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Wadsworth Republican Rep. Jim Renacci wrote a letter that urged Ohio Gov. John Kasich to intervene in a California legal dispute on behalf of Suarez Corporation International, which has been charged with making illegal donations to his campaign.

(Plain Dealer File Photo)

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressman Jim Renacci wrote a 2011 letter to Ohio Gov. John Kasich on behalf of Suarez Corporation Industries about the same time the company's employees made $90,000 in questionable donations to Renacci's re-election campaign.

The Wadsworth Republican’s letter urged Kasich to contact California Gov. Jerry Brown to intervene in a legal dispute that Suarez, a North Canton direct marketing company, was having in California.

“It appears as if several District Attorneys in California may have been abusing the privilege of their office by filing repeated frivolous and baseless lawsuits, costing constituents of ours millions in settlements and attorney’s fees,” Renacci’s letter said.

“While I support tort reform and the elimination of frivolous lawsuits filed solely to elicit a settlement, I also recognize that these issues are best left to the states,” the March 29, 2011 letter continues. “Accordingly, I urge you to contact Governor Brown to share our concerns with this matter and work together to find a commonsense solution that protects American and Ohioan businesses and jobs.”

Kasich’s office said the governor did not contact Brown, as Renacci requested. Suarez also contacted Kasich’s office directly to seek help with his legal disputes and was told “we can’t help you,” said Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols.

Nichols forwarded an email from Renacci's legislative director Brian Werstler to Kasich staffer Jimmy Sheppard, which described the letter as "a courtesy to our constituent," and said Renacci did not in any "way realistically expect your office to take any action on this."

The letter from Renacci is nonetheless cited in a federal indictment that claims Suarez and its top corporate officers illegally reimbursed employees for donations they made to Renacci's campaign and Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel's unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid.

Company officials deny any wrongdoing, and the public officials are not charged with crimes. Renacci and Mandel long ago returned the donations from Suarez employees.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained the Renacci letter and other documents the company withheld from investigators when it executed a search warrant at SCI’s offices on Jan. 22, 2013, the indictment says.

The indictment also says 18 Suarez employees and their family members made $5,000 donations to Renacci’s campaign from March 29 to March 31 of 2011, which were all reimbursed by the company on April 1, 2011.

Renacci’s office at first said the congressman did not write any letters on Suarez' behalf. It supplied the letter cited in the Oct. 22 indictment within an hour of The Plain Dealer filing a public records request for it at Kasich’s office.

Renacci chief of staff James Slepian said he found the letter in an “old staff file” after several days of examining correspondence to and from the congressman’s office.

Slepian said the company’s founder and president, Benjamin Suarez, asked Renacci to seek federal legislation that would limit a state’s ability to enforce its own product liability laws.

Several district attorneys in California have filed a lawsuit that accuses Suarez’s company of selling “unapproved and misbranded drugs and devices” and making “unsubstantiated false and/or misleading claims about their benefits.” Their lawsuit seeks fines and restitution of at least $5 million.

Suarez wanted Renacci to introduce legislation that would pre-empt all state laws that regulate advertising and product labeling. Slepian said Renacci wouldn’t do so because “Jim viewed this as a state issue and did not see a role for the federal government to play.”

“Instead, our office simply forwarded the SCI info to Kasich’s office with a note explaining what we had received and pointing out that it was a matter for the states to sort out,” said an email from Slepian.

Slepian said there was no link between Renacci’s letter and the $90,000 in donations his campaign got from Suarez’ employees within two days of its authorship.

Those contributions were tied to a large fundraising event at the Brookside Country Club in Stark County in the second quarter of 2011, said Slepian, who described it as the first large campaign event Renacci held after taking office that January.

“At no point has our office ever taken any official action tied to campaign contributions,” Slepian said. “And in this case, our office never took any legislative action of any kind on the matter related to SCI. We received a packet of information from a company in our district requesting that we engage Congress on an issue they were concerned with. We reviewed the request, decided it was a state issue and that we would simply forward the information on to the Governor's office.”

Slepian forwarded a letter to The Plain Dealer that Benjamin Suarez sent to a variety of public officials in Ohio. It listed a string of actions Suarez wanted Renacci, Kasich, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Inspector General Randy Meyer and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to take to help with his dispute in California.

Suarez’s letter claimed the California district attorneys who sued his company were operating “an extortion racket” that would cost jobs at his company and others.

“These Rogue 10 D.A.’s extortion racket is doing more damage to businesses and the U.S. economy than all the federal regulators and all of the other 49 state regulators combined,” his letter said.

