GOP Rep. Andy Ogles wins Tennessee reelection while under FBI probe of campaign finances

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles has won reelection in Tennessee while facing an FBI investigation into his campaign finances.

Ogles, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, defeated Democrat Maryam Abolfazli in the Republican-favoring district that includes a section of left-leaning Nashville and winds through five conservative-voting counties.

“The fate of this country is hanging by a thread,” Ogles said in a victory speech. “And you’ve got a Democratic Party that doesn’t like the fact that you’re conservative.”

In August, Ogles said on social media the FBI had taken his cellphone in an investigation of discrepancies in his campaign finance filings from his 2022 race. He said the FBI took the phone the day after he defeated a well-funded Republican primary opponent, Nashville Metro Councilmember Courtney Johnston, by 12 percentage points.

Agents also have a warrant to access his personal email account, but have not looked through it yet, according to court filings.

Ogles has said he is cooperating and is confident that investigators will find his errors were “based on honest mistakes.”

Ogles reported making a $320,000 loan to his campaign committee in 2022. He later amended his filings in May to show that he only loaned his campaign $20,000, telling news outlets that he originally meant to “pledge” $320,000 but that pledge was mistakenly included in his campaign reports.

Ogles also was the subject of a January ethics complaint by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center over his personal and campaign finances, in which the group compared him to expelled GOP U.S. Rep. George Santos of New York.

Ogles won the seat in 2022 after Republicans redrew the state’s congressional districts to their advantage after the last census, splitting the heavily Democratic Nashville area into three seats and forcing Nashville’s then-Democratic congressman, Jim Cooper, into retirement. With the seat flipped, Tennessee’s delegation to the U.S. House went to eight Republicans and one Democrat —- Rep. Steve Cohen in Memphis.

In one of the other seats that include Nashville, Republican Rep. Mark Green defeated Democrat Megan Barry, a former Nashville mayor. Green, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, had announced in February that he wouldn’t run again, but reconsidered. Barry was attempting a political comeback after resigning as mayor in scandal in 2018 when she was a rising Democratic figure.

The rest of Tennessee’s U.S. House delegation also won reelection, including Cohen and Republican Reps. Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, John Rose and David Kustoff.

In January 2023, Ogles was among the Republican holdouts in Kevin McCarthy’s prolonged speakership nomination, voting against him 11 times before switching to support him. When McCarthy was ousted in October 2023, Ogles voted against removing him.

Later, Ogles ultimately said that he was “mistaken” when he said he graduated with an international relations degree after a local news outlet raised questions over whether he had embellished his resume.

“When I pulled my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken. My degree is in Liberal Studies,” he said.

Since his 2022 election, Ogles has been a vocal critic of President Joe Biden’s administration and last year filed articles to impeach Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. He filed new articles to impeach Harris after she became the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination following Biden’s exit from the 2024 race.

Ogles is a former mayor of Maury County, south of Nashville. He also served as state director for Americans for Prosperity, which spent money trying to get him reelected.

His opponent, Abolfazli, is from Nashville and started Rise and Shine TN, a nonprofit organization that has advocated for gun control changes in the wake of a Christian elementary school shooting in Nashville that killed three children and three adults in March 2023.

Jonathan Mattise, The Associated Press