So much is going on in the world, but I think it’s important to take time to savor simple moments of pure pleasure — like watching state Rep. Todd Warner (R-Chapel Hill) complaining about people at the state Capitol wearing wires.
Glen Casada's former chief-of-staff is facing kickback charges — and it's highlighting just how messy GOP leadership is
Y’all know that I am gleefully following the soap opera that is the Phoenix Solutions scandal. For those of you who haven’t been following, let me try to quickly bring you up to speed. Oh Lord, even that sentence makes me laugh. OK, back in the day, Republican Rep. Glen Casada was the state's House speaker. Casada was like if an oil slick and a used car salesman had a baby. He had an aide, Cade Cothren, who was like if the cocaine bear and Gavin McInnes had a baby and abandoned it before teaching it about good facial hair. Casada is all, “I will make my friends and enemies kneel before me on my quest for power.” Cothren’s out here dropping all kinds of racist and sexist slurs, and for reasons that have never been adequately explained, regularly calling Casada “daddy” and helping Casada on his quest.
So Cothren gets caught being a gross lout and is fired. He then allegedly sets up Phoenix Solutions, a political mailing house. Casada and the former head of the TN GOP, then-state Rep. Robin Smith (R-Chattanooga), allegedly help funnel Republican money to him. This blows up, and then this mysterious Dixieland Strategies emerges from the ashes. As far as I know, no one knows who this is, but people seem to think they know that it’s Cothren.
There’s a lot that’s weird about this, but the main thing that’s weird is how much effort certain state Republicans have put into making sure that Cothren continues to get paid. People assume he has dirt on folks they don’t want coming out, so they’re basically paying him to stay quiet.
I don’t know if this is true, but now that Cothren is at war with current Speaker Cameron Sexton, Cothren seemed to be trying to smear Sexton as someone who had used Cothren for nefarious purposes and who seemed to have forgotten that this meant Cothren had dirt on him. Sam Stockard over at the Tennessee Lookout wrote about this in January:
Cothren also has claimed he helped Rep. Cameron Sexton win the House speakership in 2019 before being paid tens of thousands of dollars through his business. He sought to subpoena phone records from Verizon Communications and Confide Inc., an encrypted message service, to show numerous communications between him and Sexton during 2019 and 2020 when he says he was a confidante of the Crossville Republican and worked on his speakership campaign before being ditched.
The former state House speaker and his aide have been charged with bribery, fraud and money laundering
But now the tides have turned! We find out it doesn’t matter if Cothren can provide evidence that he and Sexton were communicating, because the FBI had all the proof they needed that they were communicating, because someone in Sexton’s office, possibly Sexton himself, was wearing a wire!
In their latest filing, attorneys for Casada and Cothren say federal prosecutors are refusing to identify confidential informants who wore wires, secretly recorded caucus meetings and provided documents. The Casada-Cothren attorneys say they need to know those people’s identities so they can call them to the witness stand.
The filing indicates Speaker Sexton or someone in his office most likely provided the feds with secret recordings.
To be clear, we don’t know who was wearing a wire. The feds won’t say. They claim they’re not calling the wire-wearers as witnesses, so they don’t have to reveal their identities. Cothren and Casada’s teams want to know so they can call them as witnesses themselves.
Meanwhile, Rep. Warner is throwing a fit. Again from Stockard’s latest:
Republican state Rep. Todd Warner is peeved at the possibility House Speaker Cameron Sexton wore a wire for federal authorities five years ago as they investigated an alleged kickback scheme involving a mysterious business.
“I find it very disturbing that we have members that may be doing that kind of stuff behind the scenes. To me, that’s a tactic the Democrats would pull, like they pulled on President Trump. Here we have it going on in Tennessee. We have members trying to take out three conservatives, myself one of them, and I just find it very troubling,” said Warner, a Chapel Hill farmer and construction company owner.
Warner is reportedly still paying Dixieland Strategies and has yet to be indicted.
Here’s the problem Warner has. I don’t see anyone else saying it, but it seems clear. Warner is either what he seems to be claiming to be here — potentially an unindicted co-conspirator who is still funneling money to one of the indicted co-conspirator’s businesses — or he’s not.
Let’s say he’s not. Just for fun. Warner is very close to the people about to go to trial. So close that he’s possibly continuing to pay one of them. I assume — if Dixieland is Cothren's company — he’s trying to pay Cothren to leave him out of this mess, but that’s just scenario one. But there’s another scenario that makes sense here — that Warner continues to do business with Cothren and remains unindicted because he has been asked or ordered to stay in the mess, and this pissy run to the media is just him trying to deflect suspicion from himself as one of the informants.
I can’t wait to see what happens next. Will we find out that Casada is actually his own evil twin? Is Cothren secretly a prince from Estonia who is trying to claw his way onto an international stage to get the approval of his father? Is Todd Warner Keyser Soze?
There are so many soap-operatic possibilities. Who can even guess what will happen next.
