Louisiana Voice

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.

Sen. Bill Cassidy gets it.

John Kennedy, along with a dozen other senators and senators-elect, apparently does not.

Kennedy, who looks and acts as if he just stepped out of an old Pogo comic strip (or for the younger set, like Sen. Belfry of the Shoe comic strip), insists on bringing more and more embarrassment upon the state by joining with the others to CONTEST the electoral vote count during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress.

We can all vividly recall the Republicans bitching and moaning that Democrats were trying to nullify the results of the 2016 election with the impeachment of Donald Trump. They kept invoking the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump, conveniently ignoring the fact that 65.8 million did not.

Now the shoe is on the other foot and the Repugnantcans are trying to nullify the wishes of 81.2 million who voted to Biden (as opposed to the 74.2 million who voted for Trump).

That’s a double standard by any measure but you’d never know that by listening to Sen. Kornpone, aka Foghorn Leghorn who, every time he opens his mouth, a banal bromide spews forth.

It obviously has never occurred to Kennedy that he took an oath to defend, not undermine, the U.S. Constitution.

It never occurred to him that he is in a unique position to help, not ignore, his constituents. People are hurting, yet he plunges ahead on this doomed mission of fealty to a demagogue.

It never occurred to him that his loyalty should be to his country, not some orange-haired tyrant.

It never occurred to him to let the rule of law, not the petulant whims of a spoiled tweet-master, guide him as his moral compass.

In short, John Neely Kennedy has forgotten where he came from.

He is a former Democrat-turned-Republican for one reason and one reason only. Political philosophy had little to do with his switch; political survival had everything to do with it. He merely shifted with the political winds because that was his meal ticket.

You can bet the farm if the state made a sudden hard turn leftward, he’d be back in the Democrat camp proclaiming that he’d rather drink weed killer than forsake his liberal core beliefs. That’s John N. Kennedy sincerity for you. We call those kinds of political hacks neither RINOs nor DINOs, but chameleons.

If trump peed down his back and told him it was raining, he’d break out his umbrella. But if you tried to reach out to him, you’d get a computer-generated canned response that was neither germane nor useful.

He belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of Goofy.

But today, it was announced that Sen. Dr. Bill Cassidy is among a bipartisan group of 10 senators who are fighting that quixotic effort to overturn the election that Trump lost by 7 million votes.

The 10, which include, besides Louisiana’s senior senator, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, signed off in a statement that said:

“The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans’ confidence in the already determined election results. The voters have spoken and Congress must now fulfill its responsibility to certify the election results. In two weeks, we will begin working with our colleagues and the new Administration on bipartisan, common sense solutions to the enormous challenges facing our country. It is time to move forward.”

Maybe Cassidy could take Foghorn to the woodshed for a little man-to-boy talk.

Oh, and while he’s at it, he should take that ass-clown Clay Higgins with him.

Bullet-Head Higgins showed up for an appearance on JIM SCUITTO’S CNN SHOW earlier today and came off looking exactly like the imbecile he is.

Higgins, boasting that he is an “investigator,” (he was the public information officer for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office before he was canned – we aren’t sure what he ever “investigated”), claimed to have “thousands of pages” of evidence of voter fraud but when pressed by Scuitto, was unable to cite a single example. No, not one. nada. zilch.

That’s not unusual for the one Louisiana elected official who has the capability of making John Kennedy look good by comparison.

It truly escapes me how this guy ever got elected. It’s not as if he had a lightweight as an opponent in his initial run for Congress four years ago. He defeated Scott Angelle rather handily. Angelle, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission, had finished a close third in a four-man race for governor in 2015, barely losing a runoff spot to retiring U.S. Sen. David Vitter and had led in the first primary in the congressional race a year later.

But by running on Trump’s coattails in much the same manner as Kennedy did for the Senate, Higgins, who would give a head of cabbage a good run in an IQ test, won by 12 percentage points in the runoff.

Higgins is a guy who went into the race about $100,000 in arrears on his child support payments and was recorded telling his ex-wife that once he got elected, there would be plenty of money laying around for him to get caught up on payments.

Only in Louisiana, folks. Only. In. Louisiana.