I went back through the record. I pulled the publicly available filings on the Desmond case. I reviewed the 108 page November 17 2021 filing that contains the February 14 2019 memo from Senior Assistant Attorney General Daniel Kasaris. I matched it against the May 24 2019 letter from Senior Assistant Attorney General Tiffany L. Carwile that transmitted that memo as the response to a subpoena served on May 17 2019 in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Case No. 18 CV 771. I checked the 2022 settlement reports from the Chandra Law Firm, the Vindicator, WFMJ and later coverage to confirm the payout amount and timing. I also checked federal filings and public reporting on other misconduct allegations tied to the same prosecutor. I am satisfied that the core allegation in my grievance is correct. The memo contains an impossible timeline and unverified claims and it was sent to the very prosecutor whose office was under attack by a whistleblower. That is enough to trigger the professional conduct rules.

I will restate the facts as cleanly as possible.

1. The underlying case

Former Mahoning County assistant prosecutor Martin Desmond was fired in 2017 after raising internal concerns about how major criminal cases were handled in the office. Local coverage in 2018 and 2019 confirms that Desmond said he was terminated for challenging the handling of cases like State v. Marquan White and State v. Kalilo Robinson.

Desmond sued Prosecutor Paul J. Gains, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Linette Stratford and the county in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, Case No. 18 CV 771. He claimed retaliation, defamation and related relief. That case settled on April 7 2022 for 550,000 dollars. That figure is confirmed by the Chandra Law Firm press release, by multiple Youngstown based news outlets and by Gains’s own office. The settlement was reached on the eve of Gains’s cross examination.

The settlement was not minor. It followed a record that already showed misconduct inside the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office. The Seventh District Court of Appeals in January 2022 had described Stratford’s internal memo about Desmond’s conduct, which is part of the background of the firing.

2. The subpoena to Kasaris and the May 24 2019 response

On May 17 2019, Desmond’s counsel issued a subpoena duces tecum to Senior Assistant Attorney General Daniel Kasaris. The goal was to get documents about the Mahoning County matters that Desmond had raised, including the Scott Cochran prostitution investigation and the claimed political protection network. The Attorney General’s Office responded on May 24 2019 through Senior Assistant Attorney General Tiffany L. Carwile. Her letter said the request was vague and overbroad and that Kasaris was not a party, not a witness and did not know the claims. She still attached the February 14 2019 memo from Kasaris. That memo is the document at issue. It is reproduced in the grievance. It is the same memo that later showed up inside the 108 page November 17 2021 Desmond filing. 

So we know the memo went from Kasaris to the Attorney General’s Office, then to Desmond’s lawyer, and that Gains was looped in. The 2021 filing contains an email from May 22 2019 in which Gains tells Kasaris he received the subpoena and in which Kasaris replies that he forwarded it to constitutional law and that his guess was that they would move to quash it. That proves Kasaris was actively engaged in managing the subpoena response for a case in which Gains was the defendant.

3. What the February 14 2019 memo actually says

The memo is four pages inside the 2021 filing. The header states:

MEMO: TO FILE

FROM: DAN KASARIS

DATE: FEBRUARY 14 2019

He says his former bosses, Matt Donahue and Steve Schumacher, authorized him to write it and to forward it to Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul Gains. He says that on or about August 2017 he got a call from Donahue to handle a matter involving Attorney Scott Cochran. He says he met Martin Desmond at the Mahoning County Drug Task Force in August or September 2016 with Assistant Ohio Attorney General Chris Stickan to learn about the case. He says that in October 2016 he was formally appointed a Special Assistant Mahoning County Prosecutor to investigate and or prosecute Scott Cochran. Those three dates cannot all be accurate. A 2017 referral cannot lead to a 2016 meeting and a 2016 appointment. That is the central defect.

The memo then describes the four parts of what Kasaris calls Desmond’s conspiracy. He lists:

A 2012 political donation shakedown by Senior Assistant Prosecutor Nick Modarelli in the Austintown County Court that Cochran allegedly knew about.

