The Enemies List
The charges were dismissed Wednesday morning. By that afternoon the governor wanted six agencies investigating the people who brought them.
Tropical Storm Bertha was coming ashore Wednesday afternoon. Jeff Landry and Liz Murrill stood at a podium at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in Baton Rouge — the building where this state coordinates its response when people are in danger.
They did not use it to talk about the storm.
Hours earlier, special prosecutor Laurie White had dismissed all sixteen felony counts against the attorney general. Mayor Helena Moreno, retired Judge Calvin Johnson and five council members had written asking her to end it. Moreno said the request wasn’t driven by fear or politics — that the public interest was better served by moving on.
That was the off-ramp.
Instead, the governor started naming who should be investigated.
The mainstream media is dying now. So much of what is important to our future is not being reported in a way that gives citizens the ability to understand and take action. I write about power and how it works in our society. Please support me in this endeavor to bring you cutting-edge information and commentary. Thank you.
“I think the feds need to come in,” Landry said.
A federal investigation. A state investigation. The Judiciary Commission should look at the judges. The Bar Association and the Office of Disciplinary Counsel should investigate “all of those lawyers.” Council President J.P. Morrell — “I don’t know if the conduct that he engaged in shouldn’t disbar him.” And DA Jason Williams: “He should have his law license ripped from him.”
Six investigative bodies. Two named lawyers he wants stripped of their licenses. In one breath, on the day the case ended.
Williams is not accused of anything to do with the grand jury. He recused at the outset, and the records bear him out. Landry’s stated grievance is that Williams advised the City Council it could call an election and appoint an interim clerk — a district attorney giving a legislative body a legal opinion. Three justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court read the law the same way he did.
Meanwhile, the State Police are already investigating the grand jurors, and Clay Higgins has already asked the DOJ.
That is the governor of Louisiana, in the emergency operations center during a tropical storm, calling for federal agents, state police, the judicial disciplinary body, and the bar to be turned loose on a district attorney, a council president, a group of judges, and twelve anonymous citizens who voted in a grand jury room.
For a case that had already been dismissed.
“Me and the people around me saved New Orleans.”
He said that out loud, three weeks after vetoing $33 million of the city’s money.
New Orleans is on pace for about 78 murders this year — a number this city last saw in 1969. Shootings down 70 percent from 2023. Carjackings down 63.
Jeff Asher, who counts these numbers for a living and has no stake in the answer, says the decline started in 2023. Landry didn’t send state police here until January 2024. Troop NOLA didn’t exist when the curve started bending.
Crime falls for a lot of reasons, and people argue about all of them. Housing. Demographics. Street outreach. Thirty years of getting lead out of old houses and out of the dirt where children play, most of it done by people whose names you don’t know.
None of them held a press conference about it.
There is one number he did move. Louisiana’s prison population fell 21 percent between 2016 and 2022 under a bipartisan reform package. It’s climbing again — up about 2,000 since the 2024 laws he signed, which eliminated parole and stripped medical parole from the severely ill. He wants $82 million more for corrections next year.
And last September he opened an ICE detention camp inside Angola — Camp J, the old solitary unit, on a former slave plantation that is still a working farm. To get it open on his schedule, he declared a state of emergency in July. There was no storm in the Gulf.
He declared an emergency that didn’t exist to open a detention camp. Eleven months later, he used the real one to demand investigations into the people who accused his attorney general.
Then there was the bond.
“I was indicted, threatened with arrest, and given a $400,000 bond,” Murrill said. “I invite everyone to compare that bond to those routinely set in Orleans Parish by this same judge for people charged with second-degree murder. I can tell you the answer: it’s about $268,000.”
She’s right. That’s a real injustice and a real number, and she has never said a word about it before.
She knows what pretrial detention is — she’s spent her whole career on the other side of it. Knowing what a thing is and being subject to it are not the same, and she just found that out. She learned what the number feels like when it has your name on it, and you’re certain you did nothing wrong. She learned the process is the punishment. She used the word extortion.
That is the ordinary condition of the New Orleans jail. Roughly nine in ten people held there are awaiting a disposition — not convicted of anything. In Louisiana, money bail is required on every charge upon arrest. And Black men aged 15 to 64 have made up 88 percent of that jail population. They are 19 percent of the city.
She never paid hers. The Supreme Court recalled the warrant within days. She has not spent a night in a cell and she never will.
Three weeks of it was enough to make her call a press conference.
“I find it extremely disturbing that there is a group of people, who remain largely unidentified, who were able to weaponize a grand jury... I still don’t know who ‘they’ all are.”
Two days before she said that, affidavits went into the court record. One from Pat Fanning, a veteran New Orleans defense lawyer. One from Daniel Smart — an Assistant Attorney General who works for her.
Both swore that Laurie White tried to talk the grand jury out of indicting Murrill, and the grand jurors wouldn’t listen.
Her own employee put that in the record. Then she stood at a podium and described a shadowy group she can’t name.
That is what the investigations are for. She doesn’t have the names yet, and she has said she intends to get them.
The Supreme Court had all but invited her to file a motion to quash the indictment and signaled it would grant it. She didn’t. She took the route that produced subpoenas aimed at a prosecutor and a district attorney, and then a press conference.
Twelve anonymous citizens of this parish did this. Article 438 has let grand jurors investigate what comes to their own knowledge since 1966. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s the law working in a direction it has never once worked before.
“What I did was not a crime. It was never a crime.”
No judge quashed the indictment. No jury acquitted her. A prosecutor withdrew it at the victims’ request. That’s a nolle prosequi, not a verdict.
