This brief interview just barely hits the highpoints of a comprehensive article in The Intercept. that exposes Manchin as a thoroughly corrupt old school politician.

Here's a short excerpt from the story:

Puccio’s firm was also the appraiser for a $22 million armory project in Fairmont, which was another subject of investigation, according to the Gazette-Mail. The main contractor for that project was Omni Associates, an architectural firm previously located in the Manchin Professional Building in Fairmont where Manchin’s family coal company, Enersystems, was also headquartered and where Manchin’s cousin Tim operated a law firm. The two senior principals of Omni have donated thousands to Manchin since 2000.

Puccio had also played a role, which has not been previously reported, in the scheme to charge West Virginians more for electricity in order to keep Enersystems’ biggest customer viable. For years, the main buyer of coal from Enersystems was the Grant Town Power Plant, which then sold energy to Mon Power, a major electric company in West Virginia. The regulated rate it passed on to consumers, $27.25 per megawatt, kept down the price it could pay Manchin’s company and threatened the economic viability of the plant. Rather than switch to a more economically efficient energy source, Manchin simply pushed to force ratepayers to pay more.

In 2006, according to a source familiar with the rate change, Puccio, then serving as Manchin’s chief of staff, was instructed by Manchin to meet with Mon Power lobbyists so that they would petition the public service commission to increase the Grant Town plant’s megawatt rate to $34.25, soliciting an additional $4.5 million dollars per year from ratepayers and bailing out the main buyer of Enersystems coal. As Sludge reported earlier this month, Puccio has been registered as a lobbyist since 2017 for the parent company of Mon Power.