Renacci admits his accusations unsubstantiated

said the accusations are “absolutely untrue” and called Renacci’s tactics the work of a desperate campaign. The National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has not spent any significant money in the race, and Renacci has aired just two TV commercials.

“There’s nothing true about it,” Brown said during an interview Thursday with the Dayton Daily News about Renacci’s accusations.

The Dispatch is not publishing the accusations because Renacci has provided no evidence to support what he told the Enquirer.

“So these are unsubstantiated, I understand that,” Renacci said Thursday to Tom Roten of WVHU Radio in Huntington, W.Va., Renacci adding that the complaints should be heard if they are substantiated.

The Enquirer reported that Renacci did not offer any specifics.

He brought up the vague allegations while repeating allegations from Brown’s 1986 divorce with his first wife, now Larke Recchie. In 2004, Brown married Connie Schultz, a former columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Recchie has decried Renacci’s attacks repeatedly, saying Renacci is using the decades-old divorce records to smear her family.

While Renacci is not the first political opponent to bring up Brown’s divorce, he has been the most persistent in raising the allegations. But Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics said the attacks seem to have had no bearing on perceptions of the race.

“For as much fireworks as there have been in this race, when you talk to people involved in the national Senate campaign on both sides of the seats that are most important, Ohio does not come up,” he said, noting a “widespread feeling that Sherrod Brown is a heavy favorite in this race.”

“I do think that Renacci is trying to get something going here, but there hasn’t been much indication of momentum for the campaign,” Kondik said.

Nathan Gonzales of Inside Elections said, “I think it will take a lot to change the fundamental dynamic of the race, which is that Senator Brown is likely to win re-election. ... I think it will take a lot to change enough minds to have an impact.”

Earlier this month, Renacci aired a TV commercial charging that court records say “Brown physically abused” Recchie during their messy divorce. In Sunday’s debate, Renacci said Brown should resign from the Senate because of those 32-year-old allegations.

Brown’s campaign responded by airing a commercial in which Larke Recchie says on camera that “the political attacks against our family are just wrong ... I couldn’t be prouder to have Sherrod Brown as Ohio’s senator. I understand politics can sometimes be nasty, but Jim Renacci should be ashamed.”

Brown said Renacci is “clearly a desperate candidate just doing whatever he can do to just upend everything.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” the Democratic senator told the Dayton newspaper. His ex-wife “speaks for herself, and she doesn’t want to talk about it. She isn’t going to hold a news conference and talk about it. I insist I’ve done nothing wrong in terms of that. As Larke said, my former wife said, there were only harsh words, only angry words. That answers that.”

The developments came as The Associated Press reported that Renacci, who flies around the campaign trail aboard a Cleveland strip-club owner’s private plane, also used that pilot and his plane during his run for governor without properly reporting the cost of those flights. The AP identified about a dozen instances in which Renacci was shuttled to gubernatorial campaign events by Don Ksiezyk, who owns the Bug–a–Boo and Peek–a–Boo clubs in Cleveland, between August 2017 and January 2018, when he dropped out of the gubernatorial race to run for the Senate.