On Friday, September 11, 2026, the Washington Post published what it found on the Facebook page of the man running political operations for a sitting United States senator's re-election campaign.

His profile picture showed SS soldiers holding captured Soviet banners. The men in it belonged to Hitler's personal bodyguard division.

Jon Husted fired him the same day.

Who he was and what he did for Husted

Stephen B. Woytek is 25. He joined Husted's Senate campaign in August as its political director — not a volunteer, not an intern, but the person in charge of political strategy for an incumbent senator in one of the most-watched races in the country.

An account carrying Woytek's name and photo also kept a Spotify playlist called "Tales From Rhodesia," described as being for someone "homesick for a place that no longer exists." Rhodesia was the name the government of what is now Zimbabwe used after declaring independence from Britain in 1965 rather than accept a transition to majority rule; a small white minority held political control over a much larger Black population until 1980. White supremacists have adopted it as a symbol for exactly that reason.

Woytek pushed back on what the images suggest about him. "I want to be unequivocal: I reject the racist and antisemitic ideology the SS and Nazi Germany represented," he told the Post. "I believe it is important to educate our younger generations, which is why I participate in historical reenactments."

Husted's campaign didn't defend the posts. It defended the man.

Here is what Husted's campaign said:

"Steve serves our country honorably as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and is a proud graduate of The Citadel. He studies military history and routinely reenacts historical battles. While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others. Sen. Husted demands better of those who represent him. Upon learning about the social media posts today, Sen. Husted made the immediate decision to part ways."

Read that again. Two sentences of character reference, a sentence conceding bad judgment, a line about Husted's standards, and the firing last.

"Sen. Husted demands better of those who represent him" is a strange thing to say on the day you find out who has been representing you. Husted found out from a newspaper, after Woytek had already spent a month on the payroll running the campaign's political shop.

That is the part that should bother Ohio voters. Not that a 25-year-old had bad judgment on Facebook — that a campaign for the United States Senate never looked.

This is the second one in two months

In July, NBC News reported that Andrew Havas had resigned as a volunteer county chair for Husted's campaign in Franklin County. Havas pleaded guilty in 2009 in a Mahoning County case involving a 15-year-old, when he was 22. He served 90 days in jail and was ordered to have no contact with the child. The original charge was sexual misconduct with a minor, later reduced to a single misdemeanor assault count.

Havas resigned after NBC News asked the campaign about it.

Husted's campaign said Havas "did not disclose" his criminal history. We wrote about that one at the time, in a post about Husted's own record on child sexual abuse — as Ohio House speaker in 2006, he stripped out the provision of the state's clergy abuse bill that would have let survivors of decades-old abuse sue.

So the pattern in two months is: a county chair with a guilty plea in a case involving a 15-year-old, and a political director using an SS photograph as his public profile picture. Both were found by reporters. Both times the campaign's explanation was that it hadn't known.

A campaign that doesn't know who it is hiring twice in two months is not unlucky. It is not checking.

Update: Husted's campaigns took money from a Nazi SS reenactor, too

Updated September 22, 2026.

Five days after the firing, Husted talked about it himself. In a September 16 interview he said Woytek had been "highly recommended," that "he's a lieutenant in the National Guard, and he does war reenactments," and that some of the photos "gave a very bad impression of where he might have been ideologically," TiffinOhio.net reported.

The same outlet then went through Ohio campaign-finance records and found that this isn't the first time Husted's campaigns have been close to someone who dressed up as the SS. It reported that Richard Iott gave $5,000 to Husted's campaign for governor in March 2017, and another $5,000 to the DeWine–Husted campaign in May 2018, after Husted dropped out of the governor's race to become DeWine's running mate.

Iott is not an obscure name. In 2010 he was the Republican nominee for Congress in northwest Ohio when photos surfaced of him in a Waffen-SS uniform with a group that reenacted the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking. It was a national story. Then-House Republican Whip Eric Cantor publicly repudiated him. His defense back then was the same one Woytek used this month: it was historical reenactment.

Husted's campaigns took his money seven and eight years after that story broke. In April 2026, Husted joined the Senate's bipartisan task force on combating antisemitism, saying, "Antisemitism has no place in our country or anywhere in the world."

We have seen this exact story this year

In August, the Washington Post found Nazi and KKK images on the X account of a former staffer for Georgia Senate candidate Mike Collins — the fourth person in Collins' orbit caught with white nationalist or antisemitic material.

Same newspaper. Same kind of images. Same discovery route: a reporter looked at a public social media account that the campaign employing the person apparently never opened.

What Husted has actually said about extremism

Husted has spent this campaign talking about who is dangerous in Ohio. He has said he may strip 19 states of their federal highway money over the driver's licenses they issue to immigrants, citing a fatal crash that investigators have not tied to anyone's immigration status. A Senate Republican ad boosting him used a dead Ohio family's photo to warn about "dangerous illegals," and the driver charged in that crash is a U.S. citizen.

He also told Fox News that his opponent backed "Social Security payments for illegals." PolitiFact rated it false.

A senator with that much to say about who is dangerous had a man with SS imagery on his Facebook page running his political operation, and found out from the newspaper.

What the record shows

Jon Husted's Senate campaign hired Stephen Woytek as political director in August 2026 and fired him roughly a month later, on the day the Washington Post reported that his Facebook profile picture showed soldiers from Hitler's personal SS division and that an account in his name kept a playlist celebrating white-minority-ruled Rhodesia. It is the second person Husted's campaign has parted with in two months over a record a reporter uncovered first — the other, a Franklin County volunteer chair, pleaded guilty in a 2009 case involving a 15-year-old. In both cases the campaign's defense was that it did not know. Separately, campaigns supporting Husted took $10,000 in 2017 and 2018 from Rich Iott, whose Nazi SS reenactments had cost him national Republican support in 2010.

Source

Reporting from TiffinOhio.net (the Iott contributions), The Washington Sun, Newsweek, and the Washington Post's original story. Photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP, via The Washington Sun.