Does Governor Landry know what governors do?

Jeff Landry really liked that Laura Ingraham speech to LABI last week.

Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry declared that conservative television and radio personality Laura Ingraham would make a "great governor," less than a week after Louisiana's largest business group's decision to hire Ingraham to speak at an event drew criticism.

Ingraham praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee, blasted New Orleans for taking down Confederate monuments, made fun of the city's Mayor Mitch Landrieu and derided the #MeToo social media movement while serving as keynote speaker for the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry's annual meeting Feb. 8.

She also closed her remarks at the LABI meeting by saying that she might buy property in Louisiana and decide to run for governor in 2019. Ingraham has also been discussed as a candidate for statewide office in Virginia where she lives as well.

It's weird that Landry thinks Ingraham ought to just go ahead and take the job he will certainly be running for and often acts as if he already has. It would be fun to see if he changes his mind should she actually make good on the threat. But I don't think a second home in the Gret Stet was included in her speaking fee.

But Ingraham isn't Landry's only friend on the national stage right now. He's also got lots of pals on this fancy sub-Reddit.

An association of top Republican law enforcement officials has created a secret online bulletin board called the “Briefing Room” that’s allowing big donors to help shape legal policy, according to records reviewed by MapLight and The Intercept.

The Republican Attorneys General Association frequently directs officials working for GOP attorneys general to review files posted on the file-sharing website before participating in conference calls hosted by RAGA’s nonprofit policy arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund. The association works to get Republicans elected to the top law enforcement job at the state level. The Briefing Room is hosted by RLDF on the virtual cloud website, box.com.

The RAGA/RLDF board basically works like ALEC but for Attorneys General. It develops and coordinates donor-friendly policies that can be implemented across state lines by member AGs. In other words it is a clearing house for national agenda setting on behalf of these people.

RAGA’s largest donors in 2017 included the Judicial Crisis Network ($2.9 million), a dark money organization that led a $10 million media campaign to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch; the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform ($590,000), a trade association that works to limit lawsuits against corporations; and Koch Industries ($205,000), the global conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Some RAGA donors have been involved in a range of state-level investigations and lawsuits, including Marathon Oil Company, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, and Purdue Pharma. Purdue, the manufacturer of the popular painkiller Oxycontin, is being sued by 14 states for allegedly downplaying the addiction risks posed by its prescription opioid medication. RAGA members are leading the lawsuits in Ohio, Alabama, Missouri and South Carolina.

Pay to play law enforcement seems like a serious matter of public interest.  So, naturally, the AGs aren't especially interested in keeping the public informed about the decision-making process.  Vehicles like this message board are used because they exist in kind of a public records gray area. Which is why reporters are having trouble getting access.   The AGs can pretend these public records aren't really public records, usually by just saying they aren't documents produced by the AG's office or that they belong to a "third party website" sort of like Hillary Clinton's famous private email server some of these same Republicans spent much of the past year and a half moaning about. 

The Bayou Brief noticed something even more interesting about the way Jeff Landry's office responds to these requests.  Landry asserts a "deliberative process privilidge" that does not actually exist. 

The deliberative process exemption no longer exists in Louisiana.

It was eliminated in 2015, after then-Gov. Bobby Jindal signed Act 145 into law. But even when it had been on the books, the exemption, specifically, had never applied to anyone other than the governor.

Landry’s office was concealing public records by citing an old law that never applied to them in the first place, and no doubt, they were counting on the belief that no one would question or challenge their deception.

By now, we're used to Landry mistaking the Governor's privlidges for his own.  But, as the state's number one law talking guy, he should at least endeavor to stay up to date about what those actually are.  We're pretty sure Laura Ingraham doesn't actually want the job anyway. But if she's looking for a letter of recommendation, she should probably get one from someone with a clearer understanding of the job.