After helping orchestrate the defeat of Tennessee House Finance Committee Chair Patsy Hazlewood in Hamilton County’s Republican primary last month, conservative activist and Tennessee Conservative website owner Brandon Lewis has set his sights on her Senate counterpart.
Lewis says he is seeking to find a Republican primary challenger to Senate Finance Committee Chair Bo Watson of Hixon in 2026.
“Hey,” Lewis says in a video recently posted on his website. “Sen. Bo Watson is getting filthy rich off taxpayer money, and he’s not the only one in the General Assembly who’s cashing in with your tax dollars.”
Lewis’ assertion comes in the wake of Hazlewood’s surprise loss to Michele Reneau in House District 27, which includes the affluent town of Signal Mountain as well as Red Bank and more rural communities north of Chattanooga.
Watson’s wife, Nicole Osborn Watson, is a lobbyist. She currently works for the Holland & Knight law firm and is registered on behalf of 23 clients, including Tennessee Football Inc., which is the Tennessee Titans football team. The firm has other lobbyists who were registered to lobby on that and other measures.
“I’m talking about these state senators and these state reps who are fleecing taxpayers, and they get this tremendous conflict of interest,” Lewis said in the video.
Watson’s marriage came under scrutiny in 2022 when lawmakers approved issuing $500 million in bonds for a new covered football stadium in Nashville.
The senator noted at the time he voted against the funding for the stadium both in committee and on the floor. But he wound up voting to go along with the bonds when the House insisted on their inclusion in the spending plan. He filed a Rule 13 personal interest disclosure on the measure prior to the vote.
The decades-old rule states “that it may be considered that I have a degree of personal interest in the subject matter of this bill, but I declare that my argument and my ultimate vote answer only to my conscience and to my obligation to my constituents and the citizens of the State of Tennessee.”
“Actually,” Watson said in his email to The Tennessee Journal, “I was the sponsor of Senate Amendment 0940 … that initially removed the funding for the Titans stadium from the 2022 budget bill, Senate Bill 2897, which passed the Senate Finance, Ways and Means Committee.”
Lewis also blasted Osborne Watson as having been “involved in the Ford Motor Company corporate welfare scheme to give them billions of dollars with very few strings attached to build these electric vehicles nobody wants out in West Tennessee that apparently are not going to be built on schedule now, and ultimately, I think probably won’t be built at all.”
Lewis said Osborne Watson “gets paid hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars, to get this billion dollar deal through, and her husband sits on the Finance Committee.”
“That money goes from the Titans and Ford Motor Company into Nicole’s pocket and then into the Watson family bank account. When we report on this story, the comments are all like, this is a patent conflict of interest. This is not correct. When we have polled and surveyed people, they say, this is bad, but Bo Watson can’t seem to see it.”
“Anyone can look up my wife’s clients at the state’s Ethics Commission,” Watson said in a statement to The Tennessee Journal. “Our state’s newest automobile manufacturer is not — and never has been — one of her clients.”
A review of Tennessee Ethics Commission filings shows Ford did not use the Holland & Knight firm nor was Osborn Watson listed as a lobbyist for the automaker. Instead, it used an in-house staffer.
Lewis often denounces Republicans he disagrees with as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in Name Only.” Asked if he saw the relationship as a conflict of interest, Lewis said in an interview that he believes what’s going on is “absolutely 100% corrupt.”
“Your wife gets to dole out billions of dollars to millionaires and billionaires, those companies hand your wife a check. That check winds up in your personal bank account, just like my wife and I have shared finances,” he said.
Lewis, who once worked as field director for U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Sherwood, said “we need as many conservative challengers to go up against these people that have these voting records that are not palatable to the typical Republican primary voter. I mean, we need more folks to challenge folks like Patsy Hazlewood that are up there in the House and in the Senate.”
During the Hazlewood-Reneau campaign, the incumbent spent at least $300,000 through the pre-primary period. But she never went negative much to the dismay of her supporters, one of whom went so far as to create a website featuring Reneau in a tinfoil hat. Reneau spent $71,000. She won by 131 votes.
Local Republicans believe Hazlewood, a pro-business Republican who was more moderate on some social issues, may have lost some traditional supporters due to non-ideological factors. One cited her insistence for keeping a state mental health facility at Moccasin Bend despite influential advocates demanding the hospital be moved elsewhere. They want the facility relocated so the land in the historically rich area can become part of the Moccasin Bend Archeological District.
