Former Ohio state legislator Cliff Rosenberger lost his bid to be declared a crime victim of the House Bill Six utility bailout racketeering scheme. Last week, a federal judge decided Rosenberger, who was a representative for some areas in Clinton County from 2011 to 2018, could not provide any evidence that his political career was torpedoed because of the actions of Larry Householder, the architect of House Bill Six, while the scheme was happening.
The judge, Timothy S. Black, said Rosenberger, himself a former Ohio House speaker from 2015 to 2018, failed to provide enough evidence that Larry Householder and lobbyist Neil Clark, who died by suicide in March 2021, planted misinformation about him that led to a probe by the FBI into allegations that Rosenberger was involved in a bribery scheme related to a payday lending reform law.
Rosenberger resigned from his position as Speaker in April 2018 after news broke related to that FBI investigation.
David F. Axelrod, Rosenberger’s attorney, said his client believes that the FBI investigation only happened because Householder and his co-conspirators wanted him out of office.
“The Householder case gets talked about mostly as an economics case and there are human costs to these sorts of things, and former Speaker Rosenberger would have given a voice to those human costs,” Axelrod said in an interview with WYSO.
If Rosenberger had been declared a crime victim of the House Bill Six scheme, he would have been eligible to speak at Householder's sentencing in federal court later this month on June 29.
Axelrod said he isn’t sure what legal avenue his client, Rosenberger, will take next.
