Louisiana Voice

LouisianaVoice has learned that Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida), chairman of the House Ethics Committee, is said to be looking into the possible expulsion from Congress any members who might have conspired with or encouraged the attempted takeover of the federal government last Wednesday by Donald Trump supporters.

Rep. Clay Higgins has been mentioned as one of those being targeted by the investigation as has Rep. Steve Scalise.

Meanwhile, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) has released a half-hearted rebuke of Trump and the insurgents even as the PGA CANCELS its contract with to hold its 2022 championship tournament at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey and several major corporations have SUSPENDED political contributions in the wake of the Trump-fueled riot that killed at least six people and left congressional members’ offices trashed and looted.

LABI has been almost as enthusiastic in scolding the rioters as Trump and was and only slightly ahead of Trump’s belated order that flags be lowered to half-mast in honor of Capitol police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood whose death was announced Monday morning, five days after the riots.

It would certainly be nice if the business community’s main lobbying arm could show the decency to commit to a peaceful transfer of power by publicly rebuking those who participated in this assault on democracy last week in a little stronger language.

But then, that would be far too much to expect of LABI and its leadership.

Even STRIPE, the San Francisco company that has been processing payments to the Trump campaign, is also cutting ties with Trump.

So, it would seem reasonable to lump LABI in with the likes of Higgins.

Higgins has been a notorious loose cannon since his election to represent Louisiana’s 3^rd District in 2016, often embellishing his law enforcement credentials in congressional hearings, prompting his former boss, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz to public dispute some of his claims.

Higgins also was the lone Louisiana representative to vote no on HOUSE RESOLUTION 1155 back on September 29, 2020. That resolution in part:

• Reaffirmed the commitment to the orderly and peaceful transfer of power called for in the Constitution of the United States, and
• Intended that there should be no disruptions by the President or any person in power to overturn the will of the people of the United States.

There were only four other nay votes on the resolution calling for a peaceful transfer – Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Louie Gohmert (R- Tx.), Steve King (R-Ia.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). To say those five violated their oath of office would be belaboring the obvious.

Reps. Scalise, Mike Johnson, Ralph Abraham and Garret Graves voted yes but reversed themselves on Jan. 6 when they voted in favor of the objection to accepting the election results, thus demonstrating that they cannot be trusted to keep their word and casting doubts on their loyalty to country over party. At least Higgins was consistent with his earlier vote by joining the others in objecting to certification.

Higgins’ name was not the only one that surfaced, however:

• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip SCALISE (R-La.) are under the gun for what critics say was a failure to show leadership at a time of crisis.
• The siblings of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) have called for him to be expelled from Congress.
• The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability has called for an ethics investigation into whether Rep. MO BROOKS (R-Ala.) may have incited the deadly riot with a speech he made prior to the breaching of the Capitol building.
• Rep. CORI BUSH (D-Mo.) says Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) have blood on their hands for inciting “this domestic terror attack though their attempts to overturn the election.” She said they have “broken their sacred oath of office” and must be expelled. Meanwhile, thousands of lawyers and law school alumni have signed an OPEN LETTER calling for Hawley and Cruz to be disbarred for their roles in challenging the election results which led, at lease indirectly, to the rioting.

It is expected that some specific cases will be brought before a grand jury for charges, according to a confidential source. The committee is looking at communications between some members and their staffs with leaders of the riot.

Meanwhile the ethics investigation that could lead to expulsion is moving ahead.

Censure has been the more common form of disciplinary action in Congress, requiring as it does a lower threshold of votes to impose. In U.S. history, there have been 20 members of Congress EXPELLED. Of that number 17 were expelled for their support of the Confederacy in the aftermath of secession. Fifteen were from the Senate and five from the House. Seven others resigned in lieu of expulsion. The most recent such resignation was that of Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) in 2006, who resigned following his conviction in connection with the Jack Abramoff scandals. The expulsion of Rep. William Sebastian of Arkansas was posthumously reversed.

No one answered a call to Deutch’s office and his voice mail was full and was unable to accept messages.

A reader sent a terse, eight-word note along with the link to a disturbing story about the anarchist attack on the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday.

“Let’s guess whose fingerprints were all over this,” he wrote.

Indeed.

It seems that John Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson and Clay Higgins aren’t the only Louisiana officials who must share responsibility for stoking last Wednesday’s unprecedented invasion by white supremacists and outright terrorists of the world’s monument to democratic governance and free elections on behalf of a mentally deranged Donald Trump.

Trump, we now learn, had other co-conspirators in high places who must now answer for the deaths of five people, including a member of the Capitol Police who died of injuries suffered while trying to defend that same democratic government.

