The Diary of a Witness

Written by Sara Ganim

Anna Lippincott is a reluctant cooperator. 

She has snarky nicknames for the prosecutors and FBI agents who’ve secured her freedom. She’s sassy when providing information. She rolls her eyes when they don’t understand it.

Don’t get me wrong, Anna is grateful – grateful for a lot of things, one being the ability to start over: to move to another country and forget about the scandal she left behind when she worked for the most powerful man in Ohio. 

But even though it ruined her life, or at least nearly ruined her life, Anna still yearns for those taboo times. She talks about those moments with the warmth and joy of nostalgia. The guys sitting in federal prison, the guys the newspapers call the criminals – to Anna, those are the good guys. They’re her friends, her “family.”

In Anna’s eyes, the real bad guys are the ones who she believes did this to her: the snitches she calls scummy – the guys who she says ran to the feds because they were jealous or scorned, or not invited to the inner circle. And the federal agent who she believes grabbed at a chance to punish his political enemies. Or the prosecutors who backed her into a corner and forced her to flip.  

The immunity she got, well, to Anna, it’s just a small consolation for destroying her career.

Until now, Anna has only been known as Associate 1 – peppered throughout an 81-page federal complaint as an accomplice to a political mob family.

What she lived and what she witnessed has been written about from many other points of view –  that of prosecutors, FBI agents, informants, and defendants. But through everything that’s happened, Anna’s perspective has been a mystery. She’s never shared, until now, what she saw and what she lived.

Her story straddles two very different worlds: The inside of what authorities call a “criminal enterprise” and then the quiet workings of a federal prosecution. This story is hers. It’s told how she saw it, how she reflects on everything that happened, and how it changed her life forever.

Forget dry reports and sanitized accounts. This is the unfiltered, unpredictable, and unapologetically honest diary of a witness. 

The Day of the Peaches

Most nights, Anna Lippincott collapses into bed, drained from the unrelenting chaos of her life as a top aide to the most influential politician in Ohio. But by morning, she’s always re-energized, fueled by the intoxicating confidence that comes with being 26, ambitious, and already at the top of her game. Her grit and smarts, plus that fleeting 20s feeling of invincibility, have given Anna everything she needs to earn the respect to stand alongside the state’s political elite. 

She absolutely loves her job. 

Anna is one of a small group of staffers who work for Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder. They call themselves “Team Householder” and have since they were just a trio of ambitious political junkies dreaming of power.  

For the last four years, Anna has been the person everyone turns to when something needs fixing. And she always delivers. Her confidence is unshakable; her work ethic relentless. She strides through the halls of the statehouse, in all-black conservative outfits, her long blond hair bouncing gently in rhythm with the echo of her shoes – that unmistakably specific sound of high heels hitting old marble floors.

It’s July 2020, 6 a.m. Anna is up, although the sun is not. She’s making coffee even if she doesn’t need the caffeine to get hyped for another day. As the sun begins to peak over the horizon, the doorbell rings. Strange, she thinks. She isn’t expecting anyone. Oh wait, she remembers. The peaches.

Weeks earlier, Team Householder had decided to split an order of Georgia peaches from a business called The Peach Truck. Every season, they ship the freshly picked fruit in boxes. And every season, Anna lets them ripen in her condo before divvying up and delivering portions of the order to her colleagues. 

She goes to the door, still in her pink pinstripe pajama shorts and a turquoise quarter-zip, prepared only to sign away her modest little space to the annual peach takeover. 

But it’s not the peaches. Instead, standing before her are federal agents, armed both with long guns and subpoenas bearing her name. The lead agent steps forward, his youthful face incongruously stern. “Ms. Lippincott?” he asks. All Anna can think at this moment is, “this guy looks even younger than me.”

Her beagle-rottweiler mix breaks the silence. The agent jumps back. His eyes flick nervously. “Can you put the dog inside?”

Anna is now nervous, too. Her mind is racing through every meeting, every party, every vote, every trip, every rally, every text message conversation that was anything but politically correct. 

“Can we come inside?” the agents ask.

She’s not sure why, but Anna’s contrary nature and innate skepticism kick in. Something tells her she doesn’t have to cooperate. No one has said she is under arrest, or even suspicion. 

“No,” Anna says. “What’s going on?”

“We want to talk to you.”

“No.”

The agent, Blane Wetzel, hands her a search warrant. 

“We’ll need to take your phone,” he says.

Anna examines the warrant. She’s unnerved to see it has a photograph of her condo on it. They’ve been watching. She hands it over. 

“What’s the passcode?”

Anna stares at Wetzel. She can’t get over his boyish looks, or his obvious nerves. Somehow it’s calming. It’s giving her courage to push back. 

“I don’t believe I am required to give that to you.”

The agents exchange glances, visibly irritated but conceding that she’s right.

“It would be a sign of cooperation,” Wetzel says.

Anna shakes her head. “I’m not going to.”

Anna doesn’t know it, but in this same moment, almost everyone who is important to her is getting a knock at their door. Many of her closest friends have it much worse. They are being greeted with handcuffs and warrants, not just subpoenas. Her phone, now in the hands of federal agents, is lighting up with news alerts that read Ohio House Speaker Larry Housholder indicted. She misses a call from her boss, Jeff Longstreth, a man she thinks of as a second father. He’s hoping she’ll bail him out of jail. 

Federal prosecutors are alleging that Larry Householder built a political mafia, funded by one of his biggest donors – a company called FirstEnergy – to get elected Speaker of the House in Ohio and pass legislation that would bail FirstEnergy out of its financial struggles. Deemed the largest corruption scheme in Ohio history, authorities estimated $61 million was spent to pull it off. One of the orchestrators, a self-described mob boss named Neil Clark, wrote that it was actually $70 million. Anna, who was the keeper of all the most important files, thinks it was more like $100 million.

By the time it’s over, four lobbyists, one state official, the CEO of FirstEnergy, and Larry and Jeff are all indicted. Anna is the only one in the inner circle who has neither flipped nor been charged with racketeering. 

