Landry speaks on coast, fraud and immigration

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry was the guest speaker at the St. Mary Parish Chamber of Commerce luncheon Wednesday.
Landry said his office has “one of the best” units for combatting cybercrime, especially sexual predators. “We are also charged with combatting Medicaid fraud,” he said. “The federal Department of Health and Hospitals believes that 11 percent of Medicaid money spent in this country is fraudulent.”
Louisiana will spend $11 billion annually on Medicaid, Landry said. “Our Medicaid fraud just won a national award,” he said. “It was an award that was earned no matter who the attorney general was.”
The unit has recovered an average of $125 million in fraud cases, he said. He said the federal government should spend, in Louisiana’s case, $25 million a year to combat fraud, but is only spending $5 million.
Landry asked the legislature to move $500,000 from the fund that the fraud unit recovers money and places into it. There is $7 million in the fund, he said, and “the governor told us no.”
He said local legislators and others asked Gov. John Bel Edwards to meet with the attorney general’s staff to renegotiate the request. “The governor shouldn’t be doing that, that should be a legislative function,” Landry said.
Public corruption is a priority the attorney general pledged to address.
“We’re going to work with our federal counterparts,” Landry said. “The special agent in charge in the FBI who was sent to Louisiana (to investigate public corruption) was the head of the unit for the FBI. You don’t send someone like that to a state that doesn’t have problems. This guy is a great, great, great leader.”
He will attend a meeting in Washington, DC next week regarding the “clean power plant” issue.
“If we implement the plan in Louisiana, the cost to you at the electrical meter, is about $4.9 billion over the next 10 years,” he said. “When you get the bill you want to blame (the energy company) but the culprit is the federal government. About 17 attorneys general have joined in a suit and got an injunction that forced the DC Circuit to re-hear it. Federal overreach in regulation has cost job creators $1.7 trillion in the last eight years. That’s money that business could use for pay raises, hire more people, getting their products and services out to us.”
Lawsuits against oil companies in the fight for coastal restoration totaled 39 when Landry took office. “I live on the coast just like you do, we absolutely have to find a solution,” he said. “The primary culprit is the Corps of Engineers. There is no agency, scientifically proven, that caused more damage than the Corps of Engineers’ regulatory schemes and their policies.”
Landry said multiple suits in multiple jurisdictions are “problematic for lawyers and different judges.”
The attorney general intervened and asked each coastal parish to attend meetings with him to explain why he thought his office should handle suits. “We asked for them to not file any more suits,” Landry said. “Until me and the governor could come up with a process.”
He claims that the governor negotiated a contract with “a handful of attorneys,” negotiated a contract that required Landry’s signature, unknown to him. He said he was never served with the contract, while every other attorney was.
“That’s disappointing,” Landry said. “I had lawyers making motions for the state that are not recognized so their motions are invalid.”
He said he notified the governor, and the contract was delivered. “The contract, on its face, is illegal,” Landry said. “The provisions are not only unconstitutional, but against the public policy of the state because the legislature two years ago (passed legislation) that the lawyers of this state could not share in contingency arrangements, where they walk away with a big portion (of settlements.) The governor’s problem isn’t with me, it’s with state policy.”
Landry also addressed the national immigration debate. “Those policies infer greater rights on people who come into this country illegally, than you enjoy,” he said. “That’s wrong. We took a bill during the session to prevent those types of policies, and I commend the House for passing it with large bipartisan numbers, only to be bottled up in a Senate committee. Next year we’ll try again, and say the rule of law in Louisiana means something, you have to follow the law.”