This weekend, Eli Manning joins his father, Archie Manning, in the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Manning joins the podcast to talk about his latest honor, fatherhood and a whole lot more.
Stream all episodes here.
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The Republican National Committee will appeal a recent ruling from U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. determining that Mississippi’s practice of counting mail-in absentee ballots received up to five days after Election Day is legal.
The appeal, which has not yet been filed, will go to the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative appellate courts in the nation.
Gineen Bresso, the election integrity director for the RNC and President Donald Trump’s campaign, told Mississippi Today in a statement that the organization is “confident the 5th Circuit will properly apply federal law.”
“The election should end on Election Day — that’s the law, and voters deserve fair and accurate results on November 5th,” Bresso said. “Counting ballots that come in after Election Day in Mississippi and other states threatens election security and undermines transparency for voters.”
The Mississippi statute in question is a 2020 state law passed by the Legislature amid the COVID-19 pandemic that allows local election workers to process mail-in absentee ballots for up to five days after an election. The law permits workers to count only the mail-in votes if the ballots were postmarked by the election date.
The state and national Republican parties, a Harrison County election commissioner and the state Libertarian Party were the plaintiffs in the litigation and argued that Guirola should strike Mississippi’s five-day window because only Congress gets to determine regulations for federal elections.
Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson is the named defendant in the suit because he is the administrator of Mississippi’s elections – not because he necessarily supports the policy. However, lawyers from Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office have defended the state law in federal court.
One of the main points of disagreement between the parties is what is the legal definition of Election Day, which will likely be the central question for the Fifth Circuit to answer.
The appellate court has not ruled on whether ballots received after an Election Day may be counted, but it previously determined in a 2000 case that a Texas early voting statute did not conflict with federal law.
The plaintiffs argue Election Day is the literal first Tuesday in November and vote-processing after that date runs afoul of federal law. State officials responded that the federal statutes only require that a vote be cast, not received, on or before Election Day.
Guirola ruled that no “final selection,” or voting occurs under Mississippi’s five-day window for processing absentee ballots — only election officials counting the votes.
“All that occurs after election day is the delivery and counting of ballots cast on or before election day,” Guirola wrote.
A federal district judge in Nevada recently dismissed a similar lawsuit in Nevada, rejecting the GOP’s claims that counting absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received days later was unconstitutional.
Other federal suits brought by the RNC alleging the same arguments against states with similar post-Election Day receipt deadlines for absentee ballots remain pending.
Mississippi is one of several states that allow mailed ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
A quick, clear resolution before November’s presidential and congressional election would be vital. The appellate process is lengthy and time-consuming, and different rulings from the district and appellate courts could lead to voter confusion.
Mississippians can request an absentee ballot application starting September 6, and the earliest day they can vote by absentee is September 23, according to the secretary of state’s elections calendar.
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The day President Joe Biden announced he would step aside and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, one of the first calls Harris made was to her longtime pastor, a native Mississippian and storied civil rights leader.
The Rev. Amos C. Brown, an 83-year-old Jackson native and pastor at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, is no stranger to such high-profile contacts. He has often been turned to by U.S. presidents. He was a close mentee of Medgar Evers. Martin Luther King Jr. tutored Brown at Morehouse College and even wrote Brown a letter of recommendation for seminary.
But Brown acknowledged in an interview with Mississippi Today that July 21 was extraordinarily memorable. He was just about to walk to the pulpit of the historic church to deliver his sermon when a deacon privately shared the news about Biden’s just-announced decision to drop out of the race.
“I paused to mention it to the congregation before I read the sermon text, which I selected well before I knew anything about what would happen that day,” Brown said. “That text was from Hebrews 12: ‘Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily beset us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.’ The timing of that text struck me as providential and poetic.”
After the Sunday service, Brown and his wife visited with members, went home, and, as pastors so often do on Sunday afternoons, he laid down to rest.
“I was actually about to go to sleep and my phone rang,” Brown said. “When I answered, it was the vice president’s voice. She said, ‘Hello, my pastor. I call because I need for you to pray for me, for Doug (Emhoff, her husband), for this nation because I’ve decided to run for president.’ I handed my phone to my wife, they talked for a minute, and then we had prayer together.”
Brown, invoking a cornerstone Christian verse from the Book of Micah, continued: “I prayed for her safety and security. I prayed she’d be led by spirituality as she sought the presidency, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with her God. Then I recited a passage from James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”
Harris is a longtime member of Third Baptist Church — Brown called her “an old-timer” — and she has talked extensively about her upbringing in both the Christian and Hindu faiths. Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir that her “earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy.’”
