COLUMBUS, Ohio— Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges was released from federal prison after serving less than half of the 5-year sentence he received for his role in the House Bill 6 corruption scandal.
Borges, a Columbus-area lobbyist, was moved Wednesday from a minimum-security federal prison camp in Morgantown, West Virginia — his home for the past two-plus years — to a halfway house in Cincinnati, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
He’ll now spend the next year either living in a halfway house or remaining confined to his house in suburban Columbus, Borges said in a letter to his wife Kate that she posted on her blog. After that, the blog stated, he’ll spend an additional year under supervision by a probation officer.
Borges left prison early because of credits he earned under the federal First Step Act, according to the blog. That law allows federal inmates to shave time off their sentences for participating in recidivism reduction programs and educational classes.
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In June 2023, Borges was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for offering a $15,000 bribe in the summer of 2019 to a GOP operative named Tyler Fehrman.
At the time, Borges worked as a lobbyist for a FirstEnergy subsidiary that, under HB6, received a (since-repealed) $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout for two northern Ohio nuclear power plants.
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Borges approached Fehrman seeking inside information into a campaign to repeal HB6, an energy law that then-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder pushed through the legislature with the help of $60 million in bribes from Akron-based electric utility FirstEnergy.
At Borges’ trial, prosecutors played a recording in which Borges told Fehrman that if he notified the media about their conversation, “I’ll have to blow your house up.” Borges later said he was joking, though Fehrman told cleveland.com |The Plain Dealer that Borges’ comment “terrified” him.
Borges appealed his conviction, arguing that, among other things, he wasn’t aware that the pro-HB6 organization was engaged in illegal activity.
However, last May a federal appeals court panel rejected Borges’ arguments. “All told, Borges had a deep knowledge of (and involvement in) Householder’s bribery scheme,” the court held.
Householder, meanwhile, was sentenced to 20 years in prison the day before Borges received his sentence. The Perry County Republican is currently at a minimum-security prison camp in Columbiana County.
Before becoming a lobbyist, Borges was Ohio Republican Party chair from 2012 until 2017, overseeing the party as Ohio moved from the nation’s quintessential swing state to a solidly red one.
However, party leaders voted him out after the 2016 general election because of his tepid support for President Donald Trump’s campaign.
While in prison, Borges described via the blog working on the prison’s ranch, as well as teaching classes on yoga, writing, and outer space. Ahead of his release, he wrote, his fellow inmates working at the ranch got him an ice cream cake.
In one letter to his wife posted to the blog in late July, Borges wrote that while he has been “surrounded by weirdos, drug addicts, and untreated mental health patients,” his time at his minimum-security prison was “still a lot better than being around violent maniacs and being locked in a room or a cell all day long, like a lot of places are.
“Without question, this whole experience has been unequivocally bad,” Borges wrote. “But from what I’ve heard and the things I’ve seen, it could’ve been a whole lot worse.”