Leon is delinquent

What happens if you ignore a fake subpoena? Is it any less or more a penalty than ignoring an order to turn over your files on fake subpoenas?

Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office still has not provided information to the New Orleans City Council about its use of fake subpoenas, more than a month after Cannizzaro told council members he would. And Council President Jason Williams wants to know why.

In a letter to Cannizzaro obtained by The Lens, Williams is requesting that Cannizzaro provide the information, which the council requested last fall. At the time, Cannizzaro estimated it would be available by mid-May.

“We are now beyond the timeline you provided for disclosure, however several items remain outstanding,” Williams wrote. Williams’ spokeswoman Katie Hunter-Lowrey said the letter was delivered Wednesday morning.

Or maybe it's not an order. Williams only "requested" the information from Cannizzaro's office, right? But then I guess a fake subpoena isn't really an order either so we're back to the original question.

Fittingly, the answer is, the deadline isn't really a deadline.

In a letter to the council, Cannizzaro said that compiling the additional information would take time because it doesn’t keep a centralized inventory of documents in its case files. Finding it would require a manual review of 150,000 cases. That review had begun, he wrote, but it could take “as long as six months.”

“It has now been over seven months since your response to the Council, and we have received no supplemental information,” Williams wrote in his letter. “I hereby request that you provide the supplemental data … or provide justification for why this information is being withheld.”

Earlier this month, Cannizzaro’s spokesman Ken Daley told The Lens that the six-month timeline “was an estimate, not a deadline.”

This is probably as okay with Jason as it is with Leon. It means he can keep writing letters and asking about this for several more months getting us closer to the time when the two end up running against each other anyway.