Michael Rulli Corruption & Ethics Ohio

Michael Rulli Hired the Man Ohio's Attorney General Sued Over a Fake East Palestine Charity. He Says the Guy Was "Crucified."

A fund collected nearly $149,000 from donors who thought they were helping East Palestine. Its founder paid a $25,000 penalty and took a lifetime ban from Ohio charities. Two years later, Rulli made him his communications director.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

Michael Rulli Hired the Man Ohio's Attorney General Sued Over a Fake East Palestine Charity. He Says the Guy Was "Crucified."

In February 2023, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, and crews vented and burned the chemicals inside it — sending a black plume over the village and setting off years of health worries, business closures and lawsuits.

Americans wanted to help. Many of them got a text message asking them to.

The text messages came from something called the Ohio Clean Water Fund. It said it was raising money to get bottled water to East Palestine residents, working with the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley.

Second Harvest had never authorized any of it. The food bank had no affiliation with the group at all.

More than 3,000 people gave. The fund collected nearly $149,000. About $10,000 of it reached the food bank. The rest did not.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued. When the case settled in August 2023, he did not mince words:

"These scammers preyed on generous donors to try to line their own pockets, but ultimately were stopped and shut down."

The man who co-founded that fund is named Mike Peppel. In January 2025, Michael Rulli hired him to be the communications director for his congressional office.

What Peppel actually agreed to

It's worth being precise about the settlement, because Rulli's defense depends on being imprecise about it.

Under the August 10, 2023 agreement:

The Ohio Clean Water Fund paid $116,904.88 to the Second Harvest Food Bank, plus a $15,000 civil penalty.
Peppel personally paid a $25,000 civil penalty — within three days.
Peppel accepted a lifetime ban on incorporating, operating or soliciting for any charity in Ohio. He can't be a board member, officer, employee, contractor or even a money-handling volunteer for a charitable trust in the state, ever.
The fund's fundraisers at WAMA Strategies, Isaih Wartman and Luke Mahoney, paid $22,077 in restitution plus $3,000 in investigative costs.

Peppel did not admit wrongdoing on the record. That's normal in a settlement, and it's the hook Rulli hung his hat on.

How Rulli explained the hire

When local station 21 News broke the story that Peppel was on the congressional payroll, Rulli's office put out a statement:

"We are happy to have Mike Peppel join our team as our Communications Director, after spending nearly a decade in public service. Mike's extraordinary work ethic, loyalty and dedication to the people of our region assisted me in nearly every aspect of what I was able to accomplish during my time in the Ohio Senate. In light of the dismissal of any and all civil complaints against Mr. Peppel, we are ready to move forward and focus on serving our constituents with a proven leader joining our team."

Read that last sentence again. "In light of the dismissal of any and all civil complaints."

The complaints weren't dismissed because they were groundless. They were resolved by a settlement in which Peppel wrote a $25,000 check to the state and gave up the right to work for a charity in Ohio for the rest of his life. Rulli's statement takes the least informative fact about the outcome and presents it as exoneration.

Then he said it out loud

Three weeks later, on February 3, 2025, Rulli was in East Palestine for the second anniversary of the derailment, standing alongside Vice President JD Vance.

21 News asked him there, in that village, whether he stood by the hire. His answer, as the station reported it:

Peppel should have used better judgment.
He feels bad that residents are offended.
Peppel deserves a second chance.
Peppel was "crucified" for being the charity's spokesperson, and just wanted to do charity work.
As a good Christian, Rulli decided to give him that second chance.
He hoped Peppel learned from it, but he wouldn't get another strike.

The word "crucified" is doing a lot of work there. Peppel wasn't crucified. He was sued by his own state's Republican attorney general, and he settled by paying a penalty and accepting a permanent ban.

And the people Rulli was standing among that day are the ones the money was raised in the name of — the ones who never got the water.

Why this is his problem, not Peppel's

Peppel is a private citizen who took a settlement. Whatever anyone thinks of second chances, he isn't on a ballot.

Rulli is. And East Palestine is in his district — his own office confirmed that when it announced his visit to the derailment site with Vance.

A member of Congress hires whoever he wants. But a congressman's communications director is the person who speaks for him to the constituents he represents. Rulli looked at a district still living with a chemical disaster, looked at the man whose fund took nearly $149,000 raised in that disaster's name, and decided that man should be his voice.

Then he told the village they were wrong to be offended — and framed his own decision as Christian charity toward the person who'd been penalized, rather than toward the people who'd been taken.

There is a version of "second chances" that is genuinely admirable. It usually involves the person who did the harm making it right with the people harmed. That's not what happened here. What happened is that a man who lost the right to solicit for an Ohio charity got a federal salary and a title, and the residents of East Palestine got told to move on.

A pattern of who gets the benefit of the doubt

This isn't the only time Rulli has decided the person under scrutiny deserves grace and the people affected don't.

He introduced a bill to make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to get too close to an ICE agent — legislation aimed at the agency's critics rather than its conduct. And when federal officials moved to deport Ohio's Haitian residents, he went on Fox News and said "let's get 'em all out of here".

The through line is consistent. When the question is whether to extend the benefit of the doubt, Rulli extends it to the powerful and the connected — and asks everyone else to be understanding about it.