Marc Dann

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Marc Dann

Marc Dann of Liberty Township, Trumbull County, Ohio, is an American politician of the Democratic Party. He is currently the Attorney General-elect of Ohio. Dann won the post in what is regarded by many as one of the most stunning upset in the history of Ohio electoral politics by defeating his heavily favored opponent, former AG and current Auditor of State Betty Montgomery, in the November 7 general election by a margin of 52% to 48%. Before her defeat by Dann, Montgomery had never lost a statewide election and had been the top Republican vote getter in the previous two non-presidential statewide contests.

Dann earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1984 from the University of Michigan and a law degree in 1987 from Case Western Reserve University.

From 2001 to 2002, Dann served as a member of the board of education of Liberty Township, Ohio. In 2003, Dann was appointed to a seat in the Ohio Senate to fill out the term of another senator. He was successfully elected to the seat in 2004.

Dann was involved in Ohio's "Mandategate" scandal (2001), acting as the lawyer of Legislative Service Commission whistleblower Dr. Matthew Wells. Wells's report claimed that the state had saddled school districts with $500 million worth of unfunded mandates. Wells's report was only released after complaints by the Ohio Democratic Party. In 2000, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the state to "immediately" fund them (DeRolph vs. State of Ohio).

In 2005, Sen. Dann was a leading figure in the exposure of a variety of ethics and criminal scandals involving a number of high-ranking Republican elected and appointed officials, including Gov. Bob Taft, who became the first sitting governor in Ohio history to plead guilty to a crime.

Dann's most notable and noted role was as the leading critic of "Coingate," an investment plan in which $50 million of the state's workers compensation reserve fund was given to Tom Noe, a politically-connected coin dealer, who invested the money in rare coins, the location of many of which are not known. Noe, who had served as the chair of the Republican Party in Lucas County, Ohio (the greater Toledo, Ohio area), has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to state, federal, and local GOP candidates. In exchange for his donations - and, critics suggest, in a prime example of the pay-to-play nature of contemporary Ohio politics - Noe, a college dropout, was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Bowling Green State University and to the Ohio Turnpike Commission by Gov. Taft.

When the Coingate scandal broke, Taft, who was a regular golf partner of Noe's, denied having knowledge of the Bureau of Workers Compensation (BWC)'s decision to invest money in Noe's coin funds. Sen. Dann demanded to see memos, e-mails, and other communications transmitted between Gov. Taft's office and the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, and sued to gain access to the documents when the governor asserted a broad claim of executive privilege and refused to turn them over. In April 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court held that, although executive privilege does exist under Ohio law, its scope is not as broad as asserted by Gov. Taft.

Sen. Dann has also been a vociferous critic of current Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, who was notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission more than two years ago that the SEC had serious reservations about investment practices at the BWC. Dann charged that Petro ignored those warnings and the misuse of funds at the agency continued unabated until the Toledo Blade and Dann began to expose the corruption.

Dann announced his candidacy for Attorney General of Ohio on November 14, 2005, and plans to use the power inherent in the office to both help local police and prosecutors deal with street crime and to actively and aggressively pursue white collar criminals, much as Eliot Spitzer has done in the State of New York.