The peaches still arrive, but U.S. Attorneys have strongly suggested she talk to no one. Most of her friends are in jail now, anyway. So she sits, in silence, on the couch in the modest Columbus condo she’s been renting while trying to save money to buy a home. She has only her two dogs and 45 crates of peaches – unboxed and ripening on any and every surface she can find. The smell is still fresh, but pungent – an inescapable reminder that the life she knew and loved yesterday may be gone forever. 

“I just sat there,” she later recalls, “completely surrounded by peaches, hysterically crying.”

Duck Hunting

The first time Anna Lippincott met Larry Householder, she didn’t know what to expect. It wasn’t in a polished campaign office or at a power lunch, but at a dive bar in a sprawling farm town in his home district, Perry County. He walked in wearing hunting slickers, dirt covering his boots. A dip was tucked in his lower lip. He was going duck hunting that day, but he made time to interview Anna first — a moment she would later laugh about as “quintessential Larry.”

It is clear from the start that Larry Householder isn’t a typical politician. While most guys (and gals) like him project a carefully curated image, Larry embraces the “aw shucks” persona. He has a round face, rosy cheeks and a boyish smile. And he literally wears his rural roots on his boots. 

But beneath the camouflage is a man with an uncanny ability to command loyalty, to inspire those around him to work harder, faster, smarter. He looks unassuming, but he’s incredibly ambitious. From the moment she meets him, Anna knows that Householder has his eyes set on one goal: regaining power. Householder served three years as statehouse Speaker from 2001 to 2004, but ran up against term limits (members in Ohio serve two-year terms and are limited to four consecutive terms) and the bog of a federal investigation into alleged kickbacks. He left to sit out the obligatory waiting period, and the feds later announced that they were closing the case with no findings – a rare move. 

Now, back in an elected House seat, he is determined to take back the gavel. He has a plan. The way he sees it, he’ll raise a ton of money and then use it to recruit more people to run for state representative. Once he picks them, he’ll fund their campaigns, win their loyalties. And they will, in return, elect him as Speaker and vote the way he tells them to.

Anna takes the job. She is 22. She calls the person she’s fundraising for, the chief-of-staff for a congressman, and tells him she’s joining Householder’s team instead. 

“He basically tells me on the phone that it is, like, the worst mistake I will ever make,” she recalls. “And I am going to go and work for a criminal.” 

Anna is annoyed.

“He was a real prick about it,” she says. In retrospect, Anna doesn’t see it as an omen or a missed flag of any kind. And at the time, she didn’t even pause to consider the warning. Instead, she dove right in, swept up in the excitement of Team Householder.  Back then, it was just Larry, Anna and Jeff Longstreth, Anna’s boss and the guy running Larry’s political operation. 

Jeff is mid-40s, handsome, with dark brown hair and high cheekbones. He, like Larry, is a rural Ohio kid, born and raised. He’s a career strategist who has mostly worked on coal energy issues until Larry puts him in charge of Team Householder. 

Under Jeff’s direction, Team Householder begins descending into towns across Ohio, talking to business leaders, finding politically ambitious up-and-comers who, as Anna puts it, haven’t been tainted by the Republican establishment. “People who don’t owe anyone else,” she says.

They need 50 votes – in a chamber of 99 members – to get Larry elected Speaker. So Larry – still a freshman legislator at this point – Jeff and Anna hole up in a room with a big round office table and a whiteboard and begin to map out a strategy. They go through the list of current members. 

He’s for us… no, that guy’s against us… They tally up how many new candidates they’ll need to recruit to feel comfortable hitting 50 votes. The squeaky sound of the dry-erase marker is scribbling out the plans that will seal all of their fates. 

When Jeff finds new candidates to run, Anna is in charge of fundraising. Anna’s spreadsheets show money pouring into their political action committee (PAC) from lots of places. The feds would later say that Team Householder used FirstEnergy like “the bank” – and even called it that as a cutesy nickname – but Anna says her files prove that Larry was popular with a lot of building trades and unions who were also dumping in a lot of money. 

“The plumbers and pipefitters, the operating engineers, like they are all giving a ton of money,” she says. “And if you look at the spreadsheets that I made when I was fundraising, they each have a column and FirstEnergy is a column but they are one of many.”

Whatever the source, the money is flowing. And from FirstEnergy alone, about $2.9 million made its way to the super PAC fund associated with Team Householder.

“I can go to FirstEnergy or I can go to operating engineers and say, like, we need 50 grand, we need $10,000 here, here, here, here, here.” She’s referencing all the districts they are trying to control via the candidates they’ve hand-picked. “Or we need $5,000 for 10 different candidates, like top races, and these people are all going to be for your issues when they’re elected.”

In separate phone conversations, Larry and Neil discuss how much they need for each race, with Neil estimating the dollar figure at “$120,000 per race.”

“I’d say $150k, but yeah, you’re in the ballpark,” Larry responds. 

Neil, the political operative, mentions that some people are deciding to support the incumbent Speaker instead. 

That’s because back in the state house, Larry hasn’t been able to shake his reputation from his first term as Speaker. “ Everyone dislikes him,” Anna says. “ But it ends up being a blessing because he doesn’t have to go to committee meetings. So he has like seven days a week to just politic. He isn’t bogged down. He doesn’t do any legislating.”

Plus, as Larry tells Neil, he doesn’t care that he has enemies. “Yeah, we can fuck them over later,” he says.

As their plans take off, Team Householder grows to include Matt Borges, a FirstEnergy lobbyist and Juan Cespedes, who lobbies for FirstEnergy Solutions – slightly different, since it’s the company that owns the nuclear plants. Team Householder rents a big swanky penthouse office suite in downtown Columbus. It is part workspace, part happy hour bar, part crash pad. On display are six different gavels Larry has acquired over the years. The message about what they’re trying to do could not be more explicit.

Matt later calls it the “unholy alliance.”

They have social gatherings every night. Candidates and members who are loyal to Larry are welcome to use the penthouse. They, too, become part of Team Householder. Some of them even use it as a place to sleep when they are stuck in Columbus, far from their districts. 

