Stockard on the Stump: Republican lawmaker irritated that colleagues might wear a wire

by Sam Stockard, Tennessee Lookout
February 28, 2025

Republican state Rep. Todd Warner is peeved at the possibility House Speaker Cameron Sexton wore a wire for federal authorities five years ago as they investigated an alleged kickback scheme involving a mysterious business.

“I find it very disturbing that we have members that may be doing that kind of stuff behind the scenes. To me, that’s a tactic the Democrats would pull, like they pulled on President Trump. Here we have it going on in Tennessee. We have members trying to take out three conservatives, myself one of them, and I just find it very troubling,” said Warner, a Chapel Hill farmer and construction company owner.

A court filing identified three confidential sources helping federal prosecutors in their investigation of former House Speaker Glen Casada and his formed aide Cade Cothren. But the total number of informants who participated in the investigation is unknown and the government refuses to identify any of them. Prosecutors say the information is privileged and they don’t have to identify them because they don’t plan to call them to testify, according to the filing.

In January 2021, FBI agents raided the homes and offices of Warner, Casada, Cothren and former Chattanooga state Rep. Robin Smith, who wound up pleading guilty and is cooperating with federal prosecutors. They also looked into the office of former Rep. Kent Calfee of Kingston, but he is not a target of their investigation.

Cothren and Casada stand accused of running a kickback scheme to help the former staffer after he was fired in 2019 for his part in racist and sexist text messages. A few months later, Casada resigned after a no-confidence vote by the House Republican Caucus.

According to federal documents, Cothren secretly ran the vendor, Phoenix Solutions, so his identity wouldn’t be known, and Casada and Smith directed business to him from Republican House members. Cothren was paid nearly $52,000 to do constituent mailers for House members. 

The House Republican Caucus also hired the vendor, purportedly run by the bogus “Matthew Phoenix,” and paid him roughly $140,000 to do caucus work. 

Thus, Warner entered office four years ago with a dark cloud surrounding him but has said little publicly about the FBI investigation. He remains unindicted but continues to do business with a political consulting company called Dixieland Strategies, whose owners remain a mystery but have links to Phoenix Solutions. 

A dependable conservative by most measures, Warner isn’t exactly on Speaker Sexton’s Christmas gift list after trashing Gov. Bill Lee’s private-school voucher bill for more than a year. 

Nor is he tight with Lt. Gov. Randy McNally after calling for him to step down amid revelations McNally sent messages containing heart emojis to a young, gay man on social media two years ago. McNally emerged from the situation somewhat unscathed after Senate Republicans gave him a vote of confidence.

Delayed multiple times, the trial for Casada and Cothren is scheduled for April 22, and talk around the Capitol is that the legislature will adjourn before it starts. Otherwise, they might not have a quorum, since roughly 20 lawmakers and General Assembly employees have been subpoenaed by the defense to testify. 

In their latest filing, attorneys for Casada and Cothren say federal prosecutors are refusing to identify confidential informants who wore wires, secretly recorded caucus meetings and provided documents. The Casada-Cothren attorneys say they need to know those people’s identities so they can call them to the witness stand.

The filing indicates Speaker Sexton or someone in his office most likely provided the feds with secret recordings. Folks are envisioning all sorts of scenarios as they try to figure out the IDs of the three main informants.

Sexton declined to comment on the latest filing, saying he doesn’t discuss pending litigation. But he acknowledged recently he was among about 20 lawmakers who were subpoenaed by the defense in January. He was uncertain why since he’s cooperating with the prosecution.

House Majority Leader William Lamberth also declined to say whether he wore a wire or secretly recorded conversations for the feds.

Some of Warner’s irritation could be a little misdirected.  

McNally, an Oak Ridge Republican, wore a wire for federal investigators in Operation Rocky Top for three years starting in 1986 as part of an investigation into the state’s bingo industry and lawmaker bribes. He’s been hailed as a hero since then. 

The investigation led to 50 convictions, including one for House Democratic Leader Tommy Burnett. Democratic Rep. Ted Ray Miller of Knoxville committed suicide, as did Secretary of State Gentry Crowell.

All that considered, why should Sexton be treated any differently if he worked with the feds to ferret out corruption? 

The caveat is that McNally recorded lobbyists only, not fellow lawmakers, according to reports.