Her Baptist upbringing, in particular, centers on the teachings of Brown, a civil rights leader who has fought for those same virtues for nearly 70 years.
Brown’s civil rights work began in his hometown of Jackson, where he organized the first NAACP youth council at College Hill Baptist Church. At age 15, he rode with Medgar Evers from Jackson to San Francisco for the 1956 NAACP national convention, held at the same Third Baptist Church that he has now pastored for nearly 50 years. He was temporarily expelled from Jim Hill High School for talking with a national newspaper about the importance of integration, and he was later stripped of his earned class president and high school valedictorian status. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission kept an extensive file on the teenager.
Later, after leaving Jackson for college at Morehouse in Atlanta, he traveled around the South to help lead the Movement, like organizing a wade-in at Tybee Island, Georgia, and serving as a leader for NAACP chapters in numerous states. While preaching at Third Baptist and at churches in St. Paul, Minnesota, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, he has been elected or appointed to numerous civil rights posts. He served as a delegate to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force.
“I think Vice President Harris was attracted to the history of this church, to the role we’ve played in social justice and advancing the human race,” Brown said. “She’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a very long time now.”
The relationship between Brown and Harris transcends faith. Brown said Harris served as his campaign manager when he ran for reelection to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999, and he publicly supported her successful campaigns for San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. Senate and vice president.
But the spiritual bond the two share, Brown said, is what he’s been dwelling on most these past few days as his friend and church member barrels toward the Democratic presidential nomination ahead of a pivotal November election.
“She’s above all else a good and decent human being,” Brown said. “If we had more people in this world of her integrity and her personhood, we’d get closer to being an expression of that beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned. That’s the kind of outlook we need to hear in America today.
“All this division and put-down and hate speech and fear mongering is too much,” Brown continued. “There’s just too much of that. Someone once said people tend to hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. Well, they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate or connect with each other. We must connect with each other, and we must love each other. That’s the message Kamala Harris is going to share with the country because that’s who she is. That’s the person I’ve known for so long.”
As for his time in Mississippi, Brown said he’s been fortunate to carry his home state legacy with him around the world.
“Everybody has a connection to Mississippi. I think about Jackson often,” he said. “You know, the deacon who tapped me on the shoulder before I preached (on July 21) to tell me that President Biden had stepped down? That was Brother Cedric Carter, who’s actually from Vicksburg originally.”
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Two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning heads the list of eight former athletes and sports figures who will be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame this weekend.
The MSHOF Class of 2024 will be enshrined Saturday night at the Clyde Muse Center on the Pearl campus of Hinds Community College.
Other 2024 inductees, in alphabetical order, include: Walter “Red” Barber, Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster; Madison-Ridgeland Academy basketball coach Richard Duease, who has coached the second most basketball victories of any high school basketball coach in the U.S.; Laurel fisherman Paul Elias, 1982 Bassmasters Classic champion and winner of five other national pro tournaments; former Jackson State and NFL wide receiver Jimmy Smith, a five-time Pro Bowler and the Jacksonville Jaguars’ all-time leading receiver; Jackson native Savante Stringellow, a former world champion long jumper who prepped at Provine and was an All American at Ole Miss; tennis champion Becky Vest, another Jackson Provine product, who competed on the Virginia Slims Tour, at Wimbledon, and the U.S. and French Opens; and Florence’s Jimmy Webb, a Mississippi State All American defensive lineman and first-round NFL Draft choice who played seven years of pro football in San Francisco and San Diego.
While Manning, who follows his father Archie Manning into the Hall of Fame, headlines the 2024 inductees, he is not the only new inductee who gained A-list celebrity status in New York City. Barber, a Columbus native, did that more than half a century before Eli as a Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees among other Major League teams.
Vin Scully, perhaps the most beloved baseball announcer ever, counted Barber as a mentor and an inspiration. Scully called Barber “the consummate reporter,” and “perhaps the most literate sports announcer I ever met.” Scully also called Barber “a profound influence on my life and a major reason for any success that I might have had in this business.”
Barber, who died in 1992 at the age of 84, was one of the first two broadcasters inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. The New York Times memorialized Barber thusly: “During his 33-year career as a play-by-play announcer, Mr. Barber, the first regular baseball radio announcer in New York, became the recognized master of his profession, delighting millions of fans with his folksy expertise and influencing and inspiring a generation of broadcasters.”