Anna starts hosting something called “every other Thursday,” a meeting that resembles a college classroom with everyone sitting in a circle. It’s a place for these new members to vent, swap strategies, and feel like part of the team. What starts as an informal gripe session evolves into something more structured. Anna and Jeff start assigning themes to the meetings, giving their loyal freshmen members the background needed to navigate the House. It’s all part of the plan, meticulously orchestrated, yet so casual it never feels forced. In the end, this is the crux of the federal racketeering case. But in the moment, it doesn’t feel like conspiracy. To Anna, it feels like family. 

The days are very long, and the work feels endless, but it doesn’t wear on Anna. It feels like building something that matters — with people who matter. That is the magic of Team Householder: they aren’t just recruiting candidates. They’re building loyalty, camaraderie, and the unshakable belief that they are all in it together. 

Anna’s all-black uniform catches on with the rest of Team Householder. Everyone starts wearing it, with one exception: When someone feels slighted or insulted, they wear camouflage instead.

“The rest of us know what that means,” Anna says. “We are going to war today. We are a family. When one of us is at war, all of us are at war.”

They assimilate in a lot of ways. Anna is a native of suburban Cleveland. Many of the rest of the staff are also yuppies. But they all take on Larry’s personality – a God, guns, and babies brand of conservatism. “Larry is very much Duck Dynasty, so we all pseudo-jokingly, pseudo-seriously adopted this rural personality,” she says. “We don’t have this expensive, extravagant lifestyle,” she says. “We’re rednecks. We drink cheap beer and shots.” Cheap beer means PBR or Old Style lager. Larry makes fun of them if they drink anything nicer. He calls Bud Lite a “hoity-toity beer.” 

Anna is having the kind of unbridled, carefree fun that you can have when you are in your 20s, only responsible for yourself. One evening at the happy hour of a local bar, Team Householder is reveling in their accelerating success. The bartender brings checks and distributes them all around. Anna’s has extra writing on it. The bartender has scribbled the word “girl” to denote Anna’s bill. Jeff stands up and begins berating the server with such ferocity that Anna bursts into laughter.

Anna is often the only woman around, but it doesn’t faze her. She can hold her own, even lead, when it comes to quick-witted and politically incorrect snark and banter. She sets firm boundaries and quickly earns the respect of everyone around her. Her role expands. She is thriving. She avoids the clichés of women in politics, rejecting the flashy wardrobe and what she calls a “Fox News anchor” persona. Those, she says, are about attention, not substance. As a result, she is both highly respected and protected by the men of Team Householder. And they trust her with everything. 

In December of 2018, leading up to the vote for Speaker, The Cleveland Plain Dealer (a storied local newspaper), announces it is beginning annual awards for Ohio politicians. Anna and the others are sitting around a conference table in the penthouse, “bored as shit.” With the November elections behind them – and their people now in place – they have time to kill before the January Speaker’s vote. So, she hires a bunch of interns for one week and tells them they have one responsibility: “Submit and vote for our people all day long.”

“We swept the awards,” Anna says. “We promoted our favored members and embarrassed our political enemies. Larry wins “best orator,” which Anna finds hysterically funny. “He hadn't given a single floor speech at all that legislative session,” she says. 

The race for Speaker isn’t so easy. The morning of the vote, Anna is in charge of streaming it in the office so the whole staff can watch. It’s the most anxious she’s ever been in her life. Anna stands there, tunnel vision on the TV. Her other senses are dulled, muting the smell of the catering and the chatter of their supporters. 

Larry wins by a margin of just two votes. Anna feels like a dog who just caught the squirrel she’s been chasing for two years. 

A week later, on January 14, the Governor is inaugurated and Team Householder hosts a party in the penthouse. It’s more of a celebration for them than for the Governor. The glass windows sparkle with the reflection of the State House across the street. Everyone migrates to the balcony. Even though it’s January in Ohio, the high today is 51. Under the clear, pitch-black skies, the team smokes celebratory cigars. The men are in tuxes, the women in ball gowns. Even though people have been asking Anna for tickets all week, she keeps the invite list small, exclusive. 

What they’ve accomplished is remarkable. Building such a loyal coalition of followers with shared goals is nearly unheard of in local politics. More common is to see every man and woman fighting for themselves, stepping on each other along the way. Team Householder’s dynasty was innovative, collaborative, disruptive. It felt, to Anna and the staff, like David taking on Goliath. And winning. 

Until, in Anna’s eyes, “The Man” stamped it criminal and took it all away. 

“If you don’t start cooperating, you’re getting arrested.”

Anna hasn’t talked to anyone in what feels like days. Her entire world is turned upside down; the only people who call are her parents and grandparents, and those calls are tear-filled, fear-filled, and just plain depressing. 

At first, she passes the long hours baking away all the peaches into any concoction she can imagine, selling them to the few non-politico friends she has – the only ones she is still allowed to contact. One of them recognizes her culinary skills and offers to pay her to help bake hamburger buns for his farmer’s market toolkit business. So she starts waking up each morning at 5 a.m., driving to a commercial kitchen, baking buns until noon, and then coming home to spend the afternoon scouring the online classifieds – applying for any and every job she can.

Her loud, thrilling life has come to a hard stop, and the silence feels murderous. She’s crippled with anxiety and depression. Scenes from the last three years replay in her head. The soundtrack is a mix of wistfulness and constant second-guessing. Could we have really broken the law? Anna always comes back to the same answer. She knows they played dirty politics. But she truly does not believe it was illegal. 

In a weird way, she looks forward to her much-anticipated meeting at the federal building. It’s the only place where she’s allowed to talk about her lost life, even if these are the last people she wants to open up to.

The room feels cold and impersonal, its fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead, and Anna sits at a large table with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Across from her are two U.S. attorneys and the FBI agent who had been at her door that morning in July. Their stern faces betray nothing. Anna sees them as fumbling, bumbling and motivated by ideology, not the law. She takes the opportunity to give them nicknames: Kid Cop and the JV Squad. She chuckles to herself, imagining their names on t-shirts like they’re a ‘tween girl-obsessed boy band. 

