Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for her remarkable investigation “The Backchannel,” which exposed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the state’s welfare scandal.
Wolfe’s investigation was the culmination of more than five years of reporting on the Mississippi welfare agency, which is tasked with helping the poorest residents of America’s poorest state. When she found in 2017 that only a fraction of Mississippians who applied for direct cash assistance were receiving it, she wondered how, instead, the state was spending hundreds of millions in federal grants designed to help those people.
Through dozens of records requests and hundreds of interviews over the past several years, Wolfe uncovered misspending of those federal funds. And, after a tipster leaked thousands of private, never-before-seen text messages between Bryant and key players in the scandal, Wolfe was able to piece together the former governor’s role.
Among the findings of “The Backchannel” investigation:
Bryant was set, just days after leaving office, to receive stock in a Favre-affiliated drug company that had received state welfare dollars.
Favre pressed Mississippi welfare officials to steer taxpayer funds to his pet projects — one of which he planned to profit from.
Bryant wielded great control over how his appointed welfare director distributed federal funds, even turning to that welfare director to seek help for his troubled nephew.
Click the links below to read the entire “The Backchannel” investigation.
Eleven Mississippi hospitals have received an “A” safety score from nonprofit The Leapfrog Group, while the state’s largest hospital received a “C” for the fifth year in a row.
The group hands out the biannual grades to about 3,000 general acute-care hospitals nationwide based on how they protect patients from errors, injuries, accidents and infections. Hospitals’ performances on more than 30 national metrics from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and other data determine each health care organization’s score.
No Mississippi Hospitals scored an “F,” but Merit Health Biloxi scored a “D,” the same it received in December. The grade is dictated by a hospital’s performance in infections, problems with surgery, safety problems, practices to prevent errors, and doctors, nurses and hospital staff.
Merit Health Biloxi, for example, scored worse than average compared to other hospitals in the rate of infections developed among patients, such as sepsis after surgeries.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only academic medical center, scored a “C.” The report highlights that UMMC has worse than average performance compared to other hospitals in deaths from surgical complications, split-open surgical wounds, blood infections, and patient falls. The report also noted the hospital did not have enough qualified nurses on staff.
Neither UMMC or Merit Health Biloxi officials responded to a request for comment for the story.
Leapfrog reported that nationwide, 29% of hospitals received an “A,” 26% a “B,” and 39% a “C.”
Less than 1% got an “F” and 6% received a “D.”
The risk of three infections commonly associated with hospital stays – including MRSA, central-line blood infections, and catheter-related urinary tract infections – spiked to a 5-year high during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains high in its latest report, according to Leapfrog.
“Infections like these can be life or death for some patients,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a statement. “We recognize the tremendous strain the pandemic put on hospitals and their workforce, but alarming findings like these indicate hospitals must recommit to patient safety and build more resilience.”
Here is the breakdown of grades for Mississippi hospitals:
Members of the Black Psychiatrists of America interrupted the breakfast of the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association. The Black psychiatrists shared a list of demands that included a rise in Black leadership, a call to desegregate mental health facilities and a rule to bar psychiatrists guilty of racial discrimination.
Their founding president, Charles Pierce, was especially concerned about television: “American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets.”
Convinced that the way to change young hearts would be through television, he became a senior adviser for a new educational show for preschoolers known as “Sesame Street,” which featured a racially diverse cast. “Sesame Street” would go on to become one of the most successful shows of all time, creating iconic characters that resonate to this day.
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Dorlisa Hutton, Chief Operations Officer for SR1. SR1 is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose missions to provide education, health and technology to all through science and partnership.
SR1 provides college access and success services by using their evidence based education model. Students are provided academic skills, social skills, family and relationship skills, recreation, civic literacy. Founded in 2005 by CEO Tamu Green, SR1 has served hundreds of children across Mississippi. Soon, SR1 CPSA will be opening in Canton, Mississippi the first STEM Charter School in Mississippi.
Alvin Sykes convinced federal prosecutors to prosecute Richard Bledsoe for a hate crime. Credit: Kansas City Public Library
A federal judge sentenced Raymond Bledsoe to life for beating Black jazz saxophonist Steven Harvey to death in a Kansas City park because of his race.
A Missouri jury had acquitted Bledsoe of murder, and afterward, he reportedly bragged to his girlfriend about killing a “n—–” and getting away with it.