Representatives of the other Ohio office holders named in the letter said they did not help Suarez, although Husted’s office said he called California Attorney General Kamala Harris to get more information about the issue. Campaign finance records show Suarez contributed $5,000 to Husted's successful 2010 run for Secretary of State.

An assistant attorney general in Harris' office called Husted back to say that the dispute was a local matter, not a state one, Husted spokeswoman Maggie Ostrowski told Northeast Ohio Media Group. Husted passed that message along to Suarez and had no further involvement in the matter, Ostrowski said.

Kasich’s chief counsel, D. Michael Grodhaus, sent Suarez a letter on March 29, 2011 that said he had reviewed the businessman’s complaints and had an assistant obtain additional information about the proceedings in California.

“Because the people of the State of California have clearly expressed their wishes as to the kinds of consumer protection laws and regulations they want in their state, we do not believe that it would be appropriate for the Governor of Ohio to seek federal legislation to pre-empt or override California’s consumer protection laws and regulations,” Grodhaus’ letter said.

“Likewise, we do not believe that it would be appropriate for the Governor of Ohio to intervene in or attempt to influence an on-going investigation or regulatory proceeding initiated by a district attorney in another state,” the letter continued.

Nichols said Grodhaus subsequently forwarded Suarez's materials to California Attorney General Harris, who "wrote back and said 'mind your own business.'"

According to Nichols, Suarez Corporation also contacted Kasich's office to seek help after the FBI and U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach began investigating its campaign donations.

The company's human resources director, Julianne Dalayanis, sent Kasich a letter copied to numerous other public officials that claimed a "high crime" was in progress. It accused Dettelbach and an aide of "malicious prosecution" to benefit their careers and to do the bidding of Democrats, such as Mandel's election rival, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, with whom it claimed they were aligned.

The letter asked Kasich to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Suarez's claims, and that he ask House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia to investigate abuses it alleged.

Kasich's constituent affairs director, Dave Ward, replied with a letter that said "the concerns you expressed have to do with an issue that is outside the jurisdiction of the Governor's Office."

"You have contacted the appropriate federal authorities with your concerns, and I encourage you to work with them to address this issue," said Ward's Feb. 26, 2013 letter to Dalayanis.

After Suarez was indicted, Kasich announced that he would donate the $22,395 that the businessman gave his campaign to the National Alliance on Mental Illness Ohio.

Ohio Treasurer Mandel did not share Kasich's misgivings about acting on Suarez' behalf, records released by his office show. Mandel sent Renacci a letter on March 21, 2011 that urged him to introduce the legislation sought by Suarez.

Mandel also wrote a May 23 letter to California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer that criticized the district attorneys in California for filing deceptive advertising claims against Suarez’s company. Mandel’s letter threatened to urge Ohio’s attorney general to file a federal lawsuit against California.

“We must not permit this victimization and attack on Ohio jobs to continue unchecked,” said Mandel’s letter to Lockyer. “If we must institute litigation to stop the abuses, I am confident we will.”

The indictment says the company asked Mandel to write letters on its behalf to public officials around March 18 and May 17, and describes repeated correspondence over the letters between Mandel’s campaign and SCI officials.

It also says 20 Suarez employees and their family members subsequently made donations of $5,000 apiece to Mandel between May 26 to June 13, which were illegally reimbursed.

It says the actions of Benjamin Suarez, his company, and its Chief Financial Officer, Michael Georgio, violated the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.

That law prohibits corporations from making direct donations to federal candidates, caps the amount that individuals can give, and bars people from making contributions in other people’s names.

It claims the company made almost $200,000 in “disguised contributions” to Mandel and Renacci to “gain influence for SCI and Benjamin Suarez.”

“Benjamin Suarez, Michael Georgio, and SCI disguised and concealed the amount and source of campaign contributions and the identity of SCI as the true contributor to the 2012 House Campaign and the 2012 Senate Campaign in order to enhance SCI’s and Suarez’ ability to seek and obtain favorable treatment, including official acts that could benefit SCI’s business interests, while decreasing the risk of potentially unfavorable public scrutiny,” the indictment says.

In an interview last month, Suarez said his company hadn't reimbursed employees for campaign donations. He said his workers gave money on their own because they were dismayed by the Affordable Care Act.

He acknowledged asking Mandel to write a letters on his firm’s behalf, but said the donations from his company’s workers were not in exchange for Mandel’s actions.

“Every statement in the indictment is false,” Suarez told The Plain Dealer. “I have never done anything illegal. I do not do anything illegal, period, nor does anyone else at my company.”