An Evidence-Based but Speculative Theory on the Campaign Finances of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry That, if True, Shows He Violated Four of the Ten Commandments He Recently Ordered State Schools to Post

Landry’s disclosure reports indicate his personal commitment to biblical principles could be weaker than advertised or he may need to replace his brother as treasurer of his campaign committees.

Did one of Governor Landry’s political associates need to make a discreet emergency visit to this Washington, DC public health clinic that diagnoses and treats patients with STDs? It certainly can’t be ruled out. Photo from the DC Health and Wellness Center’s website.

“Louisiana has long been reliably red…[but has] veered even further right” since Governor Jeff Landry was inaugurated six months ago, said an AP story last Friday that pointed to his promotion of anti-LGBTQ+ policies, such as a bill that would bar teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation, and a law he enacted on June 19 that requires public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. “This country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and every time we steer away from that, we have problems,” Landry told Fox News in summarizing the importance of the Ten Commandments law to the nation and to him personally.

Landry’s promotion of “conservative values” and emergence as a leader on the national culture war battlefield makes a bizarre entry in a recent campaign finance filing by his Cajun PAC II Political Action Committee all the more eyebrow raising. The entry in question disclosed a payment from Cajun PAC II to a company in Washington, DC that turns out not to exist, which is located, according to Landry’s committee, at the address of a public health clinic with a name that’s vaguely similar to the alleged recipient, which exclusively treats patients afflicted with AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, other STDs, and associated health ailments, at which point the situation becomes stranger still. 

The payment was only for $190, but a broader review of Cajun PAC II’s financial reports revealed a variety of other anomalies. Taken together, they raise the possibility that Landry’s personal commitment to political ethics and biblical principles is weaker than advertised, or he needs to hire a new treasurer for Cajun PAC II to clean up its books, which would admittedly be awkward as the person who currently manages the committee’s financial records is Benjamin Landry, the governor’s brother and longtime political and business associate, or both.

The governor’s press office didn’t respond to a request for comment. If it does, I’ll update this story.

Governor Landry makes no bones about his hard on for the Ten Commandments. But did he indirectly violate as many as 40 percent of them during a trip to Washington earlier this year? It certainly can’t be ruled out. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Landry is the chairman of Cajun PAC II, which he used to supplement the cash for his 2023 gubernatorial run that was donated through his main campaign treasury, which Benjamin Landry also oversees via his twin roles as the committee’s treasurer and chair. Benjamin Landry was also the treasurer of the original Cajun PAC, a federal committee his brother created in 2011 following his inauguration to represent Louisiana in the House of Representatives, and it remained active until 2021, eight years after he returned home after being defeated in his first reelection campaign and was serving as the state attorney general, a position he held until he won office as governor. 

The three political committees overseen by Benjamin Landry have collectively raised and spent millions of dollars. Cajun PAC II, which Jeff Landry established in 2019, has been periodically cited in news accounts regarding his dodgy political accounting practices. 

The committee, his gubernatorial campaign war chest, and affiliated Super PACs funneled at least $500,000  to a firm of Landry’s called UST Staffing, which a story last November in the Times-Picayune described as part of his longstanding “practice of cutting checks to his own companies,” which stretched back to at least 2007, when he lost a bid for a seat in the state senate, and “accelerated sharply during his run for governor.”

Cajun PAC II’s campaign finance report for March of this year listed the mysterious $190 expenditure noted above, which it labeled as a payment for “Membership Fees” at the House of Wellness at 77 P Street NE in Washington. 

Were details about the alleged expenditure of $190 for “membership fees” at a company that appears to be fake but has the address of a real STD clinic that doesn’t sell memberships intentionally misleading? That ‘s another thing that certainly can’t be ruled out. Screenshot from Cajun PAC II’s March campaign finance report.

A Google search turned up a listing for a firm called House of Wellness in Burtonsville, Maryland, about 20 miles outside of Washington, whose services were said to be acupuncture and herbal remedies. When I called the number given for the firm, an employee told me the online listing I’d seen had the wrong name of the company, which had always been known as Block Wellness and offered customers acupuncture treatment and massages. Given Block Wellness’ location in the Maryland suburbs about an hour’s drive from DC and the discrepancy with the name and location listed in the Cajun PAC II filing, I kept looking. 