Family members, Alvin Sykes and the Steve Harvey Justice Campaign convinced federal authorities to pursue the case. At the time, the conviction was reportedly the fourth under the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
In 2013, federal corrections authorities denied parole to Bledsoe. To date, he remains the longest serving inmate convicted under that Civil Rights Act. Sykes later helped bring both the Justice Department’s reopening of the Emmett Till case and the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
Sykes died in 2021, and his New York Times obituary read, “Though he never took a bar exam, Mr. Sykes was a brilliant legal and legislative operator whose admirers included City Council members, politicians and U.S. attorneys general from both parties. … He led a monk’s life in the name of social justice. He rarely held a job, wore second hand clothing and lacked a permanent address for long stretches of time, staying with friends instead and living off donations and, later, speaker fees. He never learned to drive and so walked everywhere, most often to the reference section of the library in Kansas City, Mo, where he did his research, or to a booth at a restaurant that he used as an informal office, his papers surrounded by cups of coffee and stubbed-out cigarettes.”
Former Gov. Phil Bryant opted Thursday to release hundreds of pages of text messages with figures in the Mississippi welfare scandal after initially fighting a subpoena against him.
But several key messages between the state’s chief executive and his appointed welfare director are missing from the batch, according to a separate trove of leaked text messages obtained and possessed by Mississippi Today.
In a video statement he published prior to releasing the texts and emails Thursday, Bryant said he has been “as open and honest as I can be” about the massive fraud scheme that took place under his watch, resulting in the loss of $77 million in federal welfare funds from 2016 to 2019.
While thousands of text messages have come out in the course of Mississippi Department of Human Services’ civil litigation, the public has yet to see any messages sent during the pertinent months of the scandal between Bryant and his subordinate who ran the agency John Davis.
Bryant said on Thursday he does not possess any text messages with Davis between 2016, when Davis became director, and June of 2019, when Bryant forced Davis to retire — including the early 2019 messages Mississippi Today already retrieved and published last year in its investigative series “The Backchannel.”
Texts that Mississippi Today possesses that Bryant didn’t produce on Thursday include:
An exchange in which Bryant asked Davis to fund a specific vendor, to which Davis responded, “Yes sir we can definitely help. You can go ahead and tell them I will be reaching out to fund them. I will do today.”
A text Davis sent Bryant explaining that he had “FOUND A WAY TO FUND” a vendor Bryant supported after initially learning it would violate federal welfare grant regulations. Bryant responded: “Your (sic) the best..”
A text in which Bryant asked Davis about a Mississippi Today report on federal welfare expenditures. Davis responds that the state is spending money in “areas that encourage getting a keeping a job.” Bryant responded: “Keep up the good work.”
In response to Mississippi Today questions, a spokesperson for Bryant said on Thursday the former governor did not delete any messages from his phone.
Bryant, who faces no criminal or civil charges, has been at the center of public scrutiny for his alleged role in diverting tens of millions of federal funds intended to help the state’s poorest residents away from the needy. Following “The Backchannel” reporting in 2022, several Mississippians who have pleaded guilty to criminal or civil charges have alleged in court that Bryant directed or influenced their misspending or fraud.
Davis, who has remained the most silent in the case, has since pleaded guilty to 20 charges — two federal and 18 state — of conspiracy, theft or fraud and is aiding federal prosecutors in an ongoing investigation while awaiting sentencing.
After an agency employee brought forward a small tip of fraud against Davis in June 2019, Bryant turned over the information to State Auditor Shad White, whom Bryant initially appointed to his position, and forced Davis to retire. At this time, investigators from the auditor’s office retrieved Davis’ phone, which held messages with Bryant dating back only to March of 2019.
“John has dedicated his life to serving others,” Bryant wrote in a glowing statement about Davis’ retirement, which did not address the fraud investigation.
Mississippi Today exclusively obtained 14 pages of text messages between Bryant and Davis sent in the four months leading up to Davis’ ousting. In the texts, Bryant asked Davis to fund specific subgrantees and praised him for his efforts to reduce the number of poor families receiving aid under under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF.
But when Bryant gathered the communication in response to a subpoena, he found that he did not have any of these messages in his possession, his spokesperson said, therefore he did not produce them Thursday.
“Everybody in modern America knows you can delete a text,” said Jim Waide, the attorney for Davis’ nephew Austin Smith, a defendant in the civil suit.