This is her first “cooperating meeting,” though that term feels like a stretch. She doesn’t feel like cooperating. She feels cornered. According to Anna, this is how the meeting played out: 

“Let’s start from the beginning.”

U.S. Attorneys Emily Glatfelter and Matthew Singer lead, flanked by a team of about a dozen suits who sit around Anna and her attorney.

Anna reluctantly answers every question they ask, watching as they scribble down her answers, wondering how their pens could possibly be recording the truth as she lived it. 

“This is how we are going to get you,” someone says smugly. They point to documents showing how much money was coming into her possession. “We know you took in a lot of money. Your name is on the bank accounts.”

Anna scanned the pages, her hands trembling slightly. It was all so surface-level, a half-baked accusation built on incomplete information.

“This isn’t right,” she said, her frustration building. “You only have one side of it—the money coming in. You don’t see where it went. I wasn’t getting rich off of this. You’ve been to my house. I was paying for everything. I was VP of operations.” 

The meeting drags on. She’s growing tired and frustrated. Singer is asking about specific meetings on specific days and Anna has no idea what he’s talking about. Every “I don’t know,” is met with another question that sounds the same as the one before it.  

“I literally have no idea what you are trying to get me to say,” she says, her voice raising. “You keep asking me the same question and I don’t know. To me, it would have been just another meeting on just another day.”

Her words come out sharper than she intends, but she doesn’t care. She has spent months under suspicion, her life turned upside down, and now they are sitting here, treating her like she needs to have all the answers to questions she barely understands.

“None of this was secret,” she says. “We invited the press to tour the penthouse. We were constantly meeting with attorneys who signed off on everything. We have nothing to hide.” 

The agents squint in skepticism. This isn’t exactly what they had in mind when they said, “tell us everything.”

“I wasn’t involved in anything illegal,” she says, capping off her venting rant with a declaration that she’s really hoping is true. 

The room falls silent for a moment, the tension thick and suffocating.

“Listen,” Glatfelter says slowly and deliberately. “These are very serious allegations and we’re not done charging people.”

“If you’re not able to cooperate, then it looks like you are part of this,” Singer adds. 

Anna’s attorney steps in and asks for a break. Anna leaves the room, standing outside in what feels like purgatory, while her attorney tries to appease the feds on her behalf. 

“Does she know what she's done wrong?” they ask. “We feel like she still doesn't understand the magnitude of the situation.” 

“No, she gets it,” her attorney says in a calming voice. 

Anna is in the hallway, answering the question to no one. “No, I really, like I don't. I still don't understand.”

Deep down, she knows there are some things they did that probably crossed some line, or at least walked too close to it. These are things that she believes were legal, but that she knows will look like Aces to the feds. Her attorney suggests, before they re-enter the room, that she use one of them.

Back in the room, in what’s supposed to be a fresh start, the attorneys slide a transcript of a phone conversation across the table. “What about this call?” Glatfelter asks, tapping the paper with a pen. “It sounds like it was coded. What does ‘smelly guy’ really mean?”

Anna cracks a smile for the first time. The memories flood back, and with them, the warm and fuzzies.  “Are you serious? There’s no code. It’s literally a smelly guy I had to kick out of the office. That’s all there is to it.”

House Bill 6

“Smelly guy” wasn’t code, but the incident wasn’t totally innocent either. 

Team Householder is officially back on top, and quickly becoming everything Larry dreamed it would be. Larry is the boss. Neil is his proxy for all the “dirty shit,” as he likes to say. Jeff is the right-hand man and Anna is the fixer. Her computer has all the files – everything they were building, from fundraising plans to campaign strategies to candidate profiles. Larry doesn’t even have a computer, and Jeff doesn’t want to deal with it. “That’s why we’ve got Anna,” Jeff jokes. 

Larry’s charm is on overdrive. He is obsessing over how to look strong and be known, statewide, as the man who knows everyone and everything. Anna spends almost $12,000 on an extremely fancy autopen that can write in Larry’s handwriting, and she tells her intern, “this is basically your full-time job.” Larry has a meeting? Everyone gets a note. The newspaper publishes some kind of accomplishment? Write a note. Happy Birthday … Congratulations … Great meeting you yesterday ….

They’re sending thousands of personalized letters each month.  To outsiders, Larry seems to be all-knowing. “We want it to seem like he is everywhere,” Anna tells the intern. 

“He was mesmerizing to us,” she says. “A great, revered boss.”

One day, the boss comes in a little peeved. He’s gotten a text message from a local sheriff he met a few weeks earlier. It reads: I thought we were friends. You don’t even know my name. 

The intern had addressed the note to Rocky instead of Randy.

Normally, Anna would just have a good laugh. But she knew this was about to compound into something worse. Team Householder had just mailed out their Thanksgiving cards – not Christmas cards, because they wanted to be first – and they were already in the mail. Rocky II is about to premiere. Anna grabs the phone and calls the post office in the sheriff’s hometown. 

“You’ve got a big stack of cards from Larry Householder en route,” she tells the postwoman who answers the phone. “There's one I need you to take out,” Anna tells her. “And I know that this is like, possibly illegal. But I need you to shred it.”

All of this harnessed power now needs to go to good use. FirstEnergy Solutions, the company that pumped so much money into Team Householder’s coalition campaign, has two financially struggling nuclear power plants that need to be bailed out. Speaker Householder is now in a position to do that. 

He introduces House Bill 6 and tells all of the representatives he’s helped elect to vote for it. It’s framed as a measure to promote energy independence and support carbon-free energy sources, but critics argue it is primarily a corporate handout. The contest is tense, but House Bill 6 passes and as soon as it does, opponents launch a repeal effort. In order to be successful, they have to go door to door, getting signatures. And if they can do that, they can put the issue directly on the ballot for voters to decide.

