Twelve days before Ohio’s 9th Congressional District Republican primary, the race’s two frontrunners find themselves on opposite ends of the same problem: one accused of running a covert smear operation against a rival, the other the target of it.
The Toledo Blade reported Thursday that a website titled “Liberal Fraud Josh Williams” — which publishes Williams’ voting record, legislation he has supported, and sexually explicit Facebook posts Williams has publicly and repeatedly denied posting — carries image metadata listing Alec Faggion as the author of several photos on the site. Public financial disclosure records show Faggion owns AMF Political LLC, a Republican consulting firm based in Lansing. Campaign finance records reviewed by the Blade show Derek Merrin’s campaign made payments to AMF Political in both February and March. No other candidate in the race paid the firm.
The site carries no “paid for by” disclosure identifying who funded it — only a copyright notice with all rights reserved. A spokesman for Merrin’s campaign told the Blade the firm was paid for campaign management services, but did not respond to questions about Faggion’s connection to the photos. TiffinOhio.net also reached out to Merrin’s campaign and had not received a response at the time of publication.
Williams responded sharply. “Promoting unfounded claims and recycled stories that have already been disproven is misleading and far below the standard voters in northwest Ohio deserve,” he said in a statement. “My character and values are worth far more than any political campaign, and it is unfortunate Derek does not feel the same way.”
Williams added that he had once supported Merrin — backing his bid for Ohio House speaker in 2023 and his 2024 congressional campaign against Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur, which Merrin lost by fewer than 2,400 votes.
The sexually explicit posts at the center of the site are not new. TiffinOhio.net previously reported on the posts, which date to roughly 2018–2022 and were first surfaced by Ohio political outlet The Rooster in May 2023. Williams has maintained they did not originate from his account. “No one has ever shown me where they appear on my Facebook ever,” he told the Blade. “I’ve said it since the beginning, but the comments were never made by me, and I don’t even know who made them up.”
Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, told the Blade that opposition websites are common in contested primaries and carry broad First Amendment protection — but that the absence of any attribution is notable. “Oftentimes a ‘paid for by’ can be a PAC or a political entity,” Loge said. “They could have a super benign name … that doesn’t tell you anything, but that’s pretty much the disclosure.”
The Blade’s report landed on the same day that a separate candidate in the race faced her own damaging story. TiffinOhio.net reported Friday on allegations from an anonymous former Trump campaign worker who told the Daily Mail that Madison Sheahan — then 23 and serving as state election operations director for the Trump campaign’s Ohio operation — engaged in a secret two-year sexual relationship with her beginning in October 2020, when the woman was 19 and briefly in a direct reporting line to Sheahan. The accuser described the relationship in three words: “Toxic. Volatile. Controlling.” Sheahan’s Ohio campaign manager, Bob Paduchik, flatly denied the account. “Madison was not and has never been in a relationship with a subordinate,” Paduchik said.
The five Republicans on the May 5 ballot are Williams, Merrin, Sheahan, Air National Guard Lt. Col. Alea Nadeem, and health care worker Anthony Campbell. The winner faces Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, in a district redrawn to lean Republican by roughly nine points under maps approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission in October 2025.