When I searched for a business at the address provided in the PAC’s report, I learned it was the offices of the DC Health and Wellness Center, which diagnoses and treats AIDS, other STDs, Hepatitis B and C, which together afflict about 35 percent of HIV-positive individuals, and tuberculosis, which people infected with the HIV virus have an elevated risk of developing.

The DC Health and Wellness Center offers other services related to its core mission, such as distributing free condoms and a needle exchange program. The Center – whose motto is “Sex is a natural part of being. Be Sex Positive” – also “proudly supports our LGBTQ+ communities, including same gender loving men,” so they “always feel empowered to take control of your sexual health.”

Photo from the DC Health and Wellness Center’s website.

On Valentine’s Day this year, the Center posted an article on its website with dating and relationship advice that encouraged readers to pick up whipped cream, cherries, and ice cream the next time they were at the supermarket. “You can experiment with these foods by putting them on your partner’s body and licking them off your partner’s skin,” the article advised. “Your sense of taste can also be incorporated in other ways during sex by using flavored lube or flavored condoms.”

Spending political money to be treated or tested for STDs wouldn’t necessarily be a proper use of the Cajun PAC II’s financial resources, but the DC Health and Wellness Center seemed much more likely to be linked to the $190 payment than the firm in Burtonsville, partly because it had the right address but also because I could imagine a number of potential scenarios that would require an emergency trip to the clinic by a member of a political delegation visiting Washington. In fact, I’d witnessed something virtually identical many years ago when I lived in Rio de Janeiro and was working as a freelance fixer for a British film crew that was in town working on a documentary. 

One morning, the documentary’s director arrived uncharacteristically late for breakfast at a hotel we were staying at during a trip to São Luís, a city in northeastern Brazil, looking ashen-faced, panicked, and hungover, which was precisely the case. It emerged in fits and starts that during the night’s festivities, he’d arranged a threesome with two prostitutes and was convinced he already was experiencing clear symptoms of AIDS, citing among other things his complete lack of appetite. 

That didn’t seem surprising, I pointed out, as he’d only been awake for 15 minutes and was suffering a brutal hangover, but he became more and more agitated, and understandably so as he was returning home to London in a few days. He and his wife always had sex within 24 hours of his return from a lengthy business trip and, he said pitifully, he’d need to come up with a very convincing excuse to explain why he wouldn’t be able to have intercourse for at least a week – which he estimated was the time he’d need to be tested for AIDS and receive the result – and possibly never again if it came back positive. We were supposed to be driving to another town in a few hours to interview people for the documentary, but we had to reschedule them for the following day because the director insisted we scour every corner of São Luís in hopes of finding a clinic that could test him immediately, which proved to be a futile endeavor.

Wasn’t it possible that a similarly unforeseen situation might develop when Landry came to Washington with a group of associates as part of his political duties? I entirely dismissed the governor from the list of suspects who might have sought assistance from the trained professional at the DC Health and Wellness Center, thinking the most likely candidates were one of his campaign donors or a friendly lobbyist traveling with him. 

It hardly seemed out of the question. To take one example, and I’m merely picking this out of thin air for illustrative purposes, perhaps a state native who traveled to Washington along with a Landry-led delegation went out for an innocent night on the town that inadvertently, and without his even being aware of how it happened, transitioned to slamming down rounds of Flaming Hookers – a simple drink that only requires setting afire a shot glass filled with 100 proof Southern Comfort, a popular beverage in Louisiana that was created in 1874 by a distiller in New Orleans – and proceeded from there to some type of imprudent behavior that necessitated he be tested as quickly as possible for HIV.

