For abetting an insurrection, Jeff Landry should be barred from becoming Louisiana's governor

The record shows Landry helped Donald Trump foment an insurrection

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By Robert Mann

Louisiana’s Republican governor-elect, Jeff Landry, aided and abetted the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection against the US government. He assisted then-President Donald Trump in building a spurious legal case that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He, Trump, and others stoked the flames that finally burst into violent, open warfare against the United States on Jan. 6.

Landry helped Trump lay the insurrection’s groundwork. They are both enemies of democracy. And because of Landry’s actions, the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should stop him from becoming governor on Jan. 8.

Here’s what the Constitution says about those who aid and abet insurrection:

14th Amendment, Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. [emphasis mine]

If Louisiana had a state supreme court that could apply the Constitution without fear of retribution from a hyper-partisan, Trump-supporting Legislature, someone would have sued Landry over his involvement in insurrection long before he became a candidate for governor.

But that would have been a waste of time and money. Beyond the prospect of legislative retribution, the likelihood of violence against any state court judge who barred Landry from the ballot would have been enough to prompt the case’s summary dismissal.

But by any objective standard, Landry betrayed his country. And if the Constitution means anything, he shouldn’t be allowed to serve as governor.

Likely, Landry was partly — or even primarily — motivated to help Trump steal a presidential election because he believed Trump would return the favor and help him when he ran for governor in 2023. As it turned out, that’s what happened. Landry probably helped aid and abet an insurrection, not because he believed Trump won the election, but because he knew it would help him win a Louisiana election.  

To begin, let’s review some documentary evidence of Landry’s betrayal:

Jeff Landry led an association that helped direct, finance, and organize the right-wing Jan. 6, 2021, rally on behalf of Trump that ended with a violent attack at the U.S. Capitol. The Rule of Law Defense Fund, an affiliate of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which Landry chaired, made robocalls that encouraged “patriots like you (to) join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our election.”

As reported in The Louisiana Illuminator on Jan. 7, 2021:

The connection between the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), a 501(c)(4) arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), and Wednesday’s “March to Save America” rally was initially reported by Documented, a left-leaning website that describes itself as “a watchdog group that investigates how corporations manipulate public policy, harming our environment, communities, and democracy.”

RAGA’s website highlights Landry as the 2020 chairman of their organization and a current member of their executive committee as of [January 2021]. And in the federal tax filings for its corporate affiliate, Landry is listed as a co-director of the RLDF. Those tax documents, which were the most recent available to the public, were for the 2019 fiscal year.

In his official capacity as attorney general, Landry helped Trump spread disinformation about the election result and actively worked to disenfranchise voters.

As reported by the Louisiana Illuminator on Dec. 9, 2020:

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has joined with nine other Republican state attorneys general in a voter-fraud conspiracy lawsuit — that cites no actual evidence nor any specific allegations of voter fraud on Nov. 3 — in a last-minute attempt to overturn the presidential election results in Pennsylvania. . .

In his amicus brief that inserts the State of Louisiana into the case, Landry spends dozens of pages arguing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision created a perfect storm for fraudulent actors to steal the election from incumbent President Donald Trump, but he doesn’t make any specific allegations of fraud or provide any evidence of it. 

Landry consulted with Trump and other White House officials about how to steal the election.

Landry went to Washington, D.C., on December 10, 2020, and met with Trump and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to discuss sowing doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and plot how to overturn the election results.

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Landry’s efforts to undermine the election results led Trump to consider bringing him on the White House staff in an official capacity.

Landry was so intimately involved with trying to steal the 2020 election for Trump that Trump wanted to bring him on board to help lead the effort. It appears the only reason Landry didn’t do it was because the role would have violated state law.

As reported by the Baton Rouge Advocate in June 2022: 

Former President Donald Trump's administration wanted to appoint Louisiana's Attorney General as "special counsel" to investigate election fraud after the 2020 election, former United States Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel testified Thursday. . . .

Questions have swirled since the 2020 election about Landry’s role in trying to overturn its results. Landry was chairman at the time of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and Trump courted Landry to be the face of a major election fraud lawsuit shortly after the 2020 election, according to The New York Times.

The Times reported that, as Trump’s administration shopped around a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate election results in several states, “the Trump allies made a particularly intense appeal to Louisiana’s attorney general, Jeffrey M. Landry, a member of Lawyers for Trump and, at the time, the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association.”

Beyond his involvement with an organization that sent out robocalls urging people to attend the rally that became an insurrection, Landry was connected to one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

Landry and Ali Alexander, formerly of Baton Rouge and one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 rally, had ties.

As reported by Lamar White in Bayou Brief in February 2021:

Among the promotional materials that listed the Rule of Law Defense Fund as one of 11 sponsoring organizations of the March to Save America on Jan 6 (after originally listing the Republican Attorneys General Association), there were at least three organizations directly tied to Ali Alexander, the far-right extremist and conspiracy theorist who planned and promoted at least one of the rallies that recruited attendees believed to have participated in the insurrection at the Capitol: Stop the Steal, WildProtest, and the Black Conservatives Fund.