A claim that the 2012 Mahoning County prosecutor primary was the most corrupt in county history, with Cochran helping Gains get reelected by releasing damaging information about the opponent.

A claim that Attorney Lynn Maro shared a protected witness list which led to a witness getting killed in another state and that Gains protected her because she represented Cochran.

A claim that Assistant Prosecutor Jack Ausnehmer took money from a defendant or her family, that 1,000 dollars was kicked up to Gains, that attorney John Juhasz represented Ausnehmer, and that this explained why Gains would not prosecute Cochran.

For the Maro incident, Kasaris said that based on his personal knowledge since 2013 he knew that Gains and Maro did not like each other, which is why he saw no reason for Gains to protect her. He also said he later learned the list was sealed rather than marked counsel only, so Maro could show it to her client. He did not attach any docket entry from Judge Jack Durkin’s court. He did not provide an order number. He did not identify the case caption. That part of the memo stands on assertion. My grievance correctly notes that public sources do not contain a reported Mahoning County case in which a sealed witness list was shared, the witness was killed in another state, and disciplinary action was declined. 

For the Ausnehmer allegation, he wrote that FBI Agent Todd Wurth told him that the FBI had investigated and that the United States Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute and sent it back to Gains for lack of evidence. Again, there is no attached FBI document. There is no USAO letter. There is no Mahoning County docket citation. It is hearsay offered to knock down Desmond’s allegation. The grievance notes that there is no public FBI or USAO record confirming this. That is accurate. 

4. Why the timeline problem matters

This is not a typo. The memo was written more than two years after the 2016 meeting and the 2016 appointment it describes. If the meeting and appointment were in 2016, then the referral date given in the memo is wrong. If the referral date is right, then the meeting and appointment dates are wrong. Either way, the lawyer who wrote the memo put an impossible sequence into a document that was later used in a civil case to resist discovery. The grievance calls this a knowing error because court records in the Desmond litigation confirm 2016 events. That is a rational inference. The memo itself shows the conflict. 

Candor toward the tribunal in Ohio is in Rule 3.3. A lawyer cannot make a false statement of fact to a tribunal. A subpoena response sent in active litigation is part of the tribunal record. When the memo went out through Carwile, it became the state’s representation of what happened between 2016 and 2019. No correction appears in the record we have. That is why I said in the first draft that the Office of Disciplinary Counsel should look at it. I keep that conclusion.

5. How this affected the Desmond case

Desmond finally got 550,000 dollars in April 2022. That is in the news releases, in the Vindicator, in WFMJ and in the Chandra Law post. The county did not demand confidentiality. The settlement came right after Gains had to admit during the hearing that an FBI and internal memorandum showed misconduct in the prosecutor’s office. That is in the law firm’s write up.

So we have two competing narratives in the record.

One narrative is in that 2019 memo. It says Desmond drew circles. It says he made extreme claims. It says his discovery label was wrong. It says he disliked Stratford. It says he was annoyed that Assistant Prosecutor Ken Cardinal told Gains about the Cochran investigation. All of that is in the memo.

The other narrative is in the 2022 settlement coverage. That coverage says the case settled right when Desmond was about to cross examine Gains. It says the settlement followed revelation of FBI and internal memoranda showing misconduct inside the office. That is not Desmond talking. That is the plaintiff’s law firm and local press describing what caused the county to pay.

When a state lawyer supplies a 2019 memo that makes the whistleblower sound unreliable and that memo is then used in a case that later settles for more than half a million dollars, the memo deserves scrutiny. The user of the memo benefited from it at the time. The later settlement shows the whistleblower’s position was not baseless.

6. Pattern evidence on Kasaris

There is federal civil litigation over the Mortgage Fraud Task Force and over the death of Dawn Pasela that repeatedly names Senior Assistant Attorney General Daniel Kasaris and former Assistant United States Attorney Mark Bennett. Those filings accuse Kasaris of suppressing exculpatory evidence and of improper relationships with a government witness. The Northern District of Ohio opinion in Viola v. Ohio Attorney General in 2021 summarizes Tony Viola’s allegations and identifies Kasaris as the Senior Assistant Attorney General involved.