NBC News has obtained a copying of a RECORDING that went out as a robocall from the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), the fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) that said, in part, “At 1 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”

Additionally, there initially was a website created to promote the rally that listed the RLDF as one of the participating organizations. Following Wednesday’s extracurricular activities that including ransacking congressional offices, stealing congressional furniture and documents, smearing defecation on the walls and planting pipe bombs, the RLDF website was taken down.

Go figure.

Already, sympathizers are claiming the insurgents were infiltrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter protagonists. They have no way of proving or disproving that. Many in the mob were wearing backpacks. How could police possibly check the contents? And consider this an alternative conspiracy theory: How do we know there weren’t Russian sympathizers who “infiltrated” the anarchists in order to plant listening devices in the offices of congressional leaders? That theory is every bit as sound as the Antifa/Black Lives Matter B.S.

But I digress.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who runs RLDF, claims the calls were sent out without his knowledge or approval. That sounds like a gaping absence of accountability at the top levels of the organization.

“I was unaware of unauthorized decisions made by RLDF staff with regard to this week’s rally,” Marshall was quoted by NBC as saying. He only assumed his current role on Nov. 10. “Despite currently transitioning into my role as the newly elected chairman of RLDF, it is unacceptable that I was neither consulted about nor informed of those decisions,” he added. “I have directed an internal review of this matter.”

Neither RAGA Executive Director Adam Piper nor RLDF Executive Director Peter Bisbee responded to requests from NBC for comment about the robocalls.

Two prominent members of the RAGA who have been at the forefront of efforts to hand Trump an illegitimate claim to the presidency despite his losing by more than 7 million votes, are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and our very own Jeff Landry.

Paxton filed an ill-fated LAWSUIT in an effort to challenge election results in four key states lost by Trump but the court ruled correctly that he had no standing to bring the suit and it was tossed, as were 49 other suits brought by Trump’s attorneys.

Landry has kept a somewhat lower profile in the days following the rioting but nevertheless has been front and center in his support of Trump and his “fake news” claims to have won the election in a “landslide.”

But wait. Landry, it seems, was the RAGA CHAIRMAN for 2020, and on Nov. 10, he announced that the organization was filing an amicus brief ENDORSING the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s CHALLENGE of a state supreme court RULING that allowed the counting of absentee ballots up to three days after election day – on the condition that they were postmarked by the Nov. 3 election day.

The Louisiana Attorney General was also listed as a CO-DIRECTOR of RLDF, according to 2018 tax documents filed by the organization.

And while his name has not surfaced in connection with the robocall that went out, you can bet, as our reader said, his fingerprints are “all over this.”

And for a man so fond of the political spotlight, his silence since Wednesday is deafening.

In a day and age when there is heightened sensitivity to racial discrimination, age discrimination and sexual harassment, it’s difficult to fathom blatant violations of federal laws enacted to protect individuals from such behavior.

But then, we have the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and yes, Donald Trump, each of whom have been accused of such sexual harassment so egregious that it cost all but one of them their careers – and the jury, literally, is still out on the other one.

And now we have a lawsuit filed in Louisiana’s Western District federal court that contains charges of sexual harassment, falsification and destruction of records, and payroll fraud against an Alexandria restaurant franchisee and its human resources director that, if true, would repulse the most inured among us.

If the claims are founded, there will not only likely be a substantial monetary judgment and possible criminal charges against the defendants but in all likelihood, their franchises for Huddle House restaurants would likely be revoked by Huddle House’s parent corporation in Atlanta.

Huddle House restaurants, while constructed and operated in strikingly similar manner, are in no way related to Waffle House restaurants.

William Most, the New Orleans attorney who is representing a former employee in her fight, said the litigation was not filed against Huddle House Corp., but against its franchisee, D’Argent Companies, D’Argent Construction and D’Argent Franchising of Alexandria, and its human resources director Justin Giallonardo, son of D’Argent founder Thomas Giallonardo.

The lawsuit says that Justin Giallonardo attempted on several occasions to get plaintiff Samantha Williams, who was an employee of one of the Huddle House restaurants where she was in the company’s management-trainee programs, to have sex with him.

When all his efforts proved unsuccessful, he told her manager, Wes Pigoff, that if he couldn’t have sex with her, he was going to fire her. Pigoff said in a sworn affidavit that accompanied the lawsuit that he told the younger Giallonardo the he was Williams’s boss and could not be trying to date her or have sex with her, to which Giallonardo replied, “I can do whatever I want to.”

Williams quit before she could be fired and Pigoff completed forms for the Louisiana Workforce Commission which confirmed that she resigned but, he said in his affidavit, Giallonardo ordered him to re-do the form to indicate she was fired and to back-date the revised form.

