PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — There are two starkly-different candidates running to be Ohio’s next United States Senator.
A ten-term Congressman from northern Ohio, and a former Silicon Valley executive who was raised in the south. Republican J.D. Vance has received the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, but his critics — including his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan — have accused him of eluding the voters in Ohio while he spends time “out of state” trying to raise money for his campaign.
In recent weeks, Vance has not granted many media interviews to outlets with the exception of conservative media enterprises. The silence has even garnered the attention of his own party. The Daily Beast reported that Bill Cunningham, a fixture on conservative talk radio airwaves in Cincinnati for decades said that voters, party activists, and statewide officials are telling him that Vance has been “phoning it in.” Vance is allegedly missing from many of the county fairs, party meetings, and campaign stops where candidates in this state are expected to be, the Beast reported.
“The Republican faithful are telling me,” Cunningham said, “they can’t find J.D. Vance with a search warrant.”
However, on Wednesday, the Guardian was given the opportunity to interview the businessman while he was fundraising in Scioto County, just hours after he returned from a trip to Washington D.C.
A “sham” non-profit.
The interview lasted approximately ten minutes and ranged from a series of topics including the opioid epidemic to the January 6th insurrection on the very building he hopes to occupy. In the interview, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Derek Myers asked Vance about allegations that a non-profit the candidate has is a “sham” and was used for political purposes, as accused by his critics.
A Business Insider investigation last year claimed the candidate’s sham non-profit, “Our Ohio Renewal,” was a “charade” that mostly “[sat] around doing nothing,” when it was touted as being an addiction-resource organization. Leading Ohio opioid advocates had never heard of the organization, according to the Ohio Democratic Party, and according to tax filings, Vance’s group spent more on “management fees” paid out to Jai Chabria — a longtime former Ohio Governor John Kasich advisor who now serves as Vance’s Chief Strategist — than it did on programming to address the opioid crisis that has hit Ohio harder than nearly any other state.
IRS records show that Vance’s organization spent $45,000 on polling, but does not elaborate on what the questions or results were. Ohio Democrats and watchdog organizations have labeled the expense an improper use and claim it was a political gain under the guise of helping addicts. When asked on Wednesday if the allegations of Vance’s non-profit were true, the Middletown native hit back.
“Well, it’s a terrible ‘scam’ because it’s my money going into it, mostly. Most of the money that went into the non-profit I provided, or at least a lot of the money, I should say, was provided by me. I never paid myself a cent, never supported my political candidate [sic] at all.”
The filings show that more than $220,000 was funneled into the group.
“The organization did some things to try to understand what was going on with the public’s opinion, in part because we were doing some things with public policies …. I’m not opposed to releasing a poll, but this is a weird thing that Tim Ryan is talking about, and I’m not even sure what he is talking about, but I will look into it.”
While Vance claims he doesn’t know what “Tim Ryan is talking about” with respect to the polling, the IRS paperwork — known as a form 990 — has Chabria’s signature on it and clearly shows the expenditure for a “survey.”
Vance said on Wednesday that the opioid epidemic in Ohio and across the country is getting better, but statistics from the CDC show that is not the case.
His opponent.
Vance attacked his opponent, ten-term Congressman Tim Ryan, who holds the Democratic nomination for the open Senate seat.
“…. you’re not going to have a better state, a better community, a better country unless you start choosing different leadership. There’s one guy who is running who is a 20-year career politician who has voted with Biden 100% of the time, and there’s another guy running who is willing to call out that the leadership of this country has failed, and that’s me.”
Ryan’s campaign fought back calling Vance’s claims about the full party-line vote false.
“Tim is one of the most bipartisan members in the entire U.S. House of Representatives. He’s worked across party lines to address the opioid epidemic, give service members a pay raise, hold China accountable, and pass the USMCA — the only trade deal he’s ever supported in his career — and has taken on leaders from both parties when they pushed trade policies that were bad for Ohio workers,” said Izzi Levy, a spokeswoman for Ryan. “JD Vance is a fraud who spent most of this summer hiding from Ohioans rather than explain why he thinks a 10-year-old should be forced to have her rapist’s baby, why women should stay in violent marriages, or why he capitalized on the opioid epidemic to start a scammy non-profit that only ever promoted himself.”
The January 6th insurrection.
Vance also talked about his endorsement from former President Donald Trump and the January 6th Select Committee, which is investigating the insurrection on the United States Capitol in 2021. In recent weeks, bombshells have dropped during congressional hearings that the former President rallied the group of deadly rioters and refused to do anything to stop them.
“I paid attention on January 6th. I was very disappointed at what I was watching, but I also saw a President of the United States who was constantly saying ‘protest peacefully, don’t break the law’ and I think it’s hard for me to square what I saw on January 6th with the idea that somehow Donald Trump is somehow personally responsible for a riot that didn’t have anything to do with his words or his encouragements, and certainly, where he was not even physically present.”
While Vance said the former President did not have any role in the violent attack that took the lives of seven people, the articles of impeachment lodged against Mr. Trump in 2021 — which ultimately ended in a not-guilty verdict by a GOP-controlled Senate — cited words during the President’s speech that day claiming otherwise.
“[Trump] also wilfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the articles read.
And, while there has been recent testimony in the hearings that Mr. Trump wanted to join the rioters at the Capitol — including an alleged account where he tried to forcibly take over the wheel of his armored SUV when his security detail refused to drive him down to the building — the Pesident, himself, never actually stepped foot on the grounds of the Capitol during the attack. However, during his speech he used “we” but he never joined the supporters that took the short walk from a rally in front of the White House to Congress.
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them,” the President said during the speech.
Patriots or terrorists?
In the days and weeks after the riot, five police officers who had served at the Capitol on January 6 died.
- Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, who was attacked by the mob, died on Jan. 7.
- Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack.
- Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police also died by suicide four days afterward.
Myers asked Vance during the interview this week if he considered the rioters — many of whom have been criminally indicted for their actions — as patriots or domestic terrorists.
“I don’t think it fits the definition of terrorism, not even close,” Vance said. “But look, I mean, you have a protest of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them were obviously peaceful protestors, most of them never even stepped foot in the Capitol, and yeah, you have some violent people who beat up some police officers, and I think when you beat up a police officer you should face the consequences for it, but this is important: you face the consequences after a trial where you’re innocent until proven guilty.”
The Ohio Democratic Party said Vance is going to have to grant more than one media interview to an unbiased source if he plans to garner the attention of Ohio voters.
“J.D. Vance is hiding from Ohioans because he feels ‘out of place’ in the state and can’t answer for his sham nonprofit, defend his toxic position that survivors of rape and incest should be forced to give birth or explain why he thinks that women should stay in ‘violent’ marriages. San Francisco Vance may be afraid to talk about his out-of-touch positions on the campaign trail but Ohioans won’t be fooled by the Buckeye State’s biggest fraud,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.