Dem’s data center attack in critical Senate race hits snag when money trail surfaces: 'Jekyll-and-Hyde'

FIRST ON FOX: Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is targeting Republican Sen. Jon Husted over Ohio's growing data center industry in a new campaign ad that features a facility owned by Google — whose corporate PAC and lobbyists have contributed thousands of dollars to Brown's campaigns.

The Sept. 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Husted for spearheading "the push to bring data centers to Ohio" and linking their expansion to "higher electric bills."

The facility featured in the ad, which opened in Lancaster in 2023, is owned by Google.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google's corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google, including two whose firms have worked on permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability issues.

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"Apparently Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in," Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?"

Among the contributors are Google lobbyist Lisa Kountoupes, who donated $3,500 in March, and Google lobbyist Michael D. Smith, who donated a total of $10,200 to Brown since 2017, according to Federal Election Commission records. The contributions were made to Friends of Sherrod Brown, Brown's principal campaign committee.

Kountoupes’s firm, Kountoupes Denham Carr & Reid, was hired by Google in December to lobby on "issues related to permitting reform" tied to the company's data center needs, Politico previously reported. Smith's firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs, reported lobbying for Google on "issues related to permitting reform for grid reliability and energy affordability," according to federal lobbying filings.

FEC records show Brown also received a combined $6,000 over the past decade from three additional Google lobbyists.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Lauren Chou, a spokeswoman for Brown's campaign, highlighted Brown's opposition to Ohio's data center expansion, saying Husted "led the charge," but did not address Brown's past campaign contributions.

"Husted is a ‘chief reason’ Ohio has 226 data centers and is ‘the face of data centers’ in Ohio," Chou wrote. "Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs and Ohioans – not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends – should get to decide if data centers are built in their community."

Cooke accused Brown of acting like his "Google relationship in Washington does not count," calling it "Jekyll-and-Hyde politics."

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"For nearly five decades, Brown has sold himself as the plaid-shirt, working-class populist," she said. "He lost in 2024, and now he is back running the same playbook: say one thing to Ohioans while his Washington record tells a very different story."

Brown, who is seeking to return to the U.S. Senate in the high-stakes race against Husted, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 before losing his reelection bid in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio.

But this isn’t the first time Brown’s comeback campaign has faced questions over conflicting positions.

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In 2015, Brown celebrated the construction of an Amazon data center in central Ohio, saying in a press release the new facility "is great news for New Albany and central Ohio."

Despite his public praise, Brown has become an outspoken critic of Ohio's growing number of data centers, a defining issue in Ohio politics ahead of the midterms. President Donald Trump has pushed to expand the facilities, warning that communities that block them would "end up being backwards and poor."

But Cooke said this about more than one local data center.

"America is in a global race for AI, computing capacity and energy infrastructure," she said. "China is not slowing down because American politicians discovered that attacking data centers makes a convenient campaign commercial."

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Husted campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce said that Brown failed Ohio families during his 32 years in Washington and is "once again resorting to lies instead of facing his abysmal record head-on. "

"The House overwhelmingly passed Sen. Husted’s bipartisan legislation requiring data center companies to pay for the power they use, but Senate Democrats blocked it," Natoce said. "Sherrod Brown and his friends would rather play politics and stick Ohio families with higher electric bills than pass a commonsense solution. It’s despicable."