Image shows how the night that began innocently but transitioned to slamming down Flaming Hookers, as described in the speculative scenario I described for illustrative purposes only, would likely have ended. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Cajun PAC II’s disclosure filing reported the payment to the Center was made on March 11, but that’s not necessarily the day the money was spent, as was apparent from the political committee’s other filings. The governor and members of his team were in Washington a number of times this year prior to the date the $190 charge was paid. If something like the scenario I envisioned did indeed occur, it most likely would have taken place in late-January when Landry and a group of his close associates came to the nation’s capital for Washington Mardi Gras. During the trip, the governor crowned the event’s queen, Camille Morrison, the daughter of Baton Rouge real estate developer and Landry donor Shane Morrison; hosted several fundraisers at the Waldorf Astoria, which operated as the Trump Hotel until 2022, when the former president sold it; and reportedly attended a number of parties thrown by Louisiana businesses. 

I stopped by the DC Health and Wellness Center yesterday in hopes that someone there might have useful information. Two Center employees were able to answer some of my questions, which strengthened the chance, though by no means proved it, that Cajun PAC II’s description of the $190 was not only misleading, but was intentionally so.

First, the Center doesn’t sell memberships, which is exactly as expected since there can’t be much of a market for joining a club whose primary recreational activity is being treated for STDs. Secondly, the clinic is funded entirely by the DC government and doesn’t charge patients for treatment, testing, or anything else, and wouldn’t be able to receive payments from its customers even if it did. Patients of the Center who don’t have health insurance are seen for free. Those who have health insurance don’t pay the clinic either; the only bills related to their treatment or diagnosis they might have to cover would be form Labcorp, which the Center refers its customers to for laboratory testing when needed, and they pay Labcorp if their health insurance company doesn’t pay it the full amount due. In other words, the only thing that appears to be accurate in Cajun PAC II’s entry regarding the $190 payment is the Center’s address, whether that was deliberate or not. 

There’s a lot that’s still murky and unknown about the line item for the alleged charge paid to the House of Wellness, which in the absence of a reply from Landry’s press office can only be speculated about. But based on the available evidence, one possibility – and I’ll emphasize again that it’s only a possibility, though the best assessment I can come up with given what I know thus far – is that either Cajun PAC II Treasurer Benjamin Landry sought to obscure the recipient of the committee’s $190 and what it paid for by reporting a mishmash of mostly false information in the disclose filing and hoped, with pretty good reason, that no one would notice the peculiarities; or he entered fake details that were provided to him by someone else who sought to accomplish the same goal.

So, why wouldn’t Benjamin Landry or the other party in the  scenario I’m floating here – let’s merge them together into a composite character known henceforth as Cajun PAC Associate No. 1 –  simply make up an entirely phony recipient of the payment? And why would  Cajun PAC Associate No. 1 provide the correct address of the STD clinic in the disclosure filing, which could easily lead to the Center if someone became curious about the expenditure, as happened with me? Lastly, if the Center didn’t receive the $190, who did? 

This is once again only conjecture based on what I presently know, but creating a wholly bogus company would lead to  potentially serious legal and PR problems if it were discovered. If Cajun PAC Associate No. 1’s goal was to mislead but wanted to diminish that risk, he or she might well have decided to provide a name of the alleged recipient that was similar to the real payee and the latter’s correct address, so if a problem did develop it could be blamed, even if implausibly, on an administrative error. 

But in this case, neither the “House of Wellness” nor the DC Health and Wellness Center was the real recipient of the $190, which leads to the question of who was and why Cajun PAC Associate No. 1 didn’t use its name? Well, one possible answer to the two questions is that a payment of $190 to the “House of Wellness” for “membership fees” may sound a little suspicious, it doesn’t sound anywhere as remotely suspicious as a payment of to Labcorp – which potentially did in fact receive the payment – for STD testing. 

Even if every element of the theory I’m proposing as a possible explanation for the disbursement in question is true, I don’t have evidence that Landry would have been aware at the time, or is now, that one of his political colleagues behaved so badly that he had to speed to the first health clinic he could find for an STD test. If the theory or something along the same lines is correct and Landry is aware of it, it would mean that by turning a blind eye and effectively giving his seal of approval he indirectly violated Commandment VII (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”) and may also have violated Commandments IV (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy) if his colleague came down with the STD on a Saturday; V (Honor thy father and thy mother) depending on how that’s interpreted; and X (“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife”) in the event his colleague picked up the STD from the spouse of a fellow Louisian who lived next door to him and happened to have traveled to Washington at the same time. 

