver regulatory value in return. Defense attorneys argued that Randazzo was a private citizen when the money changed hands, and that the bribery statute therefore did not apply.
The jury — twelve Ohioans who sat through six weeks of testimony and documentary evidence — could not resolve that question. After nine days of deliberation, they reported themselves deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial. Both defendants remained free.
The new indictment does not abandon the bribery theory. It recharges it, alongside additional counts that reflect what prosecutors describe as "new information" obtained through civil litigation against FirstEnergy that was not available at the time of the original indictment. Attorney General Yost declined to detail the specific new evidence on the day of the announcement, but the addition of 14 new tampering-with-records counts against Dowling suggests that the civil discovery process surfaced documents bearing directly on what the defendants knew, when they knew it, and what steps they took to manage the evidentiary record.
The Executives Who Walked Away — For a While
Chuck Jones spent 35 years at FirstEnergy and its predecessor companies. He became CEO in 2015 and built a reputation as a blunt, aggressive executive who was willing to play hardball in both boardrooms and regulatory proceedings. He was also, according to the people who worked with him, deeply invested in the fate of the nuclear plants. The Davis-Besse and Perry facilities represented, in his telling, not just balance-sheet assets but a piece of Ohio's energy identity — reliable baseload generation that the market was irrationally discounting in favor of cheap natural gas.
That investment in saving the plants, prosecutors allege, is what motivated the scheme. Jones was fired by FirstEnergy's board in October 2020, along with Dowling and several other executives, for violating the company's policies and code of conduct — a firing that followed the FBI's search of Randazzo's Columbus home and the unraveling of the HB6 scheme. Jones has consistently denied the most serious allegations against him, though FirstEnergy itself ultimately agreed to a $230 million deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in which it admitted to making billions of dollars in concealed payments to politicians and nonprofit entities in exchange for regulatory favors.
Michael Dowling served as FirstEnergy's principal liaison to Ohio's political infrastructure. He was, by all accounts, exceptionally good at his job — a veteran of Ohio politics who knew which relationships mattered, which lobbyists to retain, and how to move money and influence through the system in ways that produced results. He was also, according to prosecutors, deeply involved in the mechanics of the Randazzo payment and the HB6 campaign. The 14 additional tampering charges in the new indictment suggest that investigators now believe they have documentary evidence of Dowling's involvement that extends beyond what was presented at the first trial.
Both men retain the presumption of innocence. Both have maintained that the charges against them are either legally defective or factually wrong. And both now face the prospect of a second trial in which prosecutors, armed with new evidence and the hard lessons of the first trial's failure, will attempt to persuade a second jury that the $4.3 million payment was what the evidence has always suggested it was: a bribe.
The Governor Who Testified, the Senator Who Testified, and the Question of Who Knew What
One of the more remarkable aspects of the original HB6 prosecution was who ended up on the witness list. Jon Husted, then Ohio's lieutenant governor and now a United States senator seeking reelection, testified at the Jones-Dowling trial about conversations he had with the defendants regarding the PUCO chairmanship. Husted testified, according to reports from the courtroom, that Jones and Dowling had been pushing for a different candidate for the position — and thus, implicitly, that their influence over the appointment process was real and actively exercised.
Governor Mike DeWine also received a subpoena in connection with the case, as did Husted. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the scheme. But their involvement as witnesses underscores the degree to which the corruption at the center of HB6 was not a hermetically sealed transaction between two executives and a lobbyist. It operated through, and required the participation of, the ordinary machinery of Ohio government — appointment processes, legislative calendars, regulatory proceedings, and campaign finance flows that were, in most cases, individually legal even if their combination and coordination was allegedly corrupt.
That is, in some ways, the most troubling feature of the HB6 scandal: not that bad actors invented a new kind of corruption, but that they exploited existing legal structures — dark money nonprofits, consulting payments, legislative relationships — to achieve corrupt ends while maintaining maximum legal insulation. The $4.3 million payment to Randazzo flowed through a consulting agreement, not a brown paper bag. The political money moved through 501(c)(4) organizations, not campaign accounts. The legislative outcome was achieved through ordinary floor votes, not arm-twisting in the speaker's personal office. Each step, viewed in isolation, might be explainable. Viewed together, prosecutors say, they constitute one of the most sophisticated and consequential corruption schemes in Ohio's history.
The Ratepayers Who Are Still Waiting
House Bill 6 was partially repealed in 2021, after the full scope of the corruption that produced it became public. The nuclear subsidies were eliminated. Some of the anti-renewable provisions were rolled back. Ohio ratepayers were, in theory, spared the full cost of the billion-dollar bailout that FirstEnergy had purchased through its $60 million influence campaign.
But the costs of the scheme did not disappear. FirstEnergy customers paid elevated rates during the period HB6 was in effect. The company's $230 million deferred prosecution payment to federal authorities — which the company's shareholders effectively absorbed — represents a fraction of the economic benefit FirstEnergy extracted from the scheme before it was exposed. Householder's 20-year sentence represents the most severe judicial consequence imposed on any participant to date. Randazzo escaped judgment by his own hand. And Jones and Dowling, the executives who allegedly set the machinery of corruption in motion with a $4.3 million wire transfer, have yet to be held accountable in a courtroom.
The reindictment announced on June 4, 2026 is the state's declaration that it intends to hold them accountable — and that a hung jury, however frustrating, is not the end of the matter. It is the beginning of a second attempt.
Ohio Attorney General Yost noted that the new indictment contains facts derived from civil litigation against FirstEnergy that his office did not have at the time of the original charges. The discovery process in civil cases operates under different rules than criminal grand jury proceedings, and it is not unusual for civil litigation to surface documents, communications, and records that the criminal investigation missed. What, specifically, those records reveal about the conduct of Jones and Dowling — about what they knew, what they directed, what they concealed — will become clearer when the second trial begins.
What is already clear is that the FirstEnergy HB6 scandal has proved to be one of those cases that refuses to be closed by the ordinary procedures of the justice system. The original federal case produced convictions of the legislative architect and his associates. The state case against the corporate architects stumbled at the final step, undone by a legal ambiguity about the timing of a payment. The new indictment attempts to clear that ambiguity and to add evidentiary weight where the first prosecution fell short.
Six years of investigations, trials, mistrials, suicides, and prison sentences. Hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, deferred prosecutions, and civil judgments. A Speaker of the House in federal custody. A utility regulator dead before he could be tried. And two executives in Akron, Ohio, preparing once again to stand before a jury and answer for what prosecutors say they did with a $4.3 million wire transfer in the winter of 2019.
The case, as Attorney General Yost put it, hasn't changed. It is still, at its core, about two people who allegedly decided that the laws governing public officials, bribery, and the public trust were obstacles to be managed rather than limits to be respected — and about whether Ohio's justice system can hold them to account for that decision.
The second trial will provide one more answer. Whether it is the final one remains to be seen.
The Ethics Reporter will continue to follow the Jones-Dowling prosecution as the case proceeds to trial. Charles "Chuck" Jones and Michael Dowling have pleaded not guilty to all charges. A trial date in the new proceedings has not yet been set as of publication.