Here’s how this works:  They need about 600,000 signatures. It’s a professional job. So, the opposition will need to hire professional signature-gathering firms to do it. Team Householder needs to stop them from getting those signatures – and the easiest way is to stop the firms. 

“Let’s just get all of the signature firms hired tomorrow,” Juan texts Jeff. “We can take out all of the good players and limit their chances.”

Neil later gathers everyone in their conference room to game out the plan. “There’s a finite number of firms who collect signatures,” he says. "If we want to stop them from getting to 600,000, we need to cut them off at the knees.” 

Neil sat at the head of the table, surrounded by Jeff, Anna, Juan and Matt. Now that Larry is Speaker, Team Householder has moved out of the swanky penthouse and into the caucus political office, which Anna thinks is, by comparison, a shitty downgrade. The conference room they scheme in was painted by the prior Speaker in two shades of baby blue, separated by thin orange and white horizontal stripes. It was supposed to resemble Air Force One. Horrible, Anna says to herself every time she walks into the room.

The air is thick with the smell of cheap coffee. Neil lays out the plan to keep the signature-gathering firms from reaching their goal. 

“We can hire them to gather signatures for fake petitions – or hire them to do nothing at all,” he says. The room begins to feed off of the energy.

“Yes,” Jeff says, “And we should also run ads: Criminals are coming to your house, don't answer your doors, don't sign their petitions.” Another suggestion rolls in: “We can also hire people to stalk the petition gatherers, scare them.”

They all laugh. Neil warns, if they fail, it’s going to “piss off the Speaker.” The meeting ends with Anna feeling deviously proud. “We are just better at this than the other side,” she says. Anyone who squirms is dismissed. As Larry often said, “It's time to put on your big boy pants."

All of the funds for everything they did – from electing the loyal house members, to media campaigns to pass House Bill 6 and now the campaign to avoid repealing it – is funded via a Super PAC called Generation Now. Technically, the organization is a 501(c)(4) – a social welfare organization – that needs to use the majority of its funds for  its primary “educational purpose.” 

“Like, we are educating people or whatever, but,” Anna laughs, “the other 49 percent goes to negative mail campaigns.” Like this one: a mailer sent to thousands of Ohioans, warning that giving a signature to the repeal campaign would help cede control of Ohio’s energy grid to China. 

“Don’t give the Chinese government your personal information, email, cell phone, address or sign your name to their petition,” the flier reads. It has the Chinese flag in the background. “China is quietly invading our energy grid and coming for Ohio jobs.”

They run a television ad with stock video of Chinese political leaders with fists in air. The voiceover says, “They’re meddling in our elections.”

Generation Now’s press spokesman hates the xenophobia of it. He threatens to quit over it, but Larry won’t let him. 

Records show Neil paid at least 15 companies with Generation Now money – sending them checks ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 dollars. The only service they were to provide: not to work. 

“ ‘Cause, like, then we have cover. We can say, this is some group that, like, the campaigns were absolutely not consulted in any of that,” Anna says. 

Generation Now had millions of dollars in it. Starting back in 2017, following a trip Larry had taken on a private jet to visit FirstEnergy officials, the company was making quarterly payments of $250,000 into the PAC.  As Neil put it: “On HB6 (FirstEnergy) got $1.3 billion in subsidies … so what do they care about putting in $20 million a year for this thing. They don’t give a shit.”

For the referendum campaign, about $23 million was spent trying to keep their opponents from getting the signatures they wanted. Messing with PAC money, that’s an easy way to land yourself in federal prison, and Anna knows it. 

“We can’t fuck around with this,” Anna tells folks in the office. She has a PowerPoint about firewalling. She is constantly in meetings with attorneys and she’s paying obscene legal fees to have everything reviewed and approved. “We can't coordinate these efforts, like, that is illegal. That is stuff that we have to be extremely careful with.”

“I’m not going to jail for this.” 

The phrase echoes ominously through the office as if they’re trying to manifest it. She says it all the time, and so do her colleagues.

Part of being so careful means having no contact with the signature gatherers. Anna knows that it’s important to maintain deniability. Even if her title of “VP of Operations” is unofficial, she still takes it really seriously. 

The FBI will later say that part of the “Enterprise” is bribing some signature gatherers with $2,500 and a plane ticket if they stop collecting signatures, hand over “inside information,” and fly home, “away from Ohio.” 

Perhaps that’s what Smelly Guy was doing.  

One afternoon, Anna is at her desk when one of the petitioners calls her directly. He wants to drop off all his notes and materials before he goes back to wherever he came from. He’s demanding she come pick it all up from his hotel and then buy him a plane ticket to get home. Anna refuses.

“The best I’ll do is an Uber to the office,” she says. “You can drop it all off here.”

When he arrives, the man reeks of something horrible – she isn’t sure what. She can only tolerate it for about two minutes before she begins to gag. 

“You have to leave,” she says, trying to hold her breath. He dumps his gross paperwork on a table. As he leaves, Anna pushes it right into the trash with one hand, the other is already dialing Neil Clark to come deal with this. 

“This crazy man just showed up,” she says. “I still can’t get the smell out of my nose.” Neil arrives and peers into the trash can. They both laugh. 

The referendum to repeal House Bill 6 never made it to the ballot, but it did make it into the federal indictment. 

Cracking the code

The disastrous first proffer meeting is lingering over Anna. She can’t help it. She longs for the days of mischievous political schemes, of bully text chains, of insider get-togethers with politically incorrect jokes. Those are the moments she cherishes. Working with the feds – that’s an eye roll. A chore. A self-preserving necessity. Nothing else. 

She’s grateful she’s not staring down a lengthy indictment, but she still feels like she’s in prison. This new life is just so boring. She’s no longer baking hamburger buns, but instead working an online personal assistant job. Her therapist fires her with the swift, impersonal drop of a text message: There’s a lot going on and I can’t be involved in any of this.

Anna knows that things can get worse at any moment if she doesn’t find a way to start cooperating in a more meaningful way. The problem is, she truly believes she has nothing juicy to share. Her attorney, Greg Peterson, reminds her that there are six digits that can basically set her free. 

