The Republican Party has me confused. I thought it liked billionaires.
It certainly likes Harlan Crow, who has provided U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with lavish vacations and private school tuition assistance that the conservative jurist might not have been able to afford on his government salary.
But then comes Phil Bryant this past week disparagingly referring to Mississippi Today, the journalistic thorn in his side, as a “billionaire-driven media outlet.”
Who is that billionaire who is supporting the nonprofit, philanthropy-dependent newsroom and, by inference, its investigation into the massive public corruption scandal that occurred during the former Republican governor’s last term in office?
Jim Barksdale.
The same Jim Barksdale who was a major contributor to several of Bryant’s political campaigns. And the same Jim Barksdale who was held in such high regard in GOP circles that Bryant’s first appointment, after being elected governor in 2011, was to make the native Mississippi businessman the interim head of the Mississippi Development Authority.
That contradiction is just one clue not to be too impressed by Bryant’s decision this week to release hundreds of pages of text messages he sent to or received from those entangled in the welfare scandal.
There’s also the unconvincing video, circulated in advance of Thursday’s data dump, in which Bryant said he would be releasing “all” the text messages. He failed to mention, however, that there would be at least one huge gap in what he produced. Missing are any text messages with admitted crook John Davis between 2016, when Bryant picked him to lead the state’s welfare agency, and June of 2019, when Bryant forced Davis to retire. Bryant doesn’t deny there were text messages between the two, but a spokesman said Bryant couldn’t find them on any of the cellphones the former governor used.
Curiously, Davis’ cellphone, which was confiscated by the State Auditor’s Office when it began its investigation almost four years ago into the fraud, had its own similar gap. There were no text messages with Bryant on it prior to March 2019.
Thus, during the nearly three-year span when the majority of the theft and misspending occurred, we don’t know what was said between Bryant and the man at the center of the scheme that auditors say improperly diverted at least $77 million intended to help the poorest of the poor.
There may be other gaps, too. Mississippi Today and its lead investigative reporter into the scandal, Anna Wolfe, undoubtedly will be looking for them.
Although it was State Auditor Shad White and a Hinds County district attorney who broke the story on the welfare scandal, it is Wolfe’s subsequent reporting, more than anything else, that has suggested Bryant’s hands might not be as clean in the matter as he professes.
Bryant argues on his video that one of the largest and most controversial expenditures of welfare money — $5 million to build a volleyball facility at his alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi — was cleared by several attorneys within state government. Even if that’s so, he still has the problem of the stock options he was agreeable to accepting as a reward for allegedly helping a start-up pharmaceutical company secure its own big slice of the welfare money. In addition, some of those who have been convicted or sued in the scandal have claimed in court documents that Bryant directed or influenced their misspending or fraud.
Bryant, who has not been charged or sued, has never been a big fan of Mississippi Today. In its early years, he wouldn’t talk to its reporters. But attacking that news outlet or anyone else reporting on this scandal is a diversion. It’s the fallback mechanism of any politician, current or former, who is getting bad press. Blame it on the folks doing the digging and the reporting.
In this age of drastically shrinking newsrooms, Mississippi Today has become this state’s premier nongovernmental guardian of how public money is used in state government. The Clarion Ledger is challenged these days to just cover the city of Jackson. The Associated Press does a remarkable job with just two reporters in its Jackson bureau, but it’s not enough. The rest of the news outlets statewide have five Capitol correspondents combined.
Mississippi Today, now up to 15 persons on its news staff, thankfully has the resources to cover state government and politics aggressively. Jim Barksdale or his foundation has helped make a lot of that growth possible with contributions totaling more than $1 million since Mississippi Today was founded seven years ago.
That’s been a more deserving investment by the billionaire, it appears, than what he contributed to Bryant’s campaign kitty.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
