The chairman of the Frederick County Board of Supervisors left his Google calendar open to the internet. Here is what was in it.

Part 1Meetings with Applicants Before Votes

Sept. 24, 2024 was the day before the Fruit Hill data center vote. Jewell started that day early. He met at 7 a.m. at a Cracker Barrel with Chris Mohn of Greenway Engineering, the applicant’s engineer, and Tim Stowe, chairman of the Planning Commission. Mohn had sent the invitation. Later that day, at 1 p.m., he was booked at the Aikens Group offices with Jason Aikens for reasons unknown. What we do know is that the next evening the Board denied Fruit Hill 4–3. Jewell sided with the applicant and voted against denial.^{Source 1} He said nothing about either meeting.

• Sep242024Jewell-Stowe-Mohn
• Sep242024Jewell/Aikens

This meeting isn’t an isolated occurrence. We found that this happens again and again: whenever the calendar shows Jewell meeting an applicant, he votes in favor of the applicant. The applicant or its engineer usually sent the invitation: Greenway Engineering, Equus Capital Partners, Carmeuse, the Aikens Group, Stowe Engineering, the Data Center Coalition, etc. They also picked the time and the place, sometimes over a dinner. The only thing the public received was a hearing.

• He had dinner with Equus, then later was going to vote on Equus’s land. On Dec. 3, 2024, Aikens set up a dinner for Jewell with Daniel M. DiLella of Equus. Six months later Equus signed to buy Aikens’s Middletown land (May 31, 2025).^{Source 2} Eighteen days after that, Jewell voted to study it.^{Source 3} Equus is the Virginia Technology Park applicant.
• Fourteen meetings with the applicant’s lawyer. Ty Lawson, a land-use attorney and 2023 donor, is on 14 entries. On Aug. 14, 2024 they met at 1:30 p.m.; that evening Jewell voted to approve Lawson’s Snowden Bridge case.^{Source 4Source 5} They met again on Jan. 30, 2025; on Feb. 12 Jewell moved to approve Lawson’s Appleland amendment.^{Source 6}
• Breakfast with the applicant, the morning before his hearing. Aikens booked Jewell for 7 a.m. on Feb. 17, 2026. The next day the Planning Commission heard Aikens’s rezoning, REZ #01-26.^{Source 7} Aikens presented it, then recused himself at the Board.^{Source 8}
• A site visit, then a vote he chaired. On Feb. 14, 2023, Stowe forwarded Jewell an invitation to visit Carmeuse’s Middletown quarry site. On Oct. 4, 2023 Jewell chaired the Planning Commission and voted to recommend Carmeuse’s rezoning. Stowe and Aikens abstained from that vote,^{Source 9} but Jewell never disclosed that he had met with Carmeuse and Stowe.

• Dec32024Aikens/Jewell/Dilella
• Aug142024Meeting with Ty Lawson
• Jan302025Ty Lawson Meeting
• Feb172026Jewell/Aikens
• Feb142023FW: Meet with Mr Jewel and Mr Harbaugh

Twenty-five times, the record shows a vote preceded by a private meeting with the applicant’s side without any disclosure. You can find more in the timeline.

Part 2Tim Stowe, Shockey and the TVRC Circle

The man who set up many of those meetings was Tim Stowe, the current chairman of the Planning Commission, which is the body that hears these applications first. He also happens to be a donor to Jewell. In the fall of 2024, with data center applications before the county, Stowe organized Jewell’s data center meetings himself. On Oct. 16 he scheduled “Frederick Co data center meeting agenda development” and invited the Data Center Coalition, the industry’s trade group. On Dec. 12 he scheduled a “Breakfast to discuss data ctrs” and invited an executive of Howard Shockey & Sons, whose executives had given $3,000 to Jewell’s 2023 campaign.

Earlier the previous year, on Apr. 18, 2023, Jewell met John Good and Gray Farland at Shockey. Good gave $1,000 the next day. Farland gave $1,000 on May 18.^{Source 10}

• Oct162024Frederick Co data center meeting agenda develo…
• Dec122024Breakfast to discuss data ctrs
• Apr182023meet John Good, Gray Farland and JJ

One week before Fruit Hill, the Data Center Coalition invited him to a legislators’ tour and lunch, with three House of Delegates addresses and Stowe on the invitation. The calendar doesn’t say who paid for the lunch or how much that lunch cost; his Statement of Economic Interests should, but doesn’t.

