CINCINNATI — Jurors heard from a handful of witnesses Thursday in the corruption trial of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges, including a small town political hopeful who said she was the target of a nasty ad campaign from fellow Republicans. 

Beth Ellis testified for the prosecution, in an effort for prosecutors to show the intense grassroots efforts to get Householder re-elected as speaker with the power to push through key legislation they said he was being paid to support. 

Ellis told jurors she was a farmer in Ohio’s 91st House District and had never run for office before. She said she had been approached to fill the seat left vacant by Rep. Cliff Rosenberger,who then was House speaker, in 2018.

Ellis said she ran an honest campaign; she raised money, knocked on doors, and made phone calls to earn people's votes. The Ohio Right to Life and NFIB both endorsed her candidacy.

It was right before the campaign filing deadline in Feb. 2018, when she said her son got a mailer about her being a Columbus insider and a bad person. The ad was paid for by Growth and Opportunity PAC, a super PAC that also paid for attack ads against other Ohio candidates. Until then, Ellis was running unopposed in the Republican primary, so she was surprised when she learned she had a challenger in candidate Shane Wilkin.

Ellis would lose the primary to Wilkin, a member of the so-called “Team Householder” and whose campaign got a $13,000 donation from FirstEnergy and a $10,000 donation from Householder. Wilkin was among the lawmakers who would vote in favor of Householder becoming speaker. 

She later told Householder’s lawyers during their cross-examination that she never met Householder, Borges, or lobbyist Neil Clark, nor did she know anything about House Bill 6.

Jurors also heard from an FBI forensic accountant about bank accounts for Generation Now, the dark money group that prosecutors say was a cover for bribery transactions. Christopher Hartzel said the 504c(4) was funded by two sources—FirstEnergy and JPL & Associates, the firm run by Republican strategist Jeffrey Longstreth, who pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges.

Earlier in the day, Householder’s defense attorney, Rob Glickman, questioned another FBI witness, agent Nathan Holbrook, who had testified for the prosecution on Wednesday. Jurors also heard from former JPL & Associates employee Megan Fitzmartin.

Householder and Burges are accused of organizing a pay-to-play political scheme that exchanged money and power for passage of a $1.6 billion nuclear bailout bill to benefit then-FirstEnergy Solutions’ nuclear power plants in Ohio.

The trial continues Friday at the Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse in Cincinnati. Householder and Borges both pleaded not guilty.