“We will continue to hold them accountable for bad decisions and bad leadership.”
Bad leadership is not a crime.
Bad decisions are what elections are for. The voters of Orleans Parish hold Moreno and Williams and Morrell accountable. The attorney general has no constituency in this parish.
And she claims she is the alleged victim here. She says she’ll keep investigating how the indictment came about, and she has already called it “irresponsible and illegal actions” in writing.
The victim is now the investigator, pointed at her own accusers, having announced in advance that they broke the law. If she ever charges one of them, that press conference is the first exhibit in the motion to throw it out.
Then the money.
Murrill will seek six figures in legal fees from the state. Landry called the prosecution “the gift they gave to the taxpayers.” Three weeks ago he vetoed $33 million for New Orleans projects and helped block a $110 million financing request in a city that could barely make payroll last year.
Six figures in legal fees is the outrage. Thirty-three million taken from the city that accused her is policy.
Her defense gets reimbursed. The city’s punishment has no one to bill. The citizens are being punished instead.
None of this had to happen.
Calvin Duncan did twenty-eight and a half years in Angola for something he didn’t do, taught himself law in the prison library, and spent twenty years dismantling Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury rule until the Supreme Court struck it down in Ramos in 2020. The office defending that rule was run by Jeff Landry and Liz Murrill.
He got out. He got licensed. In November, he ran for Clerk of Criminal District Court and won in a landslide. Days before he was sworn in, the Legislature abolished the job.
Everything since flows from that. The Council’s response, the letters, the grand jury, the indictment, Wednesday.
A lot of names got said at that podium. His wasn’t one of them.
The Council’s move was a mistake, and I’ll say so. They voted May 11; election day was May 16. Three days before people voted, Chelsey Richard Napoleon and Calvin Johnson stood together in a voting machine warehouse, both claiming to run the parish’s elections. It wasn’t lawless — Williams gave them written guidance and the Supreme Court split 4–3. It was badly timed, and it turned two Black public servants into proxies in a fight neither of them started.
Every accusation they made Wednesday, they had already committed. They said a proceeding was politicized, and politicized it. They said publicity poisoned it, then held a press conference naming people as criminals. They said the system was weaponized against an official, then aimed every weapon the state has at the officials who accused them.
And the people still under investigation are New Orleans public officials and twelve citizens who reported for jury duty. They’re anonymous by law — no lawyer, no press office, no way to answer any of this.
Watch what the State Police do. Ask your legislator, on the record, whether they think that investigation should exist.
Landry floated disbarring J.P. Morrell from the podium. His entire response to Fox 8 was three words.
“Bless their hearts.”
Sources
The press conference
Full remarks — Landry’s list of agencies, the Trump denial, “saved New Orleans,” Murrill’s statement and the bond comparison, Morrell’s response — Fox 8 / WAFB, July 22, 2026 https://www.wafb.com/2026/07/22/gov-landry-murrill-say-fight-doesnt-end-with-dismissal-charges-against-attorney-general/
“It’s not over” and continued investigation — The Advocate https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/liz-murrill-indictment-investigation/article_cbd01d67-6d71-557a-af80-1ae5d91d20ed.html
Landry’s law-license remark and Murrill’s “80 years” — Nola.com https://www.nola.com/news/courts/liz-murrill-charges-dismissed-laurie-white/article_23e6a691-fb84-463a-bf0a-1dd93d759dc3.html
The Trump conversation
Source says Landry discussed the indictment with Trump and federal authorities in Washington; Higgins on his DOJ letter — Fox 8, July 21, 2026 https://www.fox8live.com/2026/07/22/source-gov-landry-spoke-with-trump-about-orleans-parish-indictment-ag-murrill/
The affidavits and the grand jury
Fanning and Smart affidavits; White’s statement — Louisiana Illuminator https://lailluminator.com/2026/07/22/charges-dropped-murrill/
Grand jury’s authority under La. C.Cr.P. art. 438; Supreme Court stay and dissents — Louisiana Illuminator https://lailluminator.com/2026/07/17/indictment-of-ag-liz-murrill/
City officials’ letter asking for dismissal — Louisiana Illuminator https://lailluminator.com/2026/07/21/moreno-letter-murrll/
The city’s money
$33 million in vetoes — Fox 8 https://www.fox8live.com/2026/06/25/gov-landry-vetoes-more-than-33m-new-orleans-funding/
“New Orleans is no longer as important to Louisiana as it once was” — Verite News https://veritenews.org/2026/07/14/jeff-landry-new-orleans-helena-moreno/
Duncan and the clerk’s office
Calvin Duncan: the conviction, Ramos, the compensation petition, the clerk’s race — Balls & Strikes https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/calvin-duncan-new-orleans-election/
Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Act 15, 4–3 — Louisiana Illuminator https://lailluminator.com/2026/06/01/orleans-clerk-6/
Crime numbers
Historic declines in murders, shootings, robberies, carjackings — Fox 8 https://www.fox8live.com/2025/07/15/new-orleans-sees-historic-declines-murders-other-crimes/
Asher on when the decline began — Metropolitan Crime Commission https://metrocrime.org/remarkable-nopd-shifts-strategic-gears-amid-historic-drop-in-violent-crime/
Incarceration
Prison population rising; $82 million corrections increase; the 2023 timing of the crime drop — Nola.com https://www.nola.com/news/politics/louisiana-prison-costs-set-to-increase-by-82-million/article_a32d471b-0951-498c-8b5b-8cb3e0d5b3ab.html
Landry’s 2024 sentencing rollbacks and their cost — ProPublica / Verite News https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-jeff-landry-prison-budget-increase https://lