Marc Dann
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Marc Dann of Liberty Township, Trumbull County, Ohio, is an American politician of the Democratic Party, currently serving as the Attorney General of Ohio. Dann won the post in November 2006 by defeating Ohio State Auditor Betty Montgomery, a former attorney general, 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.
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[edit] Law career and state Senate
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.
Dann practiced law in Youngstown, Ohio and became active in Democratic Party politics. His disciplinary record as attorney consisted of a single reprimand from the Ohio Supreme Court for handling a 2002 alimony case without proper preparation [1].
In 2000, Dann ran for the Ohio state Senate in the district then comprising Trumbull and Geauga counties. He finished third in the party primary behind eventual winner Tim Ryan and a local township trustee. From 2001 to 2002, Dann served as a member of the Liberty Local School District board of education. After Ryan won election to Congress in 2002, Dann convinced the state Senate's Democratic caucus to appoint him to fill the balance of Ryan's term. He easily won election to a full term 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 the mandates (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. Noe 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, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to state, federal, and local GOP candidates. Noe, a college dropout, had been 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) 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 BWC, 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 was also been a vociferous critic of then-Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, who had been notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission more than two years earlier 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.
[edit] Attorney general
Dann announced his candidacy for Attorney General of Ohio on November 14, 2005, saying he would use the of 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.
Dann won 71% of the vote in the Democratic primary against former Cleveland Law Director Subodh Chandra. In the general-election campaign, Montgomery tried to distance herself from the scandals of the Taft administration, while criticizing Dann for wanting to use the attorney general's office as a platform for activism [2]. In a television advertisement, the Montgomery campaign attacked Dann for the above-mentioned reprimand and for defending a man convicted of showing nude pictures to children. Dann responded to the latter attack by saying he was simply doing his job as an attorney [3].
Dann received 2.04 million votes to 1.83 million for Montgomery. He ran up huge margins in traditionally Democratic areas and also won bellwether counties such as Franklin and Stark.
He was sworn in as the 47th Ohio Attorney General on Jan. 8, 2007 [4]. In his inaugural address, Dann pledged to "continue to take on powerful politicians, corrupt corporations, entrenched special interests or anyone else who threatens the well-being of Ohioans" [5].
According to the Associated Press, Dann's office missed a legal deadline to join an appeal of a Medicaid-related court decision the state government opposes. The deadline for filing the documents was Dann's inauguration day. The failure to join the appeal does not prevent the state from filing briefs in the case [6].
[edit] The Cafaro controversy
Dann has recently come under fire for supporting Capri Cafaro's successful bid to fill his unexpired term in the state Senate. Cafaro, heiress to part of the Cafaro shopping-mall empire, had never won election to office. In addition, Cafaro's father, J.J. Cafaro, had pleaded guilty in 2001 to bribing then-Congressman Jim Traficant to push legislation that would benefit his aviation-equipment company. Capri, then in her early 20s, was president of the aviation company but was not charged with any wrongdoing [7]. In a related trial, Capri testified she had never conspired with Traficant [8]. As of Oct. 18, 2006, the Cafaro family had contributed $30,500 to Dann's attorney-general campaign in addition to the $26,000 they had donated to his state Senate campaigns. Of that money, $10,000 came from J.J. [9]. Dann defended his recommendation of Capri Cafaro by saying he believed she was the only qualified candidate to replace him [10].
[edit] Personal
Dann's wife, Alyssa Lenhoff, is director of the journalism program at Youngstown State University. Lenhoff won several awards for investigative reporting at the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, Ohio. Lenhoff's former partner at the Tribune, Ed Simpson, is now Dann's chief of staff.
Dann and Lenhoff have three children, one of whom is adopted.
| Preceded by Jim Petro |
Attorney General of Ohio 2007 - |
Succeeded by Incumbent |
