Once upon a time, when Phil Bryant was Mississippi’s state auditor, he would have laughed at the excuses a former Governor Bryant is now giving for what appears to be his acquiescence in using welfare funds to help a start-up company from which he stood to benefit once he left office.
Bryant’s excuse is that he was busy with pressing government matters, didn’t really pay attention to the text messages he was receiving from two principals in the company, and although it might sound as if he was on board with the diversion that prosecutors have since said was illegal, that wasn’t the case at all.
What has put Bryant in the uncomfortable spotlight, more than two years after leaving office, is some excellent investigative reporting by Mississippi Today.
The online news source continues its probe into what the current state auditor, Shad White, has called the largest public embezzlement scheme in Mississippi history with an exposé on Bryant’s involvement with Prevacus, the start-up company tangled up in the scandal.
The exposé is based heavily on numerous text-message exchanges obtained by Mississippi Today involving Bryant, NFL Hall-of-Famer Brett Favre and Prevacus founder Jake Vanlandingham.
Those exchanges include Favre and Vandlandingham soliciting Bryant’s help to line up funding for the company that was trying to develop a drug to treat concussions; Favre and Vandlandingham informing the governor that state money had been secured for the venture, and that John Davis, Bryant’s head of the Department of Human Services, and Nancy New, through whose nonprofit much of the state’s welfare funding was channeled, were a key part of making that happen; and that Favre and Vanlandingham wanted to reward the governor for his help in office and afterward with an ownership stake in the company.
“I just simply did not carefully look at those texts and realize the intent in them,” Bryant said in an interview over the weekend with Mississippi Today. “And I know that’s hard to believe and I know people read it and say, ‘Well, of course he knew,’ but I’m telling you, I just did not realize the details within those texts.”
It’s important to note that none of the three men at the heart of this story — Bryant, Favre and Vanlandingham — has been accused by officials of a crime. And the stock that Favre and Vandlandingham so badly wanted to give the governor never changed hands.
Still, the appearances — as Bryant himself has acknowledged — are terrible. Davis and New are charged, among others, with conspiring to use millions of dollars in federal block grant money to help themselves and their friends rather than the state’s poor for which it was intended. Among the illegalities alleged against New, the founder of a group of schools that included the former North New Summit in Greenwood, is that she and her son, Zach New, funneled $2.15 million of this welfare money to Prevacus in exchange for an ownership stake in the company.
Favre and Bryant, longtime buddies and fellow alums of the University of Southern Mississippi, had this habit of using football metaphors in their text exchanges.
In one of them, Favre, hoping to strike it rich on the pharmaceutical venture in which he was an early investor, wrote the governor, “It’s 3rd and long and we need you to make it happen!!”
Bryant’s response: “I will open a hole.”
Was that “hole” John Davis and Nancy New? Or was it, as Bryant now claims, just a meaningless expression with no specific action contemplated?
Someone besides Bryant should answer that.
