Phil Bryant helps Brett Favre raise welfare fund for volleyball stadium
Discussion about Phil Bryant helps Brett Favre raise welfare fund for volleyball stadium
The texts allegedly show Favre, New and Bryant (right) deliberating about how to divert at least $5 million for the volleyball stadium at Southern Miss, where Favre is playing college football and his daughter is playing volleyball at the time some of the texts were sent.
“If you pay me, will any media be able to find out where it came from and at what price?” a text shows Favre asking New in 2017. He replied that “we never had that information published” and told him the next day, “Wow, just hung up on Phil Bryant! He’s on board with us! We will finish this!”
In a July 2019 text, Bryant told New he had just met with Favre and asked if he could help him.
A lawyer for Favre denied that his client knew he had received welfare funds. “Brett Favre has been very honorable during this time,” Bud Holmes told Mississippi Today. In 2020, Favre told the outlet that he had not discussed the stadium, which was not part of the state lawsuit, with Bryant.
Favre and Bryant, who left office in January 2020, have not been criminally charged, and Bryant did not address the text in a statement to Mississippi Today. In it, he accused New’s defense team of being “more concerned with pre-trial publicity than with civil justice.” The motion filed by New is the defendant’s first direct and public charge of wrongdoing by Bryant.
Favre last year paid the state $600,000 he received for speeches he never gave as part of a $1.1 million deal he made in 2017 and 2018 to promote initiatives to fight poverty. State auditors reported that he initially paid $500,000 and in May the Mississippi Department of Human Services filed a lawsuit against Favre, saying the interest on the $1.1 million totaled $228,000.
The state is barred from using money from the federal Temporary Assistance to Families program in “brick and mortar” buildings and attempts to circumvent federal regulations for building volleyball stadiums have resulted in criminal penalties.
Zach New, son of Nancy New, admitted in an April plea agreement to defrauding the government when he participated in a scheme “to disguise USM construction projects as ‘leases’ as a way of circumventing a strict ban on limited purpose grants against ‘brick and mortar construction projects that violate Miss Code Ann. 97-7-10.”
Favre was questioned more than two years ago by the FBI, Mississippi Today reported last week. Holmes told the outlet that Favre was asked one question and he believes Favre has not been interviewed since. The Mississippi Community Education Center hired Favre Enterprises in 2017 and 2018 to appear in promoting Families First for Mississippi, a program designed to help families in need, and Favre was absent for them.
In 2020, the former NFL quarterback denied that he had “received money for obligations I did not fulfill,” saying, “I love Mississippi and I would never consciously do anything to take from those who need it most.”
Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the nation, with 20.3 percent living below the poverty line, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. The US poverty rate nationally is 13.4 percent.
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