I have reported previously on Alexander’s extensive ties to Republican officials in Louisiana. Alexander lived in Baton Rouge from 2015 through 2019, but his work in the state began in 2014, when he claimed to be a “senior advisor” for the Black Conservatives Fund. In reality, Alexander was much more than a “senior advisor;” he effectively ran the entire operation, which made headlines for a deceptively-edited robo-call and a secretly-recorded and deceptively-edited video that attacked incumbent Democrat U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu during her race against Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy.

As I’ve since discovered, Alexander was friends on Facebook with Landry’s personal account, and perhaps more tellingly, in early December 2014, Landry, then serving as the Louisiana GOP’s Chairman of Voter Integrity, issued a press release about Alexander’s video, which presented an obvious joke made by Opelousas Mayor Don Cravins, Sr., a Landrieu supporter, about voting early and often as if it was tantamount to the confession of a serious crime.

After the insurrection, Landry tried to downplay its significance by comparing it to BLM protests.

Landry refused to put his name on a letter signed by 50 attorneys general that condemned the insurrection. In a separate letter, Landry condemned the violence but minimized it by comparing the insurrection to the Black Lives Matter protests of the previous summer.

The record is clear and convincing: Jeff Landry aided and abetted Trump in fomenting an insurrection.

In fact, according to reporting by CapitolHunters — a Twitter account dedicated to organizing crowdsourced information about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack — Landry was far more involved in the effort to overturn the election than all the other like-minded attorneys general except Texas AG Ken Paxton.

This chart and the subsequent thread on Twitter are helpful:

Now that we have a sense of what Landry did, let’s apply the standard to Landry that the Colorado Supreme Court applied in deciding that Trump engaged in insurrection and, therefore, is barred from appearing on the Colorado presidential primary ballot.

I will quote from the opinion issued on Dec. 19. I encourage you to read the whole ruling, but for brevity, I will rely upon (and highlight) the most relevant portions.

The court wrote:

Turning to case law construing the meaning of “engaged in” for purposes of Section Three, although we have found little precedent directly on point, cases concerning treason that had been decided by the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified provide some insight into how the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment would have understood the term “engaged in.”

For example, in Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. 75, 126 (1807), Chief Justice Marshall explained that “if a body of men be actually assembled for the purpose of effecting by force a treasonable purpose, all those who perform any part, however minute, or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors.”

In other words, an individual need not directly participate in the overt act of levying war or insurrection for the law to hold him accountable as if he had: [I]t is not necessary to prove that the individual accused, was a direct, personal actor in the violence. If he was present, directing, aiding, abetting, counselling, or countenancing it, he is in law guilty of the forcible act. Nor is even his personal presence indispensable. Though he be absent at the time of its actual perpetration, yet if he directed the act, devised or knowingly furnished the means, for carrying it into effect, instigating others to perform it, he shares their guilt. In treason there are no accessories. . . .

[W]e hasten to add that we do not read “engaged in” so broadly as to subsume mere silence in the face of insurrection or mere acquiescence therein, at least absent an affirmative duty to act. Rather, as Attorney General Stanbery observed, “The force of the term to engage carries the idea of active rather than passive conduct, and of voluntary rather than compulsory action.” . . .

The question remains whether the record supported the district court’s finding that President Trump engaged in the January 6 insurrection by acting overtly and voluntarily with the intent of aiding or furthering the insurrectionists’ common unlawful purpose. Again, mindful of our applicable standard of review, we conclude that it did, and we proceed to a necessarily detailed discussion of the evidence to show why this is so.

Substantial evidence in the record showed that even before the November 2020 general election, President Trump was laying the groundwork for a claim that the election was rigged. . . .

President Trump then lost the election, and despite the facts that his advisors repeatedly advised him that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud and that no evidence showed that he himself believed the election was wrought with fraud, President Trump ramped up his claims that the election was stolen from him and undertook efforts to prevent the certification of the election results. . .  .

President Trump continued to fan the flames of his supporters’ ire, which he had ignited, with ongoing false assertions of election fraud, propelling the “Stop the Steal” movement and cross-country rallies leading up to January 6.

Donald Trump did not fan the flames of insurrection alone. He had many accomplices who aided and abetted his plans.

One of them was Jeff Landry, who will become Louisiana’s governor on Jan. 8 but should be barred from holding any office in Louisiana for his role in the Jan. 6 attempt to overthrow the US government.

Landry’s disqualification wouldn’t be the first time a state official has been found ineligible to hold public office because of involvement in the insurrection. In September 2022, a New Mexico state judge removed Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from office, finding that the attack was an insurrection and that Griffin’s participation disqualified him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Like Donald Trump, Landry tried to overthrow the US government. As the Colorado court said in disqualifying Trump, one does not have to physically storm the Capitol to be involved in an insurrection: “If he was present, directing, aiding, abetting, counselling, or countenancing it, he is in law guilty of the forcible act.”

If we take the Constitution’s 14th Amendment as seriously as the far-right does the 2nd Amendment, then there’s no question that Landry is ineligible to serve.

And now for some music . . .

I love country and bluegrass, so I’ll be sharing some of my favorite music (new and classic) here so that we end each time with something uplifting, no matter how depressing the news. I hope to also feature Louisiana artists, so if you have someone you think I should share with readers, please let me know.

Here’s this week’s music from one of my favorite groups, the Kruger Brothers: