Alex Gibney
speaker
375 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 27 Mar
Alex Gibney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's hugely challenging. And I think in part because of what you outlined earlier. In other words, we're all cynical about, oh, sure, there's money in politics. We get it. But we don't really.
Right.
Yeah, but I don't think we really get it in terms of where it's got to at this point and exactly how it works. And so that's why and I had done this, you know, I'd been on this beat for a while. Some years ago, I did a film called Casino Jack in the United States of Money. And it was about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who I give a sort of tip of the hat to in Ohio.
But that one was not that did not break through because people are like lobbyists, money. Yeah. What people need to understand is that we've created a system of legalized bribery. And I think most people don't really understand. Most people get emotionally the idea of a bribe and they're deeply offended by it. So if we replace campaign finance with legalized bribery. Now we're talking.
Now we're talking about true crime and we're talking about the real problem, which is a few people getting advantage over the rest of us. And they're the ones who are insisting that the policies work for them, not us.
That's right. And it starts with a death, a violent death by gunshot, originally possibly murdered, deemed by the police to be suicide. And indeed, I kind of envisioned that as sort of my... That was a nod to that movie Sunset Boulevard, where William Holden tells the story as he's floating in the pool after he's dead. And so Neil Clark, who's the crooked lobbyist who killed himself...
Kind of tells us the story.
Are you in the 80 percent, 90 percent? He killed himself. The telltale sign of, you know. Maybe the clue is. He's wearing a Mike DeWine T-shirt.
Yes. That was his suicide note. That was his suicide note. It was like, don't forget, look at Mike DeWine's emolument in this case. And people have. Nobody's come to any legal conclusion about it. But I think that was the message he was sending. But it's, you know, suicide is tricky. I say tricky. Suicide is tragic. And it's mysterious.
But at the same time, I think he was also clearly trying to send a message. I will tell you what.
Well... The question is, why are parts of HB6, which was the bill that they essentially bribed to get, still in operation? Some of it has been dialed down. They haven't repealed it, right? It's not been 100% repealed. And this is, I mean, just for the viewers who haven't seen it, I mean, this is the most bald-faced kind of bribe where executives from First Energy
dumped $60 million into a slush fund for the use by an Ohio politician named Larry Householder. He uses it first to get to be Speaker of the House in the Ohio legislature. He basically hacked the – what I would say is he used MAGA.
You did, but even more than that, in the few swing districts that there were, and Ohio is an extremely gerrymandered state, but in the few swing districts that there were, he used massive amounts of money to make sure that his GOP candidates got elected, and then they owed him. And they owed him big time, and he had a way that they could pay him back.
And that way was to pass this signature bill that was written by First Energy, okay? That was the quid pro quo. And the bill was... give us a one plus billion dollar subsidy for our failing energy company. So from the first energy executive standpoint, it's a good return on investment. You drop $60 million in Larry Householder's lap and you get back $1.3 billion.
But you get to keep your executive salaries. There was another scheme too, where they thought they could spin off part of the company that would earn them another $100 million. So it was just literally robbing the state. It was Sheriff of Nottingham stuff. It was like taking from the poor to give to the rich.
And at the heart of it was this quid pro quo deal and this dark money organization called Generation Now, which initially nobody really knew what it was because if you're a 501c4, you can't penetrate it using all sorts of public inquiries.
Most of it was stuff that they made public during the court cases. I mean, yeah. In a funny way, you know, the moral of the, you know, this was a funny story to look at in terms of dark money, because here's one case where they caught you know, the perps and they sent him up to prison.
It doesn't happen very often, but this was like... It doesn't happen very often, but the intriguing thing is, and the reason we thought this was a good story to tell, as opposed to the cases where everybody gets away with it, is you can hear... how the perps talked about their fraud because what happened was the FBI was actually looking into another political corruption case involving gambling.
And the key character at the heart of this tale, a lobbyist named Neil Clark, was on those wires. Some were body wires, some were phone taps. And then he started talking about Larry Householder and House Bill 6. And they were like, what's this? So they literally stumbled into this case.
Yeah, and so, but that's the thing. When you pull a subpoena and you have an order for a wiretap and you stumble on another crime, you're within your rights to then pursue it. And then if you wanna pursue it further, of course, you have to file other requests for wiretaps and body wires. They had a group of guys posing as businessmen
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