Attention indicted governors everywhere: This is what a mug shot looks like.
The most obvious news about Tim Nolan, a former district judge for Campbell County, Kentucky, and now a member of the Campbell County school board, is that he's been indicted on charges of human trafficking of a minor, as well as "inducing a minor to engage in sexual activity" and one count of providing alcohol to a minor. The Cincinnati Enquirer notes that the court documents "don't give much detail about the incident or incidents that led to the charges," but that the criminal complaint accuses Nolan of inducing a minor into illegal sexual activity in August 2016; the complaint doesn't mention the minor's age.
The Enquirer adds that prosecuting Nolan my be procedurally tricky since he was a judge in Campbell County during the 1970s and '80s, and his daughter, Taunya Nolan Jack, is currently serving as Campbell County Circuit Court Clerk. To avoid conflicts, all court documents are being filed in nearby Boone County and the case is being presided over by a judge from outside of the area.
Nolan is apparently a pretty big deal in northern Kentucky politics: He served as Campbell County chair for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign (we have no reason to think Trump had any awareness of him, however) and is described by the River City News thusly:
He is an outspoken and controversial figure in local politics. Last year he sued the creator of GOPfacts.org, which took aim at Nolan and others, and specifically referred to Nolan as a vehement racist and posted a photo that purported to be of Nolan in a Ku Klux Klan robe.
So that's a pretty weird digression: Nolan alleged last June that GOPfacts.org had defamed him by reposting the photo from Nolan's Facebook page. Nolan's attorney said the guy in the Klan outfit wasn't Nolan at all, but actually a friend who thinks it's hilarious to dress in KKK robes for Halloween because the friend has two black grandchildren "that he loves to death," which made it all a harmless joke, HA HA. The website's owners said they had done nothing wrong since Nolan had posted the image to his own Facebook page, with no names attributed, and the caption "Comn (sic) out to the Rabbit Hole [bar] and join the clan." After the controversy over the KKK photo, Nolan was kicked off the Kentucky Boxing and Wrestling Commission, to which he'd been appointed by Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin.
If there's been a resolution to the lawsuit against the website, we haven't seen it in our admittedly limited searching, because we really want to focus on the portion of Nolan's political career just prior to his arrest: In November, Nolan was elected to the Campbell County School Board, which serves suburban Cincinnati. And what was his platform? You know, the sort of thing a rightwing Republican with no experience in teaching or school administration in his life might propose. Running against an incumbent school board member and former teacher with 27 years in the classroom, Nolan advocated school vouchers and also had this brilliant idea:
Nolan [advocated] eliminating property tax revenue for schools gradually. “We can no longer afford to fund the public schools on the back of the homeowner,” Nolan said.
Naming schools and other “innovative thinking” needs to happen to come up with sources of revenue with the business community, Nolan said.
That's right. The citizens of suburban Cincinnati elected the man who promised they wouldn't have to pay for schools anymore, because the good corporate citizens of PepsiCo and Exxon would do it out of the goodness of their wallets.
Or Brawndo. It has what kids crave.
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[ River City News and KSBA via RawStory / Cincinnati.com / Cincinnati.com again]
These things happen to all of us. At least you didn't take it out on the driver
What would Travis do?