Boehner to Visit Small Business With Deep Political Connections
House Minority Leader John Boehner is planning to give a major speech on jobs and government spending Friday at a Cincinnati company that the Ohio Republican’s office described as a “small family business.”
But the announcement did not mention that the executives of the company are also major political donors, both personally and through their leadership of a trade association political action committee that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars almost exclusively to Republican candidates.
A Boehner aide said it is a campaign speech, and the company that is hosting the Minority Leader, United Group Services, is a small industrial firm that could be harmed if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.
“We asked UGS to host it because a major theme in the speech is that family-owned and family-run small businesses like them are the engine of job growth in America, and the Obama tax hike will hit hundreds of thousands of them, including potentially UGS,” the GOP source said.
But the business’s top executives are not political neophytes.
Mark Mosley, Daniel Freese and Kevin Sell, three top executives at the Cincinnati-based firm, have contributed thousands to Boehner as well as other Republican candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Sell, a vice president at United Group Services, has also served in several local and national leadership positions at the Associated Builders and Contractors’ political action committee, according to a “member spotlight” profiled on ABC’s website.
ABC’s PAC gave more than $1.1 million to Republican House candidates in the 2008 election cycle. In 2010, the PAC has donated $572,500 to Republicans. Rep. Dan Boren (Okla.) was the sole Democrat supported by the PAC in both cycles.
Sell, described in ABC’s profile as “a semi-professional political junkie,” also ran an unsuccessful bid for judge-executive in Campbell County, Ky., earlier this year. According to the biography on his campaign website, Sell “recently served as Trustee and Northern Kentucky PAC Coordinator for the Ohio Valley Chapter, and served for seven years as Trustee/Vice-Chairman of ABC National PAC.”
Freese currently serves on the board of the ABC Ohio Valley chapter, according to the chapter’s website.
Boehner’s speech will be the latest in a series of policy-based speeches he has given over the past few months regarding the Republican governing agenda.