Pigoff also said that he was instructed to alter timesheets for employees to remove all overtime worked so as to keep costs down and when he refused one month to do so, Giallonardo deducted $8,000 from Pigoff’s pay “which was the amount of the overtime that I did not delete over a period of time,” he said. “I estimate that over the course of her work at Huddle House, I deleted in excess of $10,000 of overtime for Samantha Williams along,” he said.

Pigoff also accused the Giallonardos of assigning the social security numbers of deceased persons to undocumented persons in order to employ them. “I heard Justin explain how ‘dead people are still working,’” he said. “Based on context and other things I had heard, I understood that to mean that D’Argent was using he social security numbers of dead people to knowingly allow undocumented persons to work.”

The Giallonardos also own D’Argent Construction, LLC.

The lawsuit includes copies of text messages between Justin Giallonardo and Williams as well as the original form indicating Williams had resigned and the one Justin ordered showing that she was fired.

Attached below are copies of Pigott’s affidavit and the lawsuit. Warning: the language and descriptions of events are of such a graphic nature that discretion should be used.

McCarthyism is alive and well with five members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation.

That’s how many voted in favor of the objection to certification of Joe Biden’s election win in Arizona during the turbulent joint session yesterday and into the wee hours of this morning.

Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy and Reps. Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, Garret Graves and Mike Johnson voted yea on the objection.

Of the four House members, Graves’ vote was especially disappointing. We expected no better from the other three milquetoasts masquerading as honorable men but we expected more of Graves. He seemed to have a grasp on reality – or at least he seemed to before his vote to challenge Biden’s win that has already undergone recounts and unsuccessful court challenges.

Only Sen. Bill Cassidy and Rep. Cedric Richmond voted no.

Four people are dead as a result of that shameful act of sedition yesterday and the words and actions of Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress – like Kennedy, Scalise, Higgins, and Johnson – must share the blame for what happened.

Higgins, a-la old Joe McCarthy himself, claimed to possess “thousands of pages” of evidence of voter fraud on CNN’s JIM SCUITTO show but was unable to produce a single example when challenged.

His claim to be a trained investigator drew a quick response from his former employer, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz, for whom he once worked as a… public information officer.

“While employed at the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department,” Guidroz wrote, “Higgins NEVER conducted any criminal investigation! He continues to boast about his experience as a seasoned ‘STREET COP’ as he calls himself………He was a used car salesman prior to (employment by the Opelousas Police Department). PLEASE don’t get me started with all his shenanigans.” (It should be mentioned that Higgins resigned from the OPD rather than serve a 160-hour suspension for an altercation with a citizen.)

Yesterday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters should have repulsed even those with the strongest loyalty to Trump. It did with just-defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Alabama, James Lankford of Oklahoma and Steve Daines of Montana. Even Lindsey Graham said in the Senate chambers after order was restored that “enough is enough.”

But not so for Kennedy, Rick Scott of Florida, Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis, Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

I don’t know much about Lummis or Marshall, but Kennedy, Scott, Hyde-Smith and Tuberville are four of a kind. TUBERVILLE and HYDE-SMITH have a combined IQ of 7. SCOTT, the former governor of Florida, is cut from the same mold as Bobby Jindal and Kennedy…Well, we know he just floats with the political breeze, with no moral compass or real political convictions other than self-survival.

Apparently, that’s sufficient for Louisiana’s voters.

John Kennedy, I’m going to make this short and direct:

A person has died in the U.S. Capitol, and it’s on you.

Those who participated in the riot that resulted on a woman’s death are not representatives of Antifa. They aren’t Black Lives Matter proponents. They’re Trump’s thugs, his Proud Boys, rioting in the name of law and order. What a joke. Except it ain’t funny.

And It’s on you, it’s on Steve Scalise, it’s on Mike Johnson, and it’s on Clay Higgins. But most of all, it’s on you, John N. Kennedy.

And it’s certainly on your mentor, Donald John Trump, who has goaded his mindless followers into this insurrection, this invasion of what is supposed to be the pillar of democracy. Joe Biden called it “an assault on the citadel of liberty.”

He’s correct.

Mitt Romney said if you do not walk away from your challenge in light of today’s events, you are complicit in that anarchy, in that act of sedition.

He, too, is correct.

Let’s be clear and make no mistake about it. It’s on you, John N. Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson and Clay Higgins.

It’s on you for enabling him for the past four years and for your decision to support a tyrant over the principles of freedom and democracy in your ill-advised decision to join in the effort to challenge the results of a legal election in which absolutely no evidence of fraud has been presented.

You are fully complicit.

It’s on you.