There are public advocacy posts in 2023 and 2025 repeating these allegations, including one that says newly obtained documents show the FBI received a tip that Kasaris and Bennett were recorded talking about Dawn Pasela’s death. These sources are advocacy and not judicial findings, so I will treat them as corroborating concern and not as final proof. They still show that the same name keeps appearing in misconduct contexts.

That pattern matters here because it shows the February 14 2019 memo was not a one off strange document by an otherwise spotless official. It fits a history of contested conduct.

7. The Mahoning County context

The memo says Desmond called the 2012 Mahoning County prosecutor primary the most corrupt in county history. Kasaris says he is a native of Youngstown and found that hard to believe. He then immediately admits that he was aware of the subject matter, that Cochran did release damaging information about Gains’s opponent right before the primary and that the release may have substantially helped Gains win. That admission supports Desmond’s allegation that politics and prosecution were mixed. It is not exculpatory. It shows that Modarelli’s letter on county letterhead for Cochran was real and that it was considered a mistake. It shows that an assistant prosecutor was lobbying for a defense lawyer who had helped the elected prosecutor in a primary.

We can also see from public sources that Cochran had professional trouble. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s 2018 order in Mahoning County Bar Association v. Cochran shows discipline for misconduct. That fits Desmond’s position that Cochran was a problem figure. It does not support the idea that Desmond invented him.

8. Why this is a disciplinary matter

Ohio has disciplined lawyers for filing false or misleading material. Disciplinary Counsel v. Fowerbaugh is the obvious example. My grievance cites it. That case held that an actual suspension is the presumptive sanction for a lawyer who deliberately lies to a court. Here we have a memo that was produced in response to compulsory process, that contains a sequence of dates that cannot all be true, that asserts personal knowledge of relationships inside Mahoning County to undercut the whistleblower, and that reports a federal declination without providing any documentation. That is a violation of Rule 3.3, Rule 4.1 and Rule 8.4(c) as explained in the grievance. 

9. What accountability should look like

First. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel should obtain the original February 14 2019 memo, the native email headers for the April 3 2019 transmission from Kasaris to Stratford and Rubright, and the May 24 2019 Carwile letter. All are in the 2021 Desmond filing.

Second. The office should interview Matt Donahue, Steve Schumacher and Chris Stickan. The question is simple. Were you directing or supervising Kasaris on the Cochran matter in 2016. If yes, the 2017 date is false. If no, the 2016 appointment is false.

Third. The office should ask the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio and the FBI whether an investigation of Mahoning County Assistant Prosecutor Jack Ausnehmer was ever opened and declined in the way Kasaris described. If there is no record, that confirms the grievance allegation that this was unsubstantiated hearsay. 

Fourth. The office should examine communications between the Attorney General’s Office and Mahoning County about this subpoena because the May 22 2019 email shows that Gains was in direct contact with Kasaris about quashing. That blurs the line between an independent state prosecutor and a local defendant

10. Why this belongs on The Exposer

The Exposer is for public accountability. The uploaded grievance in this matter lists my name, website and contact. It was filed on October 24 2025. I consented to release. I did that because this kind of state level litigation gamesmanship is usually hidden. This one is not hidden any longer. 

Final position

I am keeping the claim. The February 14 2019 memo by Senior Assistant Attorney General Daniel Kasaris is materially unreliable because its own dates conflict. The memo was sent on May 24 2019 to Desmond’s lawyer with objections to a subpoena that Kasaris knew about and that Gains wanted quashed. The memo presented personal beliefs about Mahoning County relationships as if they were facts. The memo recited an alleged FBI declination without proof. The memo was used in a case that later cost Mahoning County 550,000 dollars after the prosecutor was confronted with FBI and internal memoranda. The Ohio disciplinary authorities should open a file and test every statement in that memo against the record.