Waide is one of the attorneys who filed a subpoena on Bryant. One of the items he requested was any communication in which Bryant sought help from Davis for his nephew, which Mississippi Today first uncovered in “The Backchannel.”
These texts, in which Bryant thanked Davis “for all your (sic) have done,” do not appear in the documents Bryant produced Thursday.
“And we know they exist because (Mississippi Today) published them, several of them, between him and John Davis. So we know they exist, or somewhere at one time they existed,” Waide said.
Bryant’s public relations representative Denton Gibbes addressed the missing texts in a statement released to the news media Thursday.
“To the extent any additional messages exist, Gov. Bryant does not have them,” Gibbes said. “Gov. Bryant is aware of a message between he and John Davis relating to his nephew, Noah McRae, that he does not currently possess. Gov. Bryant did not delete this or any other messages. He is unclear why this message is not on his mobile phone. Gov. Bryant has searched older devices in an effort to recover this and any other additional messages. Gov. Bryant even requested Apple’s assistance in recovering additional messages. These efforts were unsuccessful.”
The statement said Bryant chose to produce all the text messages with Davis in his possession, even though they were not responsive to the narrow subpoenas, “in the spirt (sic) of transparency.”
The newly released texts, which cover the time period July to September of 2019, show that Bryant and Davis communicated after the welfare director left office. “We are still here if you need us,” Bryant texted the embattled former director, accompanied by a prayer hands emoji, in mid-July of 2019 as the investigation into Davis’ conduct got underway.
After this, Bryant continued to contact Davis about where to find a vendor’s TANF funding. “Do you know where the $250k funding for JMG maybe at? Think this was some TANF dollars,” he wrote in August of 2019.
“Yes sir it was ready to be approved. It falls within the guidelines of TANF funding. It should not be a problem,” Davis responded.
Davis also expressed concern to the governor about being able to secure a new job, considering the ongoing auditor’s investigation. Bryant told Davis, “I have told the Auditor I would stay out of this and trust him to do his best.”
Within the welfare scandal, much of the focus has been on three projects that received more than $8 million in federal funding because of the alleged involvement of both Bryant and former NFL legend Brett Favre. These include a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, a pharmaceutical startup company called Prevacus and a $1.1 million promotional contract with Favre himself.
Mississippi Today published its 2022 investigation about Bryant’s role in the scandal after receiving and reviewing hundreds of pages of text messages obtained by investigators in the case, including those between Bryant, Favre, and Prevacus founder Jake Vanlandingham.
The texts showed that after Bryant met with former NFL legend Brett Favre about supporting his startup pharmaceutical venture in late 2018, the then-governor promised to “open a hole” for Favre and less than a week later, welfare officials including Davis struck a deal at the athlete’s home to funnel $1.7 million of federal grant funds into the project.
When the public funds started flowing to the drug company, Favre texted Bryant, “We couldn’t be more happy about the funding from the State of MS,” though Bryant denies knowing that the company received any public funds. Two days after leaving office, Bryant then agreed by text to accept “a company package for all your help,” Vanlandingham wrote, but arrests occurred before they were able to meet.
“The fact is I did nothing wrong,” Bryant said in his statement Thursday morning. “I wasn’t aware of the wrongdoings of others. When I received evidence that suggested people appeared to be misappropriating funds, I immediately reported that to the agency whose job it is to investigate these matters. It’s been a long and difficult year watching as decades of my public service is dragged through the mud and hoping it doesn’t affect those closest to me.”
Waide and Gerry Bufkin, the attorney for nonprofit founder Nancy New, initially filed subpoenas against Bryant last year in the massive civil case that Mississippi Department of Human Services is bringing against 47 individuals or companies in an attempt to claw back the misspent funds.
Bryant has been fighting the subpoenas, arguing that his text messages are protected under executive privilege. Mississippi Today, the Daily Journal and Mississippi Free Press filed a motion in early April opposing Bryant’s attempts to block public access to the documents. Bryant chose to release the messages before the court had a chance to rule on the matter.
“After much thought and discussion with counsel, I’ve made the decision to forgo any arguments about executive privilege of my text messages in this matter and simply release them all,” Bryant said in the video statement on Thursday. “Frankly, I’m tired of paying legal fees to respond to lawsuits that I’m not a party to in order to protect my privacy and an executive privilege that should exist for future governors.”
The judge in the civil suit, Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson, would have had the final say on whether the texts were released. She recently filed her first major order in the civil suit, which has been in progress for the last year, in which she denied Favre’s motion to dismiss charges against him.
