Under oath today: the JobsOhio chairman who advised FirstEnergy the night of the bribe

Rubin returns to the witness seat

Court records↗ put Josh Rubin, chairman of the JobsOhio board, under deposition on 30 September and 1 October, ahead of the federal civil trial against FirstEnergy ¹. He sat yesterday and returns to the witness seat today. The plaintiffs, state pension systems and other investors, say the utility hid from them "an illicit campaign to corrupt high-profile state legislators" ¹. Rubin advised its executives, then signed on as its lobbyist ¹.

A dinner, a condo, $4.3 million

On 18 December 2018, just after their election, Mike DeWine and Jon Husted dined with FirstEnergy chief executive Chuck Jones and vice president Michael Dowling at the Columbus Athletic Club ¹. Rubin was there, weeks from becoming a FirstEnergy lobbyist, and advised the executives not to tell DeWine they were heading straight to Sam Randazzo's German Village condo, where prosecutors say the $4.3 million payment to the future regulator was negotiated that night ¹.

$60 million in dark money, a $230 million settlement

FirstEnergy paid more than $60 million through dark-money groups in 2018 and 2019 to pass and protect a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout; a regulator's audit found $300,000 of that era went to Rubin's firm, the CJR Group ¹. The July 2021 deferred prosecution agreement↗ cost $230 million and an admission that $60 million reached a nonprofit Larry Householder controlled ²⁷. He is serving 20 years; the executives' first trial opened in early February, deadlocked, and a second is pending ¹³.

The chair's clients ride the boom

Rubin has chaired JobsOhio since September 2023; the agency has deployed more than $2 billion in liquor-franchise proceeds on grants and loans, including to FirstEnergy ¹. His client Intel has drawn more than $150 million in JobsOhio commitments and more than $2 billion from the state's executive branch ¹.

The same apparatus fed the buildout: DeWine, Husted and JobsOhio announced Amazon Web Services' planned $7.8 billion Ohio expansion in 2023 ⁴. At AEP Ohio, binding contracts already cover 17,861 megawatts of data-center capacity through 2035↗, about 70 percent above the top of the utility's historic peak-demand range ⁵.

The rates the buildout walks into

Ohio's average electricity price rose about 34 percent from 2022 through the first quarter of 2026, from 10.6 to 14.3 cents a kilowatt-hour ⁵. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta fought the tariff that generally requires large new data centers to pay for at least 85 percent of their reserved capacity for up to 12 years↗ ⁴.

The commission that approved it is the one Randazzo chaired ¹. In Lakewood, a Cleveland suburb in FirstEnergy's territory, residents told the utility "you all should be ashamed of yourselves"↗ over repeated outages ⁶.

The dividend keeps running

The board declared 46.5 cents a share on Tuesday 29 September, payable 1 December↗, with HB 6 litigation and the deferred prosecution agreement still in the release's risk language ⁷. The rate has not moved since an increase on 11 February, and the payout runs 98.94 percent of trailing earnings↗ ⁸. Capital spending has outrun operating cash flow in all eight quarters on file ⁹.

What two days under oath can settle

No source prices the civil damages, and the state audit does not say how much of the price rise data centers caused ⁵. Rubin's account either narrows the suit toward settlement or builds the trial record while Jones and Dowling await retrial ¹³. The AI buildout pays whatever rates Ohio sets; who set the rules is finally under oath.