NASHVILLE – Tennessee House Republican Caucus chair Jeremy Faison says he suspected from the start something was wrong when then-Rep. Robin Smith began to push hard for the caucus’s campaign committee to add a previously unknown political firm to its approved list of vendors during the 2020 election cycle.
After raising questions about the company – New Mexico-based Phoenix Solutions LLC – and its mysterious head, Matthew Phoenix, Faison said he immediately incurred the wrath of Smith, a political consultant from Hixson and a former Tennessee Republican Party chair.
“When I raised my questions and pushed against her, she announced the next day she was going to run against me,” Faison told the Times Free Press during an interview at the state Capitol on Thursday. “Because I knew something was wrong, and I’ve maintained since Day 1 that Matthew Phoenix was bull– and that the whole thing was a lie, and the whole thing was her and Glen Casada.”
Faison’s comments came in advance of this week’s federal grand jury proceedings and after Smith’s March 7 resignation and subsequent guilty plea a day later in U.S. District Court to a single charge of wire fraud involving a “kickback” scheme in an ongoing federal investigation.
Smith, who is now cooperating with the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of her plea agreement, admitted she, former House Speaker Glen Casada and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, used Phoenix Solutions to participate in obtaining work doing taxpayer-funded constituent mail and surveys on behalf of fellow Republicans.
Cothren posed as the fictional Matthew Phoenix, according to the federal government. While neither Casada nor Cothren’s names appear in Smith’s charging document, it describes others besides Smith in the alleged scam as a former House speaker who resigned in 2019 and his former chief of staff.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville, and at least three other legislators – Reps. Esther Helton, R-East Ridge, Bud Hulsey, R-Kingsport, and Rep. Jason Zachary, R-Knoxville – have all confirmed to the Times Free Press that they have been subpoenaed as witnesses to testify in the FBI investigation.
Sexton, who was elected to succeed Casada in 2019 and previously revealed in January that the FBI informed him of its investigation after he became speaker, said the subpoenas came as no surprise for him.
“No, no. We knew all along that there’d be a lot of members called as witnesses,” Sexton told reporters Thursday following the House session. “That’s part of a grand jury is to bring witnesses up to testify [and] provide factual information as they’re looking to indict or charge various people.”
In its charging document, the U.S. Attorney’s Office ignored any misrepresentations made by Smith, Casada and Cothren regarding work done for the GOP Caucus. Instead, authorities focused solely on Matthew Phoenix’s – Cothren’s – signing of an IRS W-9 document required by Legislative Services Director Connie Ridley to participate as a state vendor. It clearly states that the person signing the document is acting “under penalties of perjury” if caught lying on the form. The form was emailed to the state.
Sexton said in response to a reporter’s question that the W-9 forms were always required and had not been done at the request of federal investigators.
Smith and Casada had signed their own W-9 forms. Other legislative services documents show Smith forwarding some communications on behalf of Phoenix to Ridley’s office. Ridley has confirmed she has been subpoenaed by the grand jury, presumably to discuss the process and bring documents provided federal officials don’t already have them.
The speaker said he doesn’t know who else has been subpoenaed.
“Being subpoenaed doesn’t mean you’re guilty of anything. Hopefully, you know what the law is and know that witnesses do go before the grand jury,” Sexton said.
He added that implying otherwise is “just wrong.”
Helton told the Times Free Press on Wednesday, during an interview in her office, she was interviewed by the FBI in February 2021. That wasn’t long after Jan. 8, when FBI agents raided the homes and legislative offices of Smith, Casada, Cothren and freshman Rep. Todd Warner, R-Lewisburg.
“They were just questioning me about the mailers, wanting to know if I’d met a Matthew Phoenix, etc.,” Helton said. “And, of course, I had not.”
Other lawmakers who have been interviewed by the FBI about their government-funded constituent mail and/or political mail dealings with Phoenix include House Finance Committee chair Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain, and Rep. Dan Howell, R-Georgetown. Both said they have not been subpoenaed.
School voucher bill
Zachary, the Knoxville Republican, confirmed to the Times Free Press on Thursday he has been summoned to appear before the grand jury.
“I have received a subpoena to testify; however, I cannot make any further comment,” Zachary stated in an email.
It’s not known for sure why Zachary was subpoenaed.
He was a key figure in a 2019 vote involving Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher bill while Casada was speaker. Casada kept the vote tally board open for 40 minutes after it was tied on a 49-49 vote while he and others, including Lee staffers, furiously horse traded to get to the 50 votes required for passage.
Zachary switched his vote from no to yes after Casada agreed to take Knox County out of the bill, and it passed 50-49. Such wrangling and agreements are common fare in legislative proceedings. Hamilton County and 92 other counties were removed from the bill. In the end, the bill applied solely to Davidson and Shelby counties, which are contesting the legality of that in court.
Casada reportedly sought to entice another lawmaker, Democrat John Mark Windle of Livingston, a Tennessee National Guard lieutenant colonel, to change his vote by seeing if he could get Lee to promote him to a generalship. Windle didn’t go for it. He told the Times Free Press later that persons with “guns and badges” interviewed him about the offer.
Lee has twice denied knowing anything about such an offer.
Casada was forced to resign the speakership following a GOP Caucus no confidence vote for his hard-charging ways as well as an uproar over racist and sexist texts with Cothren, who also resigned.
Following the FBI’s 2021 raid, Smith’s attorney, Ben Rose, sought to raise questions about whether his client’s woes stemmed from her stormy past dealings with John “Chip” Saltsman, a top Sexton advisor. The attorney said lawmakers and others, whom he did not identify, were pointing a finger at Saltsman.
“They are telling us things like: ‘This all started with Chip’; ‘Chip is behind this’; ‘Chip is helping fuel this’; ‘We know this is all political.’ Keep in mind that many of these folks are actually apolitical and don’t have a dog in the fight one way or the other,” Rose said in a phone interview with the Times Free Press last year.
Saltsman did not comment to the Times Free Press at the time and did not respond to a reporter’s text earlier this week. He and Smith have long had a contentious relationship. Saltsman is former Tennessee Republican Party chair who served as the state House Republican Caucus’ chief consultant in 2020 and has worked at the national level.
When Smith ran for U.S. Congress in Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District in 2010, Saltsman successfully ran then-political newcomer Chuck Fleischmann’s campaign in what proved to be an epic, muddy battle. Fleischmann won.
Freshman Rep. Todd Warner, R-Lewisburg, meanwhile, was involved in a brutal GOP 2022 primary with then-Rep. Rick Tillis, R-Lewisburg, in which Tillis was pounded by another new-on-the-scene political entity, the Faith Family Freedom Fund, and lost his re-election bid.
A woman who served as the group’s treasurer, Sydney Friedopfer, who said she was Cothren’s girlfriend at the time, told the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance earlier this year that Cothren put her up to it. Cothren later refused to testify before the registry, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Tillis was among those in court watching Smith entering her guilty plea earlier this month.
Faison, who fended off Smith’s bid to become GOP Caucus chair, said he felt vindicated by her guilty plea as well as her links laid out in federal filings to Phoenix Solutions, Casada and Cothren.
“I maintained that from Day 1 that’s what that was. I never went back on it because I knew from Day 1 that’s who they were,” he said.
Contact Andy Sher at asher@timesfreepress.com or 615-255-0550. Follow him on Twitter @AndySher1.