In response to Bryant’s decision to release the texts, current Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson told Mississippi Today in a statement that “the agency has not been provided any of these text messages since we are involved in pending litigation.”
“MDHS will be very interested to review and have counsel review these messages,” he added. “MDHS is interested in reviewing communications relating to all parties, especially those currently named in the civil complaint.
Waide said he didn’t buy Bryant’s argument that he was releasing the texts to avoid more legal fees.
“The attorneys’ fees have already been incurred when they wrote the brief,” Waide said. “He wouldn’t be incurring any additional attorneys’ fees now. And second, I believe it’s inevitable the judge was going to order him to release them, and that he did it as a smart public relations move.”
Bryant released the texts publicly on a new website called bryanttexts.com. Some of the photocopies are so faded, the dates of the messages are barely legible.
“We all know what’s going to happen next,” Bryant said in the video also uploaded to the website. “My text messages will be manipulated through a coordinated effort from a billionaire-driven media outlet and Democratic political consultants. These messages will be again mischaracterized into endless fodder for those who want to try to denigrate the success of my terms as governor and castigate Republican candidates in an election year.”
HATTIESBURG – Nearly a year after a Forrest County sheriff’s deputy fatally shot a mentally ill man, the man’s family has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the county for using fatal force rather than helping.
Corey Maurice McCarty Hughes, 45, died July 14, 2022 outside of his sister’s house in the Palmers Crossing neighborhood. As his family had done over a dozen times before, they went through the civil commitment process to get Hughes treatment and called sheriff’s deputies to pick him up and take him to the South Mississippi State Hospital in Purvis.
Investigators said a deputy shot Hughes in the neck and torso after the man struck him with a hammer. Months later, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office determined the shooting was justified.
“This has left a hole in our hearts,” said Cassandra Teal, one of Hughes’ sisters who witnessed his death. “It wasn’t right what they (have) done.”
The lawsuit will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The plaintiff is Hughes’ father, James, on behalf of Corey’s daughter, Chloe, and the defendants are Forrest County and 10 unnamed sheriff’s deputies.
Chloe Hughes, daughter of Corey Maurice Hughes, expresses emotion as she raises her fist during a press conference announcing the Hughes family lawsuit against Forrest County and law enforcement in the Forrest County Sheriff’s Department, at the Forrest County Circuit Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. Thursday, May 4, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
It alleges “collective assault, negligence, gross negligence, and reckless disregard for the safety of others” and violation of Hughes’ federal, civil, Constitutional and human rights, according to the lawsuit.
The sheriff’s deputies inflicted “unnecessary bodily harm” through “excessive, unreasonable, and unjustifiable force,” the suit alleges.
In its response to the lawsuit complaint, the defendants denied the allegations and invoked qualified immunity, which protects a governmental entity and government officials including law enforcement from being sued for wrongdoing while doing their jobs, according to the lawsuit.
Trial is scheduled for April 1, 2024, in Hattiesburg before U.S. District Judge Halil Ozerden.
Hughes was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the late 1990s and took medication, his family said. But when he stopped taking it, a family member would go through the civil commitment process to get him treatment.
Verna Tameka McCarty, one of Corey’s sisters, said in 20 years, her brother had been civilly committed over a dozen times and the sheriff’s office was familiar with him. She asked why they acted differently the night he was killed.
“We have been going through this for years and have been trying to do the right thing in a situation when we needed further assistance,” she said.
McCarty said the deputies wronged her brother because they were not prepared to work with someone with mental illness.
Verna “Temeka” McCarty, sister of Corey Maurice Hughes, speaks during a press conference announcing the Hughes family lawsuit against Forrest County and law enforcement in the Forrest County Sheriff’s Department after her brother’s death, at the Forrest County Circuit Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. Thursday, May 4, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Under state law, sheriff’s deputies are required to pick up civil commitment patients and take them to the state hospital or to a holding location such as a jail until there is an available bed.
Attorney Dennis C. Sweet IV, who is representing James Hughes in the civil lawsuit, said there are policies and procedures for law enforcement to follow when encountering people like Corey Hughes who have been diagnosed with mental illness. He said the deputies did not follow those rules.
The Forrest County NAACP and Community Action Team of Palmers Crossing joined the Hughes family to show support and call for justice and accountability.
“We will not go away,” said Nathan Jordan of the Community Action Team. “We will be here until justice is done.”
Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, an African-American native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, was riding a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, where she worked as a teacher, when a white railroad conductor ordered her to move to another car. She refused.
When the conductor grabbed her by the arm, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote. The conductor got help from others, who dragged her off the train.
In response, she sued the railroad, saying the company forced Black Americans to ride in “separate but unequal” coaches. A local judge agreed, awarding her $500 in damages. But the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that ruling three years later. The decision upended her belief in the court system.
“I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed it, give us justice,” she said. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”
Wells knew about caring for others. At age 16, she raised her younger siblings after her parents and a brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. She became a teacher to support her family.
Incumbent Republican Gov. Tate Reeves says he’s not just facing a Democratic opponent, he’s up against a national cabal of East- and West-coast liberal elites and media.
He repeatedly warned a campaign kickoff crowd Wednesday that “they” are out to get Mississippi.
“My friends, this is a different governor’s campaign than we have ever seen before in our state because we are not up against a local-yokel Mississippi Democrat, we are up against a national liberal machine,” Reeves told a crowd in Richland on Wednesday, at a second campaign kickoff event. “They are extreme. They are radical and vicious. They believe welfare is success. They believe that taxes are good and businesses are bad. They think boys can be girls, that babies have no life, and that our state and our nation are racist.
“They think they can teach all of us Mississippians a lesson,” Reeves said. “They do not like who we are and they do not like what we believe. They look at all we have accomplished as conservatives and they hate it. They see our progress on education and the economy and they want to stop it. You see, a successful, thriving, growing Mississippi does not work for them, not if it is also a God-fearing, family loving and truth-believing, hard-working conservative Mississippi … They want Mississippi to be the butt of their jokes … They want to kick Mississippi around, and you and me are simply in their way.”
Reeves on Wednesday held a campaign rally and lunch at Stribling Equipment in Richland, after having an initial campaign kick-off event Tuesday in Gulfport. About 250 people attended his Wednesday event, including many present and past elected officials, lawmakers and lobbyists and local government and GOP leaders.
The event was near his hometown of Florence and in his home county, Rankin. In the 2019 general election against Democratic former Attorney General Jim Hood he won Rankin County after losing there in the Republican primary and primary runoff that year.
Reeves didn’t mention his Democratic challenger, longtime Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, by name, but worked to cast the race as a nationalized battle between Republicans and Democrats. This was a winning strategy for him in Mississippi — which has been solidly ruby red in national elections for decades — in his first gubernatorial election against Hood.
“The election that is before us is a question of whether or not we will keep up our momentum in Mississippi,” Reeves said. “The national Democrats have recruited a candidate. They are filling up his bank account. They have sent in experts in far-left politics to run his campaign. They even sent the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, here to check on his progress.”
Reeves was referring to a four-state tour, including Alabama, Arkansas and Florida, by Newsom last month as part of his launch of a new political action committee meant to promote Democrats in GOP-led states. Presley did not meet with Newsom on his visit, but Reeves chided Mississippi media on Wednesday, telling the crowd, “Oh, you didn’t see the news of Gavin Newsom here campaigning? Mississippi media must have left that out.”
When asked about whether Presley met with Newsom during his visit, a Presley campaign spokesman said: “Brandon was in Nettleton attending Palm Sunday services at his home church.”
Reeves in his speech said Mississippi has made great gains in economic development and education, adding, “Today we are building a Mississippi where nobody has to leave.” He repeated the speech’s theme — “this is Mississippi’s time” — many times from the stump.
“I have a message for all those governors in New York and California and Illinois: Mississippi is coming to take your jobs, and we have no intention of giving them back,” Reeves said. He also asked the crowd, “Help us one more time … Let’s defeat the national liberals. This is Mississippi’s moment. This is Mississippi’s time.”
Ruby Ainsworth and Betty Phillips, both Simpson County Republican Executive Committee members, were among the crowd of supporters at Reeves’ Richland event.
“I think he gave an excellent speech, one of the best I’ve ever heard him do,” said Ainsworth. “I think he’s done an excellent job as governor.”
Phillips said: “He has moved Mississippi forward — in all the ways he just said he has.”
Former Mississippi U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, a Rankin Countian, agreed.
“I’m here today as a highly unpaid political volunteer,” Harper said. “… He has earned the right to be elected another four years.”
When asked how he believes Reeves will do in Rankin County, Harper joked, “I think it will be hard for him to get more than 90% of the vote in Rankin County.”
