A Jackson, Hole, Con't

The Brett Favre/Gov. Phil Bryant welfare corruption scandal in Mississippi gets even worse as the capital city of Jackson will need billions to repair its water system, and now we see that instead of using federal money to do things like fix Jackson's water pipes, state Republicans used the corrupted state welfare program that Gov. Bryant turned into his personal slush fund to go after Democrats in the state, while current GOP Gov. Tate Reeves covered it all up.

Within Mississippi’s ever-unfolding welfare scandal, government officials didn’t just use federal funds to lavish their friends and family.

They also allegedly leveraged the money to quell their political foes, according to a defendant in the case and another individual connected to a nonprofit within scheme.

Christi Webb, director of the welfare-funded nonprofit Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, supported her friend and then-Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, in his race for governor against then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves in 2019.

To the apparent dismay of state Republican leadership, Webb hired the Democrat’s wife, Debbie Hood, in mid-2018 to run the local Chickasaw County office of the statewide anti-poverty program called Families First for Mississippi. The state welfare department was pushing tens of millions of welfare dollars through Webb’s nonprofit – $11.5 million forensic auditors found was misused over a four-year span.

But around April 2019, as the governor’s race began heating up, a local Republican lawmaker allegedly took that dismay a step further and delivered a threat to Webb: Fire Debbie Hood or lose your public funding.

“FRC will never receive another dollar from the state if you don’t fire Debbie Hood,” a north Mississippi Republican lawmaker told Webb, Webb’s attorney Casey Lott alleged.

“He explicitly said, ‘I’m the governor’s messenger,’” Lott added, referencing then-Gov. Phil Bryant.

Mississippi Today spoke with another person connected to the nonprofit who also witnessed and confirmed the lawmaker’s demand but did not wish to be named.

Bryant, who oversaw over the Mississippi Department of Human Services and appointed the welfare agency’s director, has increasingly faced public scrutiny for his role in what has been called the largest embezzlement scheme in state history.

The former governor, who has not been charged with a crime, wielded control over how the welfare agency and its partner nonprofits spent federal welfare funds, Mississippi Today has uncovered in its ongoing investigative series “The Backchannel.” And Bryant even appeared to help NFL legend Brett Favre and a nonprofit official write a grant to skirt around federal regulations, according to text messages first published by Mississippi Today this week.

Bryant’s attorney in the civil case, Ridgeland-based attorney Billy Quin, declined to comment Saturday for this story. Quin is a former special assistant attorney general under Hood, and the attorney publicly supported Hood for governor in 2019, social media posts show.

Jim Hood’s 2019 campaign manager Michael Rejebian confirmed the account on Saturday. He said that after Debbie Hood learned of the threat, the campaign began trying to run down what happened and, “we came to the conclusion that Tate (Reeves) had his fingers in it.”

“It didn’t surprise us because that’s his M.O.,” Rejebian said.

Ultimately, the Hood camp did not make Debbie Hood’s treatment an issue in the race because “she did not want this to be a distraction to the campaign and what her husband needed to do,” Rejebian said.

Rejebian called Debbie Hood a conscientious person who took the job at the Family Resource Center to help people, and that she wouldn’t have known about the funding structures.

But the questions about what happened to Debbie Hood, Rejebian said, prompted murmurs about what was really occurring at Families First, which would less than a year later be exposed for being the vehicle of millions of dollars worth of theft.

 

Again, what we're looking at here is the direct result of corrupt, one-party rule in one of the poorest states in America. Millions were stolen directly, Billions were pushed elsewhere, and the state's Black population was victimized at every turn. Both governors, the current and former, need to go to prison along with "NFL legend" Favre.

They won't, of course.