What does the "government affairs officer" do, exactly?

Blake Corley is quoted at the top of this article expressing his shock and disappointment at the arrest of the grifters for whom he had been laundering money into political contributions. It's hard to imagine he could be that surprised, though.  I mean if anyone should have known what was going on, it would be the person whose specific job it was to handle the operation.  

The complaint alleges the Patels created a fake lender which they used to “make” a $8,540,000 loan to Precision Powered Products, a Houston-based company, allegedly to expand the company in Puerto Rico. That loan was never made.

However, according to the complaint, the Patels allegedly then had 80% of the fake loan secured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in October 2021 — and then sold the loan to Memphis broker-dealer Hanover Securities the next month for a profit — netting them millions of dollars. The FBI alleges they then transferred that money into accounts controlled by Trisha Patel.

The complaint further alleges that Trisha Patel gave $2.1 million of that money to an unnamed attorney, bought $500,000 into cryptocurrency, gave $200,000 to her four children’s private schools and spent $81,000 on a new BMW. She spent another $91,000 on rent.

According to the complaint, she used another $1.2 million to pay “various attorneys, lobbyists, and consultants on behalf of Nikesh Patel.” The complaint does not name the attorneys, lobbyists and consultants, but Corley, who denied that he is involved, has worked for the Patels and their businesses, including as the chief government affairs officer and in-house counsel for PPP and American Powered Pumps, a new Florida-based company.

“The majority of the remaining funds went to another business entity associated with the Patels,” the complaint reads, though it does not identify the entity. Trisha Patel is listed in a press release as the owner of American Powered Pumps, which formed last year.

One expects the Government Affairs Officer is the person responsible for the interactions highlighted above. Or at least one expects that he is heavily involved in shepherding them. In any case he took about $100,000 of the fraud money and put it into a couple of PACs from where it was spread to a long list of state political figures. The Gambit article gives a pretty thorough accounting of that.

While it's true that candidates don't always have a lot of control over who contributes to their campaigns and not every contribution automatically implies a quid pro quo and so forth, we can focus on a couple of salient matters in this case. For example, there's the curious case of Corley's fiance's recent campaign for the State House. Despite her status as a complete unknown 27 year old challenger to a well-liked Democratic incumbent, Madison O'Malley immediately attracted immense institutional support from Dem Party insiders. 

At the end of October 2022, Corley and his fiancee O’Malley attended a Diwali event at the White House with Trisha Patel. Also present, according to publicly available information, was Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Katie Bernhardt.

Not long after the White House event, O’Malley set up a campaign committee, launching her bid against Rep. Mandie Landry in New Orleans. Within a month, Trisha Patel, her in-laws Rohini and Ajay Patel, Desai, Caimano and the state Build USA PAC had donated a combined $15,000 to O’Malley.

That race between O’Malley and incumbent Landry, both Democrats, garnered significant attention. The Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee endorsed O’Malley, as did several high-profile Democrats, including Congressman Troy Carter, Gov. John Bel Edwards and former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu.

It was a stunning development at the time. And, thanks to Landry's broad grass roots support in the district, it didn't pay off. (Landry won with an overwhelming 66% of the vote.) But it does indicate just how detached Democratic Party leadership have become from their voters. That they'd spend so much time and energy on public endorsements and campaigning for this one fraudulent candidate in a single house district while doing practically nothing to stem the tide of embarrassment in the statewide races that year illustrates how broken and corrupt an operation they're running now. 

These next few years are going to extremely difficult for Louisiana. The worst people in the state have free rein to max out on their worst impulses. And with the "opposition party" content to sit around collecting checks from criminals and do little else in the way of opposition, we can only expect the worst outcomes.