Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) potential tax credit violations are an example of “the typical corruption you see from career politicians.”
Moreno joined the program days after NBC News reported that Brown had claimed two homes for owner-occupancy tax credits for years.
“This potentially violates Buckeye State rules for such incentives since he and his wife, Connie Schultz, reportedly live at their Cleveland address, where the two are also registered to vote,” as Breitbart News’s Jacob Bliss wrote.
Additionally, the report found that Brown and Schultz were regularly late in paying property taxes for their Cleveland home, making late payments seven times since 2013. Speaking with Spectrum News’s Taylor Popielarz on Wednesday, Brown asserted, “It’s a pretty common practice, but once we learned about it, we fixed it.”
When Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle asked Moreno for his thoughts on the NBC report, Moreno said, “Well, it’s the typical corruption you see for career politicians.”
“You know, when he ran for office for Congress in 1992, after being in state government, I think for like 15 or 16, 17 years, he said, ‘Anybody who’s been in DC more than ten years is a crook.’ He was right about that,” Moreno explained. “He, of course, then changed his mind and now has been there for 30 years. He talked about how ‘Dick Ephart and Newt Gingrich were lifers, and these lifers are terrible,’ and sure enough, he became one. And the reality is, he’s the chair of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee, and … he can’t even be trusted to pay his own taxes.”
“He’s got two homes, one in Columbus, one in Cleveland – claimed an owner occupancy credit for both of them,” Moreno added. “He claims it’s a paperwork error. Well, the bill’s not complicated. You look at it; you can see exactly what credit you’re getting. The bill comes at exactly the same time every year. This lack of payment of property taxes goes back to his D.C. condo ten years ago. He was late; paid late fees over and over and over again.”
Moreno believes it illustrates that Brown is “not a serious person,” and he “obviously can’t manage his own financial affairs, and yet, we expect him to handle the financial affairs of our country.”
“We’ll expose him for the fraud that he is, and we’ll replace him. And he’s gonna have to figure out how to make money in the private sector, and that’s something he’s never ever had to do before,” he added.
Boyle went on to shift attention to the debt ceiling negotiations on Capitol Hill and noted that he had not seen Brown “say or do anything to try to raise the debt ceiling and change the behavior in Washington, which is this out of control spending, which is causing the inflation that is hurting people around the country.”
Moreno asserted that Brown has remained mum “because he’s the problem.”
“This is a guy who voted with AOC and Markey and the Green New Deal radicals for $10s and $20 and $30 trillion of more spending. He’s not a Joe Manchin; he’s fully Joe Biden. He’s a guy that if it were up to him – if the way he voted had become law, we wouldn’t be $32 trillion in debt; we’d be $50 trillion in debt. You know, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is no such thing … he voted for the original Green New Deal, which would have been infinitely worse.”
“What he’s very good at is dodging asking those questions because the Ohio media covers for him every single solitary day, but he can’t possibly have any moral standing to talk about the debt ceiling and getting our spending under control when he is the tip of the spear of the problem,” Moreno added.