On Aug. 28, 2025, Stowe convened two back-to-back sessions in the county’s Planning conference room, titled for SVEC and Rappahannock Electric, the utilities that serve Frederick County. He invited Jewell, Supervisor Bob Liero and two candidates, none of them at a county email address. No public notice of either session has been found. Two weeks after Jewell was appointed Board chairman in October 2025,^{Source 11} Stowe also put “JJ campaign planning” on his calendar. The Planning Commission’s chairman was organizing the Board chairman’s campaign planning.

• Sep182024Legislator Data Center Tours/Lunch
• Aug282025SVEC Discussion [In-person]
• Oct232025JJ campaign planning

All the while, Jewell sat on the Top of Virginia Regional Chamber’s Public Policy Committee, the body the Chamber’s strategic plan assigns to shaping local ordinances, next to Chris West, a registered lobbyist. He is on every invitation from March 2023 on. On the day the Board passed its data center rules,^{Source 12} the committee met at noon. And on Aug. 14, 2026, Aikens scheduled a “Board of Supervisors GOP Meeting.” If three or more supervisors attended and discussed county business, Virginia law made it a public meeting that required notice.^{Source 13}

• Mar12023TVRC Public Policy Mtg (Hybrid)
• Sep232026TVRC Public Policy Mtg (Hybrid) -
• Aug142026Board of Supervisors GOP Meeting

Part 3The Missing Job and His IT World

Jewell’s calendar shows that he has three work addresses: the county’s, FCN’s and DWP Associates’. His Statement of Economic Interests only lists FCN and JSEB Consulting.^{Source 14} It does not list DWP, the employer on his Maximus and Granicus invitations through 2025 and 2026. Knowingly leaving a required source of income off that Statement is a Class 1 misdemeanor in Virginia.^{Source 15}

Under the DWP name, in August 2025, Jewell ran the oral-presentation sessions for Maximus’s bid on a U.S. Senate IT contract. On that bid team sat staff from CDW Government, a company Frederick County buys from; the county paid it for Nutanix equipment in September 2023.^{Source 16} His other employer, FCN, is a major “top partner” of Nutanix. What we have is a sitting supervisor, coaching a bid team alongside one of the county’s vendors, while being on the IT committee.

The data center industry was also part of his work long before it came before him as a supervisor. Most of us are aware of that, but until now, we didn’t have a clear answer to what his involvement truly is. Iron Mountain, a data center operator, appears on 33 entries from 2020 to 2022, starting with a meeting titled “Data Center Talking Points.” One Iron Mountain employee even met him at Paper Mill Place for breakfast! Iron Mountain has no application that we know of before the county, but if Iron Mountain became a tenant or end-user of a data center that located here, his company would directly benefit from that decision.

• Oct22026Granicus x DWPA: Intro call with Ashley and Jo…
• Aug152025US Senate ITSC-V: Onsite Orals Preparation
• Jan172020Meeting: John Jewell- Data Center Talking Points

Part 4The Exposure

Invitations from county staff, Frederick Water, the EDA, the Planning Commission, the Finance Committee and regional boards all went to a personal Gmail account that was publicly available. Under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act a public record is defined by its content, not by whose server holds that information (Va. Code § 2.2-3701).^{Source 17} What is interesting is that Jewell kept that public record outside the county’s systems in his Gmail, then left it open to the entire internet. What’s even more notable is that the habit of using personal accounts is a county-wide problem. County and Frederick Water business also went to Gary Oates, Bob Wells, Mike Guevremont, Bob Liero and two planning commissioners at their personal AOL, Comcast, iCloud, Gmail and Outlook accounts. In December 2025, the County Administrator sent new-member orientation to two of them that way.

• Dec92025New Member Meeting w/ Chairman and Mike B.

By never setting the calendar to private, Jewell published everyone who appeared on it. He exposed about a thousand email addresses, 277 personal, 280 government and school, and 64 federal, including some sixty at the U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms. 429 entries carry meeting links, IDs or passcodes, 175 of them a passcode; 155 came from federal contractors or the Senate. The credentials to Senate bid calls and other government meetings sat open to anyone who might have had the link. Did his employer or colleagues agree to that?

• Aug122026Senate CSS Opportunity Tag-Up
• Aug152025US Senate ITSC-V: Onsite Orals Preparation