St. Tammany deputy sheriff’s firing underscores hypocrisy of AG Jeff Landry’s ‘association’ with own felonious employee
An ongoing legal battle in St. Tammany Parish, while having no direct connection to or effect on Attorney General Jeff Landry, nevertheless seems appropriate for comparison to a situation in the AG’s office.
A former captain in the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Office has had his firing upheld by a three-judge panel of the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Calvin Lewis was fired in 2017 because he has lived for a decade with his girlfriend who is a convicted felon and the sheriff’s office has a policy that forbids personal relationships or associations with known felons.
Lewis has not decided what his next move will be. He may either seek a rehearing before a full panel or appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Admittedly, it is an apples-to-oranges comparison when considering a situation in Landry’s office but at the same time, it’s interesting to know the policy that cost Lewis his job is not consistent across public agencies, especially in the agency of the chief legal officer of the state.
While the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office has a specific policy prohibiting associations with known felons by sheriff’s office employees, the AG’s office apparently does not.
In 2015, when Landry first ran for the office, it was a three-person race: Landry, incumbent AG Buddy Caldwell, and Geraldine Broussare Baloney of Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish.
In that first primary, Caldwell polled 35 percent to Landry’s 33 percent. Baloney finished third with 18 percent, throwing the race into a runoff between Caldwell and Landry.
On Nov. 2, three weeks before the Nov. 21 runoff, Baloney announced that after meeting with Landry, “followed by prayerful consideration with my family, I have decided to endorse Jeff Landry because of his willingness to embrace forward thinking policies, his desire to actually transform and change the way the attorney general’s office does business.”
Long story short, Landry defeated Caldwell with 56 percent of the general election vote.
As for “the way the attorney general’s office does business,” well, Landry knew the drill. He obviously had cut a deal with Baloney because as soon as he’d settled into the job, he hired Baloney’s daughter, Quendi Baloney, to head up the AG’s Fraud Section.
So, what’s so unusual about that? Those kinds of deals are cut all the time in elections. Jay Dardenne was a candidate for governor in 2015 and when he didn’t make the runoff, he endorsed John Bel Edwards. When Edwards was elected, who did he appoint as his commissioner of administration? None other than Jay Dardenne.
But then Dardenne wasn’t a convicted felon. QUENDI BALONEY was and is. She had been charged in 1999 with 11 felony counts of credit card fraud and theft. She eventually pleaded guilty to three counts and received a suspended prison sentence.
And now we learn that Quendi Baloney’s sister, Abril Baloney Sutherland, is an applicant for the position of executive counsel for the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East in New Orleans. Word on the street is that Thomas L. Colletta, Jr. is the early odds-on favorite for that post but don’t be surprised if Landry has something to say about the final selection.
And it’s not as if the authority couldn’t use some wise legal counsel, given the results of its latest AUDIT by the legislative auditor’s office.
I don’t want to call Landry a hypocrite but in 2016, he demanded to know why Gov. Edwards would allow a convicted felon to serve as legal counsel for the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors.
He questioned the board’s retaining former State Sen. Larry Bankston as its legal counsel, pointing out that Bankston served 44 months in prison for his 1997 conviction on a video poker-related bribery scheme.
“Mr. Bankston is a convicted felon who has been previously disbarred,” Landry sniffed. “An attorney who represents the board in a fiduciary capacity to the board and is a legal representative of the state of Louisiana.”
Wow. That took some real chutzpah on Landry’s part to raise that, of all issues.
But Landry is absolutely correct. And an individual who pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud being put in charge of the AG’s Fraud Section in exchange for a political endorsement just has to raise a few eyebrows – even in Louisiana.
Landry’s proclamation on his WEBPAGE two months after taking office that there was “a new sheriff in town” and that he was ending the “Buddy system” didn’t take long to become a cruel joke when that $17 MILLION SCAM to hire Mexican welders and pipefitters under H-2B visa rules through three companies owned by Landry and his brother, Ben Landry, was made public. He even managed somehow to funnel nearly HALF-A-MILLION DOLLARS of campaign contributions to those companies.
Of course, he had his own “buddy system” that bubbled to the surface when one of his prosecutors resigned in protest over the way in which he said Landry smoothed over a kiddie porn case on behalf of a “politically connected individual.”
Then the “new sheriff in town” put political contributor Shand Guidry on the AG’s payroll as some sort of “special agent/investigator” despite the fact he possessed zero qualifications for the job. But it all evened out when Guidry put Landry on the board of his oil services firm, Harvey Gulf, at a kickback salary of between $50,000 and $100,000.
Finally, in a snit, Landry demanded that LSU communications professor Bob Mann BE PUNISHED for a tweet last December in which he had the audacity to be critical of Landry for dispatching “some flunkie to the LSU Faculty Senate meeting…to read a letter attacking covid vaccines.” Mann noted that it was “quite the move from a guy who considers himself ‘pro-life.’”
We have to wonder if Mr. Landry is familiar with the First Amendment.
From his DIRTY CAMPAIGN against Charles Boustany when their two congressional districts were consolidated in 2012 through his absurd legal battle to OVERTURN the 2020 presidential election, Landry has shown himself to be vindictive, petty, churlish, manipulative, and downright reprehensible. He is a politically-conniving, hypocritical opportunist, far removed from the personification of the type leader this state needs and craves – as a congressman, attorney general, governor, or even a deputy sheriff.