FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 17, 2026

Contact: Michael Clauw, mclauw@campaignforaccountability.org, 202.780.5750

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA) filed a bar complaint asking the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Supreme Court of Ohio to investigate James Seth Metcalf, an Ohio-licensed attorney and former Deputy Treasurer and Executive Counsel to then-Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel. In February, a Franklin County judge found that two board members of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS) had breached their fiduciary duties by serving as “mere puppets” of Mr. Metcalf and his business partner in a years-long campaign to steer tens of billions of dollars in teacher pension assets to the pair’s two-person startup. Through that conduct, Mr. Metcalf appears to have violated the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct.

Read CfA’s complaint.

CfA Executive Director Michelle Kuppersmith said, “Half a million Ohio teachers and retirees trusted the STRS board to safely manage their retirement savings, but an Ohio court found that two of its members were taking direction from the very people angling to get their hands on those assets. Mr. Metcalf ghostwrote their memos, scripted their questions, fed them motions to make from the dais, and moved the conversation onto an auto-deleting messaging app. His actions seem at odds with bar rules prohibiting conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”

After leaving the Treasurer’s office, Mr. Metcalf co-founded QED Technologies, LLC with Jonathan Tremmel. In May 2024, then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued STRS board members Wade Steen and Rudy Fichtenbaum, alleging they had breached their fiduciary duties by working to redirect roughly 70 percent of STRS’s $91 billion in net assets to QED — a newly formed, two-person company with no clients, no performance track record, no SEC or FINRA registration, and no ownership of the technology it proposed to deploy.

STRS professional staff opposed the arrangement, and an independent consultant, Cliffwater LLC, retained by the board to vet QED, recommended against the engagement. Rather than accept that outcome, according to the trial record, Mr. Metcalf and Mr. Tremmel worked to influence STRS governance from the inside. Hundreds of text messages admitted at trial, along with document metadata, showed Mr. Metcalf drafting board memoranda, emails, motions, and talking points that Mr. Steen and Mr. Fichtenbaum then presented as their own. Mr. Metcalf directed Mr. Steen during board meetings and received confidential STRS documents from him. Asked about the practice on cross-examination, Mr. Metcalf testified that he had been “writing content as though I am Mr. Steen.”

On February 18, 2026, following a five-day bench trial, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Karen Held Phipps found that Mr. Steen and Mr. Fichtenbaum had “essentially act[ed] as agents for their undisclosed principals: QED, Metcalf, and Tremmel,” and had engaged in secret communications with QED representatives aimed at undermining Cliffwater and steering STRS funds to QED’s control. The court removed the sitting board chair, permanently barred both men from future service on the STRS board, and found that public confidence in STRS “suffered greatly” as a result. Mr. Metcalf was not a party to the case, and the court made no ruling as to his liability — but its findings describe his role in detail.

CfA’s complaint asks the Office of Disciplinary Counsel to investigate whether that conduct violated Rule 8.4(c), which prohibits conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, and Rule 8.4(h), which prohibits conduct that adversely reflects on a lawyer’s fitness to practice law. As the complaint notes, the Ohio rules reach lawyers acting in a business capacity, and the Supreme Court of Ohio has held that the integrity of the profession “can be maintained only if the conduct of the individual attorney is above reproach.”

Ms. Kuppersmith continued: “A board weighing whether to hand over billions of dollars in beneficiary assets has an obvious right to know who is making the arguments before them: their own fiduciaries or the people trying to win the business. The Ohio Disciplinary Counsel should investigate whether Mr. Metcalf’s deception violated bar rules.”

Campaign for Accountability is a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life and hold those who act at the expense of the public good accountable for their actions.