The ongoing saga of massive welfare fraud and corruption with a capital “C” continues in Mississippi. On Friday, lawyers for welfare scam defendant Austin Smith filed a subpoena for former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant’s last few years of digital communications with former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. This move comes as Smith is being sued by Mississippi for the return of more than $425,000 in welfare contracts paid to him and his nonprofit.
The subpoena is a part of Smith’s efforts to spread some of the blame around for his part in the welfare scandal that has rocked the state. Smith’s defense has been that he did not realize that the money he was getting was coming from the state’s welfare fund, and therefore illegally obtained. Whether or not this is true or defensible, Smith’s lawyers are not incorrect in pointing out that potential bad actors like former Gov. Bryant have been suspiciously absent from legal investigations so far.
Smith is the nephew of John Davis, the disgraced former director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services under Gov. Bryant. Davis recently pleaded guilty to multiple federal and state charges stemming from the misuse of funds meant for low-income families. One of the big-ticket items on that list was a $5 million volleyball stadium for the University of Southern Mississippi—where Brett Favre’s daughter was a player at the time. Gov. Bryant has so far been able to sidestep his accountability in the profound corruption during his watch as his replacement, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, fired the attorney who had been trying to look into that specific deal.
But the kind of corruption Bryant is allegedly into isn’t something that just begins and ends with a volleyball stadium, and Friday’s subpoena makes that clear.
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Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre’s charities have come under even more deserved scrutiny as the totality of self-dealing and corruptions he’s been connected to find the light of day. His relationship with Bryant has been a solid point of entry into the Mississippi GOP’s corrupt control over the Hospitality State. Under Bryant’s appointee Davis, it is suspected that the state’s welfare fund illegally syphoned off tens of millions of dollars earmarked for low-income families for food assistance, housing, and the like, into the hands of private building projects like Favre’s USM volleyball stadium.
Texts and emails between Favre and Bryant and Mississippi Community Education Center’s former director Nancy New show an apparent awareness of where the funding for these kinds of projects was coming from. The revelations about the stadium deal have served to remind folks that back in April, Mississippi Today reported on Bryant and Favre’s correspondence regarding Favre’s attempts to get some money for biomedical startups Prevacus and PreSolMD. State auditors say that money also came out of the state’s welfare fund.
Friday’s subpoena is a workaround for Austin Smith’s attorney, since the big-ticket volleyball stadium investigation has been obstructed by the current GOP governor. Bryant’s involvement with Favre’s startup pharma companies includes texts between the two men, where Bryant agrees to take some of the stock from the company. The only way Bryant could be more corrupt is if Favre just Venmo-ed the governor cash directly in the chat. Of course, Bryant’s defense when this was first brought to his attention—the clear evidence that he’s a corrupt scumbag—was poor reading skills and an inability to do the job he was elected to do efficiently and effectively.
“I can clearly see why you’re following those trails,” Bryant said. “And it doesn’t look good. Should I have caught it? Absolutely. I should’ve caught it. Was I extremely busy as governor? I can’t even describe to you what it is like on a daily basis as governor. This was not on the top of my list. This was not something that I was looking at every day. I’d get a text and it just kind of glance through it. I’d say, ‘Good.’”
Bryant is currently fighting a subpoena from Nancy New’s attorneys in a similar case. It is the New case that brought the previously unseen communications between Favre, New, and Bryant to light. Bryant’s other defense was that it was John Davis’ job to make sure that Gov. Phil Bryant wasn’t breaking the law. Of course, when you are having meetings with the people that want you to break the law, and then the official you put into the position to make sure you don’t break the law seems to magically break the law right after your meetings with those other criminals …
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