Much later in life, Barber became a popular weekly contributor to National Public Radio. He also authored seven books and narrated numerous TV programs and documentaries.
Brief bios of each inductee follow:
Hall of Fame weekend festivities begin Friday night’s Drawdown of Champions at 6 p.m. at the Sheraton Flowood Hotel and Convention Center, which will include silent and live auctions and a $5,000 drawdown. The public will have an opportunity to meet the inductees Saturday morning (9:30-11-30 a.m.) at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. For more information, call 601 982-8264.
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After it was twice denied permission to store carbon dioxide under U.S. Forest Service lands, a company looking to store millions of tons of the greenhouse gas in the Southeast made a strategic decision: Keep pushing.
The company, CapturePoint Solutions, leased property adjacent to forest service land in Mississippi for a project there. It started a program teaching carbon management at a school system near Forest Service land in Louisiana. And then, more than a year after it received its first denial, CapturePoint invited federal officials on an informational tour to discuss storing carbon under forest service land.
USFS officials are now considering a draft rule to allow carbon capture under U.S-owned land. The agency insists the company’s requests did not influence its decision to draft the rule — and that no one from the Forest Service attended the informational tour.
“We always felt and believed that the Forest Service was not following (Federal Land Policy and Management Act), and therefore continued our efforts,” said a CapturePoint spokesperson who asked not to be named.
That law allows some federal lands to be used for energy, including gas. Environmental groups argue the 1976 law does not cover carbon dioxide storage. They are concerned that CO2 could leak from the ground, injuring or killing people and animals and damaging the forest. Injecting the carbon underground, they say, amounts to an industrialization of federal land.
While it is technically possible for such a leak to occur, the chances of a leak from storage areas more than a mile underground are “extremely remote,” CapturePoint CEO Tracy Evans told Floodlight.
CapturePoint’s efforts were detailed in public records obtained from the Forest Service by CURE, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, and shared with Floodlight. CURE is opposed to carbon pipelines in Minnesota and is concerned about carbon storage under Forest Service land in its state. The records also reveal inquiries in 2022 by ExxonMobil to stash carbon under the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas.
The Carbon Capture Coalition says the United States won’t be able to meet 2050 greenhouse gas reduction targets unless it allows federal land to be used for carbon storage. The pro-carbon capture coalition of more than 100 companies, unions, conservation and environmental policy organizations estimates about 130 million acres of federal lands overlay suitable geology for the secure storage of captured carbon dioxide. The Forest Service manages 21% of that land.
CapturePoint applied to inject carbon under the Kisatchie National Forest in central Louisiana in 2021 under its previous corporate name, Authentic Reductions. CapturePoint also applied to inject carbon under the Delta National Forest in Mississippi in 2022.
The applications were rejected for the same reason — such a permit would allow a permanent use of Forest Service land, something the agency has historically not allowed.
Now, more than three years after the company began its push, the Forest Service is in the middle of changes that could allow the storage of the greenhouse gas under millions of acres of Forest Service land indefinitely.
The comment period for the draft rule ended in January. The Forest Service is currently reviewing the comments, agency spokesperson Catherine McRae said.
Both CapturePoint and the Forest Service agree: No agency employees ended up attending the tour the company held of the Kisatchie and Delta forests in 2022. CapturePoint said it had no direct input on the creation of the draft rules. And McRae said the company’s requests did not prompt the Forest Service to propose the draft rule.
The email correspondence in the records obtained by CURE included draft applications from CapturePoint to inject carbon under the two forests. In both, CapturePoint offered $1 per ton of injected carbon. In the Kisatchie National Forest, CapturePoint proposed injecting up to 50 million tons over a 12- to 20-year period — which it said is equivalent to removing the emissions from 10 million cars a year. In the Delta forest, the company said it wanted to inject 6-12 million tons over 12 years.
The Inflation Reduction Act offers companies that capture and store carbon dioxide from $60 to $180 per ton in tax credits. Evans told Floodlight $1 per ton was offered when subsidies were lower, but there are mechanisms in place to increase the payments if subdies increased.
“Some of the lobbying was sort of surprising,” said Hudson Kingston, legal director of CURE. He said the company “sucked up to” federal employees by offering to take them on the tour. “It’s how regulatory capture works.”
Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, had a similar reaction.
“One could really infer that there was a lot of industry pressure or influence to try to get access to this pore (underground) space,” Bogdan Tejeda said. “And that, so far, they were successful, at least with getting a rule out there that would make their applications possible.”
