Louisiana Voice

You gotta love Mike Johnson.

The House Speaker from Bossier City met yesterday with several women who claim to be victims of sex crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his words of caution following that meeting smack of the hypocrisy for which he has become known.

His meeting with the women was during hearings by the House Oversight Committee headed by Rep. James Come (R-Kentucky) which learned of “additional names” of persons of interest concerning the elusive Epstein files.

In a classic CYA statement, Johnson had this to say: “We have to very carefully guard their identities. Can’t be haphazard about this,” Then he added the coup de grace (or, as Cadet Bone Spurs might himself say, the Coupe DeVille): House Repugnantcans are committed to leaving “no stone unturned” and that Trump “has the same desire.”

What a crock of home-grown barnyard fertilizer. Anyone with an IQ of 5 or greater knows that Trump is desperate to keep those Epstein files a tighter secret than the JFK assassination files.

But for the record, let’s take a deep dive into just how thorough Johnson has been down through the years, how he has diligently avoided doing anything in a haphazard or rash manner.

Back in 2010, Johnson, then 38, was busily touting a brand-spanking new law school, a “Christian” law school to be located in the old Waggonner Federal Building in Shreveport and run by what was then called Louisiana College (now Louisiana Christian University).

The plan was to train Christian attorneys (as opposed, I suppose, to satanic attorneys), which he said was not only achievable, but inevitable. In an interview with the Alexandria Town Talk after being named dean of the as yet unrealized Paul Pressler Law School, Johnson beamed, “From a pure feasibility standpoint, I’m not sure how this can fail because … it looks like the perfect storm for our law school.”

That was a pretty bold statement in retrospect because when he uttered those optimistic words, he had not yet even seen a feasibility study commissioned by Louisiana College despite the fact that for more than a year, he’d been telling donors and the public that the law school was a done deal.

Fast forward to February 2012. With clouds of concern forming on the horizon, Johnson dispatched an aide on an urgent assignment to locate that feasibility study. The aide finally found it buried at the bottom of a filing cabinet. Its contents proved useless and six months later, in August 2012, Johnson resigned as dean of the non-existent school into which Louisiana College had poured $5 million to purchase and renovate the Shreveport building. Later that year, Johnson would write a “confidential memorandum” to the college’s board of trustees in which he said the feasibility study was a “hodgepodge collection of papers” containing nothing related to the need for a new law school. Nor was there any market study of funding sources or prospects, he wrote.

That 2013 memo revealed that when given a leadership opportunity, Johnson blew it by overselling the project and failing to reveal key problems until after he left the job. That didn’t keep him from blaming others for the debacle, however. In classic Trumpian fasion, he accused others for the problems, saying that the project cratered because of larger issues at the college. He faulted administrators for failing to provide him with the feasibility study and further claimed that problems involving the school accreditation was detrimental to his efforts to have the law school approved. “The ordeal created a real hardship for me and my family,” he sniffed, adding he resigned “with great sadness and only as a last resort.”

An interesting sidebar about the proposed name of the fictional law school: it was to be named in honor of Paul Pressler, III, a retired Texas judge and former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. But wait. Following the collapse of the law school, Pressler was accused in a lawsuit of SEXUAL MISCONDUCT  and/or assault on multiple men, including some who said they were underage at the time. One of the plaintiffs said he was only 14 with Pressler first raped him. The lawsuit was settled in December 2023 and Pressler, who had endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz for president in 2015, died in June 2024 at age 94.

Johnson, however sad he might have been at leaving the phantom law school, appeared to land on his feet as a part-time professor at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government. The school was named for long-time Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Helms, a one-time bank lobbyist, was an advocate of a government that aids “those in economic power.” He consistently voted to “slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly and wages for working families,” according to MOTHER JONES.

Last year, the school was fined $14 million for mishandling SEXUAL ASSAULTS on campus. Liberty University, in case you may not have known, is the school founded by the late Jerry Falwell, Sr., and more-or-less inherited by his son, Junior, when daddy went to that big pulpit in the sky.

But Jerry Jr. was a rapscallion at best and pretty much a sexual deviate at worst. He liked to watch as his wife had sex with other men, particularly a pool boy named Giancarlo Granda. Sometimes, it was said, he even participated in a ménage à trois with the two.

Now, what makes this interesting, other than from a purely prurient standpoint, is that when the relationship between the three went south, Granda lawyered up. But he didn’t get just any lawyer. He got a guy maned MICHAEL COHEN who also was the self-proclaimed fixer for one Donald J. Trump (what are the odds?). Anyway, it seems there were some, ah, photographs that managed to fall into Cohen’s hands which were used as “leverage” to make a dispute between Granda and the Falwells disappear. Meanwhile, Falwell Jr. became the very first evangelical leader in line to endorse Trump in the Repugnantcan primary of 2016. More not-so-subtle leverage perhaps? Cohen himself says yep.

Now, let’s circle back to Louisiana College at the time that Johnson was trying to get his law school up and running.

It was in the same approximate time frame that a vice-president of Louisiana College attempted a coup to oust incumbent President Joe Aguillard. The attempted takeover cost Timothy Johnson (no relation to Mike Johnson) his job. Timothy Johnson of Choudrant in Lincoln Parish, who led the unsuccessful attempt, is married to the daughter of Rev. Mack Ford who ran New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys south of Arcadia in Bienville Parish for several decades.

LOUISIANA VOICE obtained more than a dozen affidavits from women who lived at New Bethany as teenagers and each one accused Ford of sexual abuse, including rape and in at least one case, of having forced a 17-year-old girl at the school to perform oral sex on him.

The girl, at the time of her statement, a woman with children of her own, said Ford had her follow him into a building on the New Bethany grounds only to encounter a woman who was cleaning the office. He told the woman to leave so he could “counsel” the girl. Once the woman was gone, he directed the girl to get on her knees. “I thought it was to pray,” she said, but then she said Ford unzipped his pants and reportedly let Little Mack loose.

Tim Johnson had knowledge that a crime of rape against a child had been committed, but he chose to destroy the evidence, and brush the incident under the rug, said one former resident of New Bethany.

Tim Johnson claimed he was fired for blowing the whistle on Aguillard. Johnson, she said, had hoped to become president of the school. That was when the Survivors of New Bethany were asked about Johnson’s affiliation with Mack Ford and New Bethany. It was then that the survivors became the whistle-blower on Tim Johnson, revealing all of their stories of abuse. Tim Johnson, was asked what his affiliation with New Bethany was, and he stated he had no knowledge of the place. “I guess he did not remember that his name appeared on New Bethany court documents, and that the slander he claimed would come out as truth,” wrote one of the survivors. Soon after the inquiries, Tim Johnson was fired.

AGUILLARD, meanwhile, had his own problems as the school experienced financial difficulties, its own sexual scandal, payoffs to an employee discovered to be forging accreditation documents, all amid attempts to stifle dissent on the campus. He would eventually be fired himself. He filed a discrimination lawsuit against the school but instead, lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay the school’s attorney fees.

Granted, all the foregoing is merely circumstantial and there is no direct connection linking Mike Johnson to any of the events at New Bethany, Louisiana College or Liberty University. But it certainly is coincidental that everywhere he has shown up, there has been chaos, disruption, disorganization and confusion – including the U.S. House of Representatives.