List of the Ten Commandments I consulted when evaluating how many of them Governor Landry may have violated when writing the paragraph above. Photo from the website of Life, Hope & Truth.

It’s also possible that my best guess scenario is completely wrong and there’s a banal explanation for the discrepancies in Cajun PAC II’s entry about the payment. However, that doesn’t seem likely in my opinion due to the number of weird “mistakes” that would have needed to happen for that to be true, and more importantly because there are other grounds to believe otherwise.

I’ll start by noting here that any time an elected official puts a blood relative in charge of handling their campaign finances, they’re inviting enhanced scrutiny as a result of inevitable concerns about conflicts-of-interest or the likelihood the family member would place loyalty to elected official-blood relative   above good government in conducting their duties. Those types of  questions are particularly thorny in the particular instance of the Landry brothers because they’ve been entangled for so long in politics and business. 

Back in 2020, when Landry was the state attorney general, The Advocate and the Times-Picayune published a joint investigation that alleged he and his brother had teamed up on a deal with Marco Pesquera – a businessman whose “world...was built on lying to the U.S. government” and who was subsequently sentenced to prison for visa fraud – to bring hundreds of low-wage Mexican construction workers to Louisiana under “false pretenses” to help build a natural gas terminal, in an arrangement that generated lavish profits for the for the Jeff and Benjamin Landry and Marco Pesquera. 

Furthermore, a cursory review of the Cajun PAC II’s disclosure reports turns up a number of other potentially problematic matters, though none that are necessarily illegal,  beyond the $190 payment I’ve focused on thus far. Some concern the potential use of political money for personal benefit – which has become fairly routine over the past few decades at the federal and state levels as campaign finance rules have become increasingly lax – such as Landry spending lavishly on wining and dining, and luxury hotels.

Others regard campaign expenditures that were recorded with incomplete or not entirely accurate information that are similar to the $190 payment, which also could be due to mistakes or could have resulted from something less innocent than that. To cite one example, in February of this year Cajun PAC II shelled out $250 to buy “festival” tickets for “CCMF Congress Washington,” which if you’re not paying attention, or even if you are, sounds like some type of routine DC political event. After looking into it further, it looks like the tickets were for the Carolina Country Music Festival that was held earlier this month in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which may have been purchased for a political purpose that’s not evident at first glance or may have been bought as a gift for a friend or family member of Landry or his brother.

It seems strange that the apparent purchase of tickets for the Carolina Country Music Festival in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina would be labeled in a way that seems designed to indicate they were bought for a political conference in Washington, but maybe that’s just me. Screenshot from Cajun PAC II’s February campaign finance report.

Cajun PAC II has submitted two additional disclosure reports subsequent to its March filing that don’t show any additional payments to a company with the address of the DC Health and Wellness Center, or to any other firm that treats STDs as far as can be determined. Perhaps the relevant health matter cleared up after the patient was treated by the clinics skilled professionals, or more likely, if my speculative theory about the purpose of the $190 payment carries weight, the patient followed up by visiting a clinic in Louisiana if there was a need for additional monitoring, or, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized already, the scenario I’ve floated is simply wrong. 

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s new legislation on the Ten Commandments has been a topic of national discussion ever since Landry signed it into law on June 21, which Donald Trump praised the governor for in a Truth Social post the same day. "I love the Ten Commandments in public schools, private schools, and many other places," wrote the former and potentially future president, whose personal history is littered with egregious violations of the famous edicts God delivered to Moses long ago. “This may be, in fact, the first major step in the revival of religion, which is desperately needed, in our country." 

The ACLU and a number of other civil rights groups have already said they will challenge Louisiana’s law on the Ten Commandments, whose legality is all but certain to be eventually decided by the Supreme Court. Decades back, the Supremes ruled that would violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on state-sanctioned faith, but given the makeup of the current court that could be reversed. 

Either way, Landry and his political associates will be back in Washington regularly over the next few years to monitor the legal maneuvering and other reasons. Unless he’s able to confirm that there was nothing fishy about his PAC’s purchase of membership in a business based at the address of an STD clinic, it would be prudent on the governor’s part to monitor his associates when he’s in town too, and do the same with his campaign treasurer back in Louisiana as well.