They make the phone call together, on speakerphone. Lead U.S. Attorney David DeVillers is on the other end. According to Anna, this is how the call unfolds: 

Greg: “Anna and I have been talking and she wants to be cooperative and helpful. I know originally she hadn’t given it up, but she’s willing to give you the passcode to her cellphone. Would that be recognized and work in her favor?”

DeVillers: “Absolutely. That’s exactly the type of gesture we appreciate and will not be forgotten as we continue the investigation.”

Greg: “Okay great. Do you have a pen to write this down?”

DeVillers: “Yes, I’m ready.”

Greg speaks very slowly and deliberately: “1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6.”

There is dead silence for what feels like 30 seconds.

DeVillers: “Are you serious?”

Greg starts laughing: “I am serious.”

DeVillers finally laughs, too: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

In this moment, the most-satisfying feelings of control, of naughtiness, of disobedience, all flood Anna after weeks of lying dormant. She laughs along with the two men, but her laugh is much more guttural, more vindictive. DeVillers’ reaction is so incredibly satisfying to her. 

In the coming weeks, Anna will hand over even more: north of a million pages of digital files. “It is basically everything that has ever been documented,” she says. 

By the time that second proffer meeting arrives, Anna is prepared. She’s used all of her free time to compile evidence to show that the feds are wrong to assume she benefited financially from any of this. 

To her surprise, this meeting starts off much differently than the last. She comes armed with stacks of her own personal financial documents, along with a hard drive that has all of the documents requested in her subpoena. There is a noticeable shift in the room’s energy. To Anna, the lead attorneys look a bit embarrassed. Definitely apologetic. “We’re sorry,” they say, voices quieter than before. “Let’s start fresh.”

Anna’s life begins to restart after this meeting. The world is smack dab in the middle of COVID-19, and everyone is working remotely. So Anna’s partner suggests they temporarily move from Columbus to Palm Springs. Within hours of arriving, Anna feels her brain molecules rearranging themselves. She’s reverting back to her old self. Basically, she’s happy again. She’s working east coast hours and taking long walks with her dogs. There’s no pressure to socialize because everyone is in lockdown. Most days, it feels like she got to run away from it all. But then, the phone rings and reminds her that it’s temporary. 

Her attorney, Greg, is on the other end of the line. 

“Kid Cop just called,” he says. “When the FBI went to download your hard drive, they accidentally corrupted it. They came to me, tail between their legs, and said 'We’re really sorry, but can you give us a new one?'”

“You're kidding,” Anna says. This must be a joke. “Right?”

She’s never thought much of Kid Cop and the JV Squad (obviously,) but they’re really living up to their names, in her mind. 

"I literally cannot make this stuff up," Greg says. 

Anna knows she doesn’t have to give them a new one, but she also knows that it’s probably in her best interest to just do it. She waits a few days to respond. She likes making them sweat. She likes getting the tiniest bit of revenge for all the stress they’ve brought into her life. Finally, she tells her attorney: “I’ll make the copy for them, but I'm not buying them a new hard drive.” A beat. “Am I being a bully? It's expensive, they can buy a new one.”

They do. And the next time she hears from the U.S. Attorney’s office it’s via a court order, demanding she testify, but also granting her immunity from prosecution. 

Festive Arrestive 

It’s Christmas of 2019 and Team Householder throws an awesome banger of a party at a rooftop bar.

Jeff’s political consulting company, JPL & Associates, is hosting. A few hundred lobbyists are there, along with donors and other members of the Ohio House of Representatives. Executives from FirstEnergy fly in from across the country. It is so packed, filled to capacity, that when Jeff finds two people have snuck in, he makes Anna kick them out. 

“This is the height of it all. People are waiting in line to get in,” Anna says.

The FBI is listening. They have been for a while. 

Lead agent, Blane Wetzel – the one who Anna calls “Kid Cop” – is a former politico himself, but a Democrat in the neighboring state of Michigan. He worked on both the legislative and campaign sides and knows how things work. He taps Neil’s phone calls, and then takes it up a notch. He figures the best way to secure more good evidence is to send in some undercover guys posing as real estate developers. By now, he also has a couple of informants on the inside.

There is Nick Owens, a guy who Anna says wanted to be recruited as one of Larry’s hand-picked state representative candidates. But he’d lost in the primaries. Owens, who himself is a former prosecutor, says he went to the FBI after seeing attack ads running against him that appeared to be coming from Team Householder, which he believes was an illegal coordination using dark money. (Dark money is legal in the U.S. and has been since the 2010 ruling on Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission.) 

“We didn’t choose him. He has a chip on his shoulder,” Anna says. Owens is happy to swap criticism with Anna, saying Larry Householder couldn’t have accomplished what he did without her. He believes she was as much a part of the conspiracy as those on Team Householder who were prosecuted. 

“I was vindicated,” he says when contacted by Switchboard. “I’m a real person. I worked my ass off to save money to run. I have two kids. Then you’re going up against a system where they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars against you.”

There is Dave Greenspan, a current state representative who, during the contentious first vote on House Bill 6, says he’s going to vote ‘no.’ “So obviously Larry and Jeff were trying to work to flip him to a ‘yes’ vote,” Anna says. Before the vote, Greenspan starts getting text messages from Larry. “I really need you to vote yes on HB 6, it means a lot to me. Can I count on you?” He’s later told to delete the messages if he wants forgiveness for failing to support the bill. “I just want you to remember – when I needed you – you weren’t there.”

“Larry definitely said things that were pure intimidation,” Anna recalls. Greenspan did vote ‘no,’ and then he went and told the FBI about it. 

There is Tyler Fehrman, who Anna minces no words to describe. She calls him a “washed-up, loser politico, who hops from job to job because he can’t hold one down.” Fehrman is friends with Matt,  so Larry does him a favor and gives him a job as a campaign manager when Team Householder is recruiting House candidates, Anna says he had financial problems and she had to “garnish his wages,” which he says is true but is “standard practice” in Ohio for someone who owes child support. 

