Well, howdy there internet people, let's bow again.

So today we're going to talk about a little caper out of Tennessee.

And we're going to do this because a whole bunch of people in Tennessee sent me links to it and said hey could you

look into this and it is wild. It involves a former house speaker and their former Chief of Staff, the names are Cossata and Cothra.

The feds have picked them up and charged them with like 20 counts. And I started looking through the publicly

available stuff and it looks as though it started as like a simple white lie and spiraled out of control.

And it went from something relatively simple to very serious crimes.

There are some serious allegations here.

It appears as though initially it dealt with a company that was going to send out political mailers for candidates during the primaries.

And then it started doing business with the General Assembly. Now as a

lawmaker you can't enrich yourself that way. And the allegations from

there and keep in mind all of this is alleged at this point,

the allegations from there suggest that these two just created a whole new person named Matthew Phoenix who owned the company, but this person didn't actually exist.

There are alleged text messages that have the two talking about who would impersonate this person on the phone.

And the charges stem from like, you know, a kickback thing all the way to money laundering.

And the truly wild part to me is that all of this, this giant story that is twisting and all of these

allegations stem from what appears to be like 50 grand or so somewhere around there

which in a public corruption case with this many moving parts that's not a lot of money. So it is it's a wild case that I have a

feeling is going to catch the attention of the national media, especially if it goes to trial.

It is a document heavy case, which is really bad for the defendants because a lot of things

are written down.

A heavy hitting attorney out of Nashville, I want to say the name was Gary Blackburn,

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