Ohio AFL-CIO President Pulled Into Historic Corruption Trial

The longtime president of the Ohio AFL-CIO has been summoned as a witness in a $60 million public corruption trial as lawyers work to help the former state House speaker beat charges that he was bribed in exchange for passing a nuclear plant bailout bill.

Timothy Burga, the leader of Ohio’s wing of the largest federation of unions in the US, initially fought his subpoena to testify in the six-week criminal trial. He had argued that he didn’t have insights into whether the bill at the heart of the trial—a roughly $1 billion bailout for FirstEnergy’s two Ohio nuclear plants—was ...