“When all these races ended and Larry became Speaker, he was the only person we didn’t re-assign to work in the House and so he didn’t get a job after,” she says. “He was upset about that.”

Fehrman does eventually land a job – with the opposition. He starts managing signature collectors, trying to help repeal House Bill 6. Matt calls and asks Fehrman to meet for coffee. Matt says that everyone is “getting fat” off the HB6 issue, and offers Fehrman $15,000 to help him wipe out his personal debt in exchange for information about the operations of the signature gatherers and whether they are hitting their goals. And then Matt says, “no matter what, don’t ever tell anyone about our conversation.”

“Matt’s defense was that he was a private citizen and not an elected official. But Fehrman goes to the FBI and starts wearing a wire. After the indictment came down, he’s referred to as Informant 1. He does this ‘I was informant 1’ piece in the paper, making this his entire personality, despite the fact that being an informant on your friend is so shitty,” Anna scoffs.

Fehrman, in response to what Anna says about him, says he’s a “firm believer that the right thing is always the right thing - even when it comes to friends.” He goes on to say that doing the right thing is “just something built into the fabric of who I am” and that he sees people who question that as the reason the political system is “broken.”

Anna laughs at any idea of Fehrman holding the standard of what is right. She thought so little of him that when the FBI sorted through her hard drive, she says they made an entire folder of discovery that was solely dedicated to all the mean things she’d said about him.

“We used to make fun of this kid mercilessly,” she says. “He’s made his whole personality about doing the right thing.” 

Regardless of these insider witnesses, the FBI agents must have wanted more, because in 2019, Neil and Jeff get a call from two so-called real estate developers with a proposal: private jets, Miami, hookers, blow. Basically, let’s all go have a good time. 

Jeff and Neil decline.

“That’s just not who we are at all,” Anna says. “They aren’t trying to live a sexy high life; they want to go hunting and shooting. We go to dive bars. We drink a lot, but there’s nothing worse to them than a private jet to Miami with sleazy developers.”

Instead, they all decide to go to a dinner with the “developers” in Columbus. It’s September –  in the midst of the dirty ballot referendum campaign and they are talking strategy. 

Larry is at the dinner, along with Neil and Jeff and another staffer. “We need to make them realize you can’t be fucked with,” the staffer says. Neil follows. “It sends a message to everyone else: If you attack a member we’re going to fucking rip your dick off.”

Neil brags to the undercover agents/developers about the Chinese mailers. “So fucking cold-blooded,” he says. And the 4.9 million pieces of mail sent out, claiming the signature gatherers were all criminals. (Jeff ran background checks on 150 of them and found that 15 had criminal backgrounds.)

“They said a few dumb things,” Anna says. But later, Anna says that Neil – who was born into an Ohio mob family and watched the FBI come after his father – calls them out right away. “He said, either they are the worst developers or these are FBI agents.”

Wetzel continues to collect evidence for almost 10 months after that dinner. The  arrests come in July of 2020. A lot of things change – Anna’s life comes to a screeching halt. But Larry’s doesn’t. Anna, who is relegated to watching the November election from afar can’t help but notice: Larry, “the criminal” with racketeering charges and a looming court date, still gets re-elected, but Rep. Dave Greenspan, the informant, does not.

Raise your right hand

“Did you ever receive a directive about how to treat the files that you had on the ballot initiative?”

Anna is sitting on the witness stand. She’s been back in the U.S. for a week now, and she’s anxious to get this over with. Life has been so much easier in her new, anonymous life abroad. The only nice thing about being here, back in Ohio and waiting her turn to be called to the stand, is that prosecutors let her parents come hang out with her in the witness room. 

Her mom, an elementary school teacher, and her dad, an instruction manual publisher, are as wholesome Ohio as they get. Anna describes her upbringing as, “completely traditional. Catholic School. Suburban Ohio. Perfectly normal.” 

Her dad gave Anna his sense of humor. Her mom is just too sweet and happily oblivious to really know – or at least acknowledge knowing – what Anna has been a part of. As they pull up to the courthouse, Anna’s mom takes out her cell phone to take a picture. 

“Really, mom?” Anna loves the dark humor, but, even for her, this is too much. “My first-day-as-a-witness picture?” 

Anna obliges. It’s so nice to get to see them, now that she lives so far away. (Her partner is abroad for work and she’s joined him now that she has quit politicking for good.) The quality family time is a silver lining. The only hiccup is that they have an unwanted guest: the witness coordinator. 

“And this woman is literally the dumbest person I ever worked with in my life,” Anna says. “Dumber than a box of rocks.”

The woman, who Anna recalls saying that she usually helped children, couldn’t shake her habit of baby talk. “She’s talking to me as if I’m a young child.”

Anna and her parents spend three days locked in the witness holding area, a small, dull, windowless room lined with shelves of old law books. There is no internet and no cell service. 

“What the fuck? Give us magazines at least,” she sighs. “You literally sit at a table. You are already so uncomfortable. So we are just sitting in this room, staring at each other.”

Anna’s dad asks his daughter, “got any paper?” Anna reaches into her purse. They start doodling little notes. 

“We draw pictures and write notes and hide them in the legal books for future people who are horribly bored in there,” Anna says. 

By the time she is called to testify, Anna feels like she’s back to her old self – she has her confidence back. But it is the first time she’s seen Larry or Jeff in two and a half years. 

“Are you ready?” the judge asks Anna as she sits in the witness box. “I am,” she replies. 

Most of her testimony is basic. After all that’s happened to get to this point, Anna finds it to be rather “pointless.” Her attorney’s theory is that the U.S. Attorneys see her as a wildcard – still clearly on Team Householder – who might not say exactly what they want her to say. They don’t want the jury to see them villainously challenging a pretty, young woman on the stand. By this point, Jeff and Juan have pleaded guilty in exchange for a shot at lighter sentences. They agree to testify against Larry and Matt, who are being tried together.

The most impactful moment of Anna’s testimony comes at the very end of direct examination, which only lasts about 50 minutes. 