CapturePoint doesn’t see it that way. Evans argued that storing carbon under Forest Service and other federal lands makes sense given the federal government’s “desire to have CCS move forward.”
In addition to approaching the Forest Service, CapturePoint also inquired about storing carbon under a U.S. Army base in central Louisiana, he said.
Some federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, already allow carbon to be stored under their lands under the federal land management law. In 2022, the BLM granted its first approval to ExxonMobil to permanently store carbon under land in Wyoming, a project that remains controversial.
While CapturePoint says the law should also apply to the Forest Service, Bogdan Tejeda said it’s not that straightforward. The law does not mention carbon dioxide or permanent storage, and historically, the Forest Service has interpreted its own authority as barring any permanent use, she said.
November’s draft rule by the Forest Service surprised many agency observers, who say it bucks precedent. While there are leases on Forest Service for oil and gas drilling, for instance, those leases are for a set number of years, not for a permanent use, Bogdan Tejeda said.
“I’m not seeing anything in the rule that they (USFS) issued, showing why that would change,” she said.
Among the concerns over storing carbon under forest service land is the potential to endanger tribes’ access to fish and other food, which the federal government agreed to protect in exchange for seizing vast tracts of Native American land, according to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon.
Bogdan Tejeda still has a lot of questions, including who will monitor the stored carbon after CapturePoint is gone — and who will be liable if something goes wrong.
“It gives industry essentially a place to dump their carbon dioxide waste, benefit from the tax credits, and they don’t have to deal with the messiness of trying to get permission from property owners and eminent domain.”
The federal government says, ‘Hey, just come on over here,’ ” she said, “and that’s a form of a subsidy.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that partners with local and national outlets to investigate the powerful interests stalling climate action.
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The opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics are tonight in Paris, and my thoughts immediately go back to the only time I covered the Olympic Games, 1996 in Atlanta.
My first thought: Has it really been 28 years?
Yes, it has, but in so many ways it seems as if it were only last week. It remains one of the highlights of my more than half century writing about sports. The memories are vivid, poignant and many. There was Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame with trembling hands. There was then-Hattiesburg resident Angel Martino, a swimmer, winning the first American medal and then three more. There was the bomb that went off in Centennial Park, adjacent to Olympic headquarters, putting a 24-hour hold on the Olympics and causing this sports writer to work a 36-hour shift. There were Skip Bertman and Ron Polk coaching Team USA baseball, puffing on huge Honduran cigars all the while. There was a human blur named Michael Johnson who shattered records in the 200- and 400-meter sprints. There was all that and so much more.
Most memorable of all, there was Ruthie Bolton and, by extension, the Rev. Linwood Bolton, Ruthie’s daddy. For me, they became the best story of those Olympic Games and gave this Mississippi reporter more than he ever dreamed he could write home about. You could not make their story up.
Ruthie, from the tiny south Mississippi town of McLain, was the point guard for the gold medal-winning USA women’s basketball team that pretty much stole the Olympic spotlight from Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and the USA men’s Dream Team. The American women also included such stars as Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes and Rebecca Lobo, but little Ruthie Bolton was the team’s engine. She made them go, both offensively and defensively. Her story was fascinating and as Mississippi as it gets.
Start with this: Ruthie was the smallest of the 20 children born to the Rev. Linwood Bolton and his wife, Leola, who lived on a farm near McLain in Greene County, 34 miles south of Hattiesburg. Leola Bolton had died of cancer the year before the Olympics. Linwood, who at the age of 73 still pastored four south Mississippi churches, watched the first week or so at home on TV, then came to Atlanta for the last week of the games. Meeting and interviewing him was a highlight. He had lost the love of his life and much of his hearing, but his handshake was firm and he still possessed the sunny, effervescent personality of a much younger man.
“Yes,” he answered, he was “mighty, mighty proud of Ruthie. The rest of them are bigger, but little Ruthie was a little different from the rest,” Rev. Bolton said. “She was the quiet one, but she had a fire inside. Ruthie was the fighter. She was always so determined. When she had a goal, nothing was going to stand in the way.”
On the Bolton farm, the family grew corn, peas, beens, greens, okra and tomatoes. They raised cattle, hogs and chickens. Everyone pitched in with the chores, and, said Linwood, Ruthie always chose the most difficult work of all.