Someday they might name the speaker’s office for Sexton, depending on the case’s outcome. Or, everything could crumble if, somehow, the Casada-Cothren case implodes.

Legislative Democrats declined to say much about the matter Thursday other than they wouldn’t be surprised if someone was wearing a wire.

Of course, secret recording devices might not be what they once were. Instead of running the risk of wearing a wire and microphone around Capitol Hill, an informant only needs to press the record button on their cell phone. 

So don’t go around hugging everyone in Cordell Hull to see if they’re wired. There’s already enough illness going around that joint, and it doesn’t need to spread.

Denial ain’t just in Egypt

House and Senate Judiciary committees this week passed Speaker Sexton’s constitutional amendment giving judges discretion to deny bail for a long list of violent crimes.

Sexton took the unusual step of attending the House meeting where he discussed how mom-and-pop bail companies support the measure because it’ll help them compete with corporations. 

He also guided District Attorneys General Conference director Steve Crump into saying that bail bond companies will get people out of jail for only $1. That might be the case, if they want to starve or risk their company for one defendant. But it really isn’t relevant.

The idea is that judges should be able to refuse to set bail for people who break the law repeatedly and endanger society. Sounds logical.

The problem is we have this nitpicking thing called “presumption of innocence.” And even though probable cause hearings are used to determine whether someone likely committed a crime, they aren’t exactly the end-all, be-all for justice. 

Things can get a little complicated, especially when juries start gumming up the works.

The legislature passed the constitutional amendment on bail in 2024. In the second round, though, it must receive a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate before it can go on the next gubernatorial ballot.

Considering Sexton likely has the House wrapped up, including Democrats such as Rep. G.A. Hardaway and Rep. Joe Towns of Memphis, most of the focus lies on the Senate’s 33 members.

The measure passed the Senate Judiciary 6-3 with Chairman Todd Gardenhire voting no, along with two Democratic Sens. Sara Kyle and London Lamar. Hallway talk is that one senator flipped after seeing a colleague vote for the bill. No reason to sink yourself at this point for a lost cause.

Still, getting two-thirds could be much tougher in that august body than in the hang ’em high House.

Opening juvenile records?

In the wake of the Antioch High School shooting this year, Lamberth is amending a bill by Republican Rep. John Gillespie of Memphis to allow public access to records for juveniles accused of heinous crimes.

The Antioch High shooter, who died that day after shooting a girl to death, reportedly had a criminal history and had made threats to hurt people at school.

“We know that there’s a history there. I believe that you and every single other Tennessean, when you have a juvenile who murders someone inside the school system, that you have a right to know what was their prior criminal history, what was their psychological information,” Lamberth said Thursday.

Such information would enable the media and others to find out how he entered the school and killed a girl, Lamberth said.

Another part of the bill could force school systems to tell the parents about a threat inside a school.

This is a major departure from recent events in which Metro Police refused to divulge writings of the person who killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville’s Green Hills area. A Davidson County chancellor ruled that the writings belong to Covenant parents and are exempt from the state’s Public Records Act, a serious judicial stretch but one that hasn’t caught the ire of the General Assembly. 

Shark-infested waters

Primed by presidential pomposity, state Sen. Bo Watson is encouraging Tennessee teachers, mainly geography teachers, to use the names Gulf of America and Mount McKinley when referring to the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, the indigenous name that replaced McKinley.

Watson, a Hixson Republican and chairman of the Senate finance committee, filed a resolution this week backing President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.” 

Watson acknowledges the change doesn’t fit with Tennessee’s curriculum and says it only needs to be adjusted. 

“It’s an executive order from the president,” Watson says, no different from a bill the Senate passed this week validating an order that depends on the Centers for Disease Control, not the World Health Organization, to declare a pandemic. That dratted WHO.

Dear President Trump, would it be OK if we at least keep the Gulf of Mexico on maps and in classrooms. Otherwise, we might not know where we’re swimming while in the Redneck Riviera, which you also might consider renaming. It should be noted that Aztecs started calling the body of water in question the Gulf of Mexico many centuries ago, and maps started referring to it as such in 1550. Oh, and one more thing, if it must be referred to as the Gulf of America, does that mean John Mellencamp has to change the lyrics to his hit song ‘Little Pink Houses’?

“Go to work in some high rise / and vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico / Ooh yeah.”

You know, one day I thought I might be president, but “just like everything else those old crazy dreams kinda came and went.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

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