Louisiana's GOP governor cites fake laws to dodge questions: report

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana is dodging questions from the media by citing laws that don't actually exist, a local newspaper accused him Monday.

NOLA.com reporter Andrea Gallo detailed the governor's attempts to avoid requests for details about his government by claiming that public records would be “weaponized to stifle deliberative speech.” The journalist discovered that, during the first five months of Landry's term in office, he refused about a quarter of all public records requests by citing "deliberative process" or "executive privilege."

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"The documents they withheld for those reasons included records related to Landry’s attempts to expand the death penalty, records dealing with the Louisiana National Guard’s deployment to Mexico, and records related to Landry’s travel," wrote Gallo.

Landry made national headlines recently when he signed a law requiring all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.

The governor's office also withheld records from other agencies using a state law that only applies to the governor's office, the report continued. In another case, the governor's office claimed that there was a constitutional right to privacy after requests for information following a flood of resignations from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

“I can’t see the legal justification for it,” Steven Procopio, who serves as the president of the Public Affairs Research Center in Louisiana, told NOLA.com. “Because they’re doing this in a very broad way and using exemptions that don’t seem to have legal standing, it’s preventing the public’s right to know what their government is doing.”

Gallo spoke to a former top attorney to three Louisiana governors and thinks that the GOP governor is wanting people to sue.

“You just can’t make up law,” Ryder explained. “There’s no such thing as executive privilege or deliberative process privilege if it’s not in law.”

Three outlets were denied information when requested, citing the questionable laws. But when asked about it, Gallo said Landry's spokesperson, Kate Kelly, said the office has “never denied a public records request.”

“Every record request has been answered in compliance with the law,” she said. “We may ask for clarification and never hear back from the requester — but we never just deny a request.”

Ironically, in 2022, while serving as attorney general, Landry opposed the same practice he's accused of deploying now. He said at the time that the Department of Justice “must not be allowed to hide behind the veil of executive privilege."

When former Gov. Bobby Jindal was in office in the state, they used a "deliberative process" excuse to dodge some public information requests. In his case, there was a state statute they used to withhold the documents as "privileged."

But Gallo explained, "The same cannot be said for Landry."

“They did have a core legal argument: there was in fact a deliberative process privilege,” Procopio said. “Whereas now, it doesn’t exist in law.”

The report stated that Louisiana's constitution says "no person shall be denied the right" to observe public bodies and examine public records, except in cases of law. The only example in law says, “a record of the office of the governor relating to intraoffice communications of the governor and his internal staff may be privileged from disclosure.”

Read the full report here.