All that hard work on the farm somehow translated to the basketball court. For Team USA, Ruthie always got the most difficult defensive assignment. She nearly always defended the other team’s best player and she led the team in steals. Offensively, she ran the show, scoring 13 points a game and leading the team in assists.
In the championship game against Brazil, played before 33,000 in the Georgia Dome, Ruthie scored 15 points, passed out five assists and made five steals. On Team USA’s first offensive possession, she swished a 3-pointer from four steps beyond the 3-point line. More importantly, she was given the assignment of covering “Magic Paula” Silva, Brazil’s legendary star, who scored only seven points and made her only field goal when Ruthie was taking a breather.
Afterward, I asked Ruthie how she did it. Her answer: “I was in her pants, that’s how. I was all over her. If she had gone to the bathroom, I was going with her.”
It reached the point where a Mississippi sports writer – covering a Mississippi woman in the biggest sporting event in the world – felt sorry for the star player from Brazil.
The medal presentation afterward was one never to be forgotten. There was Rev. Linwood Bolton, holding up a photo of his deceased wife, while his daughter, watching, smiled through tears, a gold medal draped around her neck while the Star Spangled Banner played. Again, you couldn’t make this up.
Over the next couple weeks, many compelling Olympic stories will unfold on the courts, fields and in the pools of Gay Paree. None will be more compelling than what happened 28 years ago when Ruthie Bolton, the 16th of 20 born to Linwood and Leola Bolton, displayed more grit and will than imaginable.
The rest of the story? Rev. Bolton died in 1998. Ruthie went on to play the first seven seasons of the WNBA’s existence, was a two-time all-star and has been inducted into both the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. She has long since retired and recently has moved back to McLain where her daughter, Hope, will play basketball as a ninth grader this next season.
And Ruthie’s best memories of those Atlanta Olympics?
“On the floor, it had to be guarding that girl from Brazil in the gold medal game,” Ruthie told me. “Off the floor, just being supported by my family, all of them. I mean, have you ever gone into an Atlanta restaurant and asked for a table for 28?”
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OXFORD — The case against a former Ole Miss student accused of killing Jimmie “Jay” Lee will remain open after a Lafayette County Circuit Court judge denied a joint motion to seal the entirety of the filings.
In a quick hearing Thursday, Judge Kelly Luther said he would consider sealing some filings on a case-by-case basis if asked to do so by the defense for Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr. But Luther added he did not think that would be necessary, since it was unlikely any motions before trial would contain evidence that could prejudice a jury.
“The way discovery is done in today’s age, I don’t anticipate getting any of those items,” Luther said before denying the motion.
Kevin Horan, Herrington’s attorney and a representative from his hometown of Grenada, said he would draft the order and circulate it among the parties. Horan had hoped the motion, which was unusually supported by District Attorney Ben Creekmore, would be successful in order to reduce further pretrial publicity, including social media. The case has attracted national media attention, particularly when Herrington was arrested shortly after Lee went missing two years ago.
“We just move forward,” Horan said.
Luther’s ruling came after Mississippi Today filed a motion to intervene in the effort to close any filings before Herrington’s case goes to trial later this year. The news organization’s motion was supported by WMC-TV, a television station based in Memphis, Tennessee and WTVA, a station based in the Tupelo-Columbus area. The Mississippi Press Association had also issued a press release urging transparency and opposing the order.
Mississippi Today’s attorney, Henry Laird, commended Luther for following the process established by the Mississippi Supreme Court for closing cases.
“This is an example to other judges that this is how you work with the people, and this is how you work with the press,” Laird said.
Creekmore said there had been “some misconception” about the extent of the sealing requested by himself and Horan. Creekmore added his goal was not to seal the whole case file but to protect any motions entered before a jury.
“It wouldn’t have been a complete sealing,” he said.
On Monday, the day Luther had originally intended to rule on the motion to seal the file, he also issued an order from the bench to keep the trial in Lafayette County but pull jurors from another area, then sequester them in a hotel for its duration.
Creekmore was chiefly concerned about a motion confirming which county jurors will be pulled from leading to a flurry of media coverage in that area. He told Mississippi Today he thought the judge’s Thursday order will protect the integrity of the jury.
“I think you have to accept that Lafayette County is already aware of a lot of the facts of the case, and it would be difficult to find somebody who isn’t aware of the case,” Creekmore said.
In his 20 years in the courtroom, Creekmore said this case has drawn more scrutiny than many others he’s worked on, but he wasn’t able to say why.
“I don’t have an answer to that,” he said. “I can answer that question once the case is resolved. I’ve got feelings on it, but I think it would be speculative on my part to try to answer for an entire community.”
Lee was a well-known member of Oxford’s LGBTQ+ community. His disappearance and death two years ago has led to protests outside the courthouse and efforts to memorialize him at local drag shows and pride events.
Herrington’s arrest also drew scrutiny in part because his family is connected in north Mississippi. A preliminary hearing setting bond detailed some of the evidence against him, including Google searches on his computer, text messages he exchanged with Lee the night Lee went missing, and K-9s that identified the smell of a dead body in his car.
But Herrington, through his attorney and family members, has maintained his innocence. As he walked down the Lafayette County Courthouse steps, Horan stated the case will go to trial.
“Certainly,” he said.
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Nearly five years after officials first named his company in the “largest public embezzlement case in state history,” Florida neuroscientist Jacob Vanlandingham has pleaded guilty to one federal charge of wire fraud.
Vanlandingham is the latest defendant to admit to some role in the Mississippi welfare scandal, which ensnared his former business partner, retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre. The two worked together, a civil lawsuit by the Mississippi Department of Human Services alleges, to channel funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to their pharmaceutical startup project called Prevacus.
But acquiring $1.9 million in federal welfare funds from the poorest state in the nation to develop a drug to treat concussions — an allegedly illegal use of the funds — was not Vanlandingham’s crime. Instead, he pleaded guilty to using some of the funds for himself, including for “gambling and paying off personal debts,” according to a federal court file.
Reached Wednesday, Vanlandingham said he didn’t want his narrow guilty plea to be misconstrued as an admission of stealing welfare money.
“The case was very complicated but it really boiled down to one count of wire fraud, not any finding of welfare fraud,” said Vanlandingham’s Florida attorney Thomas Findley.
Both Favre and Vanlandingham have denied the allegations in the ongoing civil suit and Favre has not been charged with a crime. Vanlandingham founded Prevacus in 2012 and Favre was one of its largest investors and promoters. The startup is defunct today after selling the idea of its concussion drug to another company.
In January of 2019, Prevacus entered a $1.7 million contract with Mississippi Community Education Center, a nonprofit that the state welfare agency, Mississippi Department of Human Services, had entrusted to spend millions of federal grant funds.
“The purpose of the scheme … was for Vanlandingham to unlawfully enrich himself by making materially false and fraudulent representations that he would use certain funds, including funds obtained from MDHS through MCEC, to develop a pharmaceutical treatment for concussions,” reads the charge.
Vanlandingham pleaded guilty to a bill of information, a charging document that the government uses when a defendant agrees to waive a formal indictment, and was released on a $10,000 bond on Wednesday. The charge related to a $400,000 wire transfer from Mississippi Community Education Center to Prevacus on July 16, 2019, which occurred about a month after the state auditor’s investigation began.
The single count of wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Vanlandingham’s sentencing, along with the sentencings of six others who have pleaded guilty, has not been scheduled as each defendant continues to cooperate with federal investigators as part of their pleas.
The federal case against Vanlandingham stems from the government’s probe, beginning in 2020, into the misspending or theft of federal public assistance funds. The federal investigation did not begin until State Auditor Shad White, who originally investigated a tip brought forward by an agency employee to then-Gov. Phil Bryant, made six arrests and then turned the case over to federal authorities in February of 2020. Auditors have estimated between $77 million and $98 million was misspent or not properly documented.
“I applaud federal prosecutors for their continued work on this case,” White said in a press release Wednesday. “I’m grateful for my team at the Auditor’s office and the FBI for digging up the facts related to this case. We will continue to assist federal prosecutors as needed going forward.”
The welfare agency director John Davis and nonprofit founder Nancy New both pleaded guilty within the scheme in 2022 but have not been sentenced. An additional four defendants who pleaded to state or federal charges between 2020 and 2023. Each defendant has agreed to aid federal authorities in their ongoing investigation. The trial for an eighth defendant, former professional wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr., is scheduled for January.
The bill of information against Vanlandingham was signed by Todd Gee, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Mississippi who left the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section to fill the Jackson-based appointment.
But Vanlandingham’s bill of information was signed by two other senior officials from the U.S. Department of Justice — Glenn S. Leon, the chief of the DOJ’s Fraud Section, and Margaret A. Moeser, the chief of the DOJ’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section — signaling Washington’s role in the ongoing investigation.
Many of the crimes associated with the welfare scandal come with a five year statute of limitations.
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