“I was directed to go ahead and delete the files on my computer related to the effort,” Anna says. In all of her time working for Team Householder, there’s only one era that’s missing from her records: the files related to quashing the initiative to repeal House Bill 6. 

“Who directed you to do that?”

“Mr. Clark and Mr. Longstreth.”

“Did they tell you why?”

“They did. They said the project's over. Go ahead and just delete everything. And then they told me kind of more privately after the fact that they were afraid maybe at some point the anti-House Bill 6 people would sue us. So just go ahead and remove everything.”

The core issue on trial is this: Team Householder believes this was all politics as usual. They say that everyone takes dark money and everyone tries to please their donors. The feds say this was bribery and corruption, even if no one personally got rich off of it. Sometimes the riches are not dollars, but power. Ultimately, the jury agrees with the Department of Justice. 

When her testimony wraps, Anna feels like she can see the end in sight. The courthouse doors swing open and her dad’s car is waiting to take her straight back to the airport, headed home to her European refuge, where no one knows her name or her story. She takes a step, a deep breath of the fresh air of finality, and is promptly stopped by three process servers, each with their own new subpoena. 

Alas, it is not over. 

Blood on their hands

After the trial, after the guilty verdicts, Anna is back home, living her rebuilt life in Europe. She opens her email inbox to find a note from the baby-talk witness advocate who had been her handler at trial. 

She replies with one word: UNSUBSCRIBE. 

But Anna can’t completely move on. Those subpoenas she was handed as she exited the courthouse – one is from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Others are for criminal trials that still have not happened. 

Some of the trials will never happen. 

In March of 2021, Neil Clark walked to a retention pond in Southwest Florida and killed himself with a handgun. Anna was standing in her basement when her cell phone rang with the news. Oh shit.

“The hardest part for me all along is that I was never able to talk to these people. You get no closure,” she says later. “Neil is dead and I could never say anything to him. I could never say I’m sorry or I miss you. You can’t say anything and they are just gone and it sucks. And what hurt me the second most, was the fear. Is someone else going to do it? I was exponentially upset.”

The only reporter who has ever called Anna to try to hear her story was a college boyfriend who had become a political blogger. Two weeks after Neil’s suicide, he rang her to say he was working on “a hit piece,” as she retells it. He read her the story as she sat in silence. After a few minutes of no one talking, Anna hung up. 

Three years later, Sam Randazzo – chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and former contracted consultant for FirstEnergy – killed himself, too. By that point, there had been more rounds of indictments and he, like the others, faced multiple felony counts related to racketeering. 

Mob charges. But in Anna’s eyes, it’s the feds who are corrupt. 

“The feds do have blood on their hands,” Anna says. “In my first meeting with the feds, they said, ‘you don’t get to where you were at her age without being smart, she knows what’s going on and she’s known all along.’ My dad was like, ‘well, take that as a compliment.’ Well, it’s not. There was nothing to hide. Everything was in plain sight. We invited press corps to the big, swanky office. There was no secret happening. It was all visible.  TV ads - TV is public and so are the buys.”

“In my second meeting, they said, ‘does she understand the ramifications?’ But my answer is no, I still don’t understand. They are trying to teach you that everything that happened is bad, and I just think it was so gray.”

Political prosecutions are notoriously challenging. Their very nature is controversial. Anyone who has spent any meaningful time behind the scenes of any legislative body knows that it isn’t a clean or pretty line of work. Only the naive and idealistic believe that the scheming is reserved only for certain people. Everybody is essentially doing one thing: Looking out for their friends and going after their enemies. It’s all just variations of survival. 

Owens, the prosecutor turned politician who became an informant in the case, believes there was wrongdoing in the case, but he believes the way Larry was doing things was “the way it was done.”  

“In Ohio,” he says, “there has been such a culture.”

Anna, if you can’t tell by now, is a study in contrasts. She talks fast, with a confident cadence. She’s blunt and sometimes even intimidating. But she’s also sensitive and acutely affected by what’s happening around her. Yes, she revels in her mean-girl side, but she also holds deep empathy for unlikable characters. She practices the lost art of political nuance. She seems to be able to zero in, past the facade, to the core of someone’s being. Sometimes that means finding redeeming qualities when everyone else sees none. Sometimes that means that she rejects popular opinion about who is genuine. 

For herself, it seems she longs for one thing: Excitement. The reason she looks back on those three years so fondly is because they were interesting. Bliss, for Anna Lippincott, is not wasting away somewhere in a mundane job. It’s a challenging and masterful life where good is not always good, and bad is not always bad. 

She’s not the only one who refuses to accept society’s narrative about Team Householder. Larry and Matt were convicted in 2023. Matt was sentenced to about five years in federal prison and Larry was sentenced to 20. Neil – who self-published a book before he killed himself – predicted from the grave that the allegations would lead to convictions but that everyone would be vindicated on appeal. So far, the courts have upheld the verdicts, but the appeals continue. Larry’s attorney argued before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month. The case could still go before the Supreme Court and, if it does, it has the potential to change precedent in political corruption cases forever. 

Anna, of course, believes in Larry’s innocence, even as she continues to cooperate with prosecutors. She has otherwise sworn off politics, works for her dad, and has no plans to return to Ohio. She sits in her home office with two retro Nixon campaign posters behind her as she thinks about it all. It’s not that the posters reflect her point of view, she explains. It’s more that they convey her sense of humor. 

“You have to laugh, or you’ll cry,” she says.

Editor’s note: Most of the scenes in this story are based on Anna’s recollection but also substantiated by court transcripts and other documents that have been made public as part of this case. In a few places – specifically her conversations with prosecutors – there is no record other than Anna’s memory. Those quoted conversations are based solely on Anna’s recollections. 

Sara Ganim is an award-winning multi-platform reporter. She started her career in local news, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is now a reformed cable news gal who works mostly in long-form audio and print. Her latest podcast, Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story was named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by The Atlantic. She lives in New York with her TV-lawyer husband and two young daughters.