Republican former Tennessee state House Speaker Glen Casada and top aide Cade Cothren – facing trial on a 2022 indictment on charges of conspiracy to commit theft from programs receiving federal funds, bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds, honest services wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering – are asking a federal judge to compel prosecutors to reveal the identities of their confidential sources in the state House, stating in filings that they suspect it’s an aide to Casada’s successor, current House Speaker Cameron Sexton, or even Sexton himself, who ratted him out to Los Federales, the Tennesseean reports.
Casada resigned from the speakership in 2019 after a special prosecutor found that Cothren had attempted to frame then activist but now-state Representative Justin Jones – nationally famous for his 2023 expulsion by Sexton’s caucus – for assaulting Casada in the state capitol… And holy fuck this is a rabbit hole with Cothren using the n-word in a text and a whole bunch of other shit.
It wasn’t until after his 2022 arrest that Casada had left the state House, but anyway, with the kickback scandal, Casada and Cothren’s lawyers on Tuesday wrote in a motion that “Despite the apparent wealth of personal knowledge held by (confidential informant 1) and their material role in the government’s investigation, the government maintains it does not intend to call this witness at trial. Regardless, the government should be compelled to disclose this informant’s identity so Defendants can properly analyze the nature and extent of this person’s ‘knowledge,’ their potential biases and motivation for cooperating with the government, and the need for their testimony, if any, during the defense’s case-in-chief at trial,” which in plainer English means they want to make it all sound “politically motivated” because it was Buttsexton who took the gavel in the leadership election after Casada threw in the towel, thus he had something to gain, blah blah blah.
The usual song-and-dance from MAGA cocksuckers who would have you believe that two things cannot be true at the same time when it comes to one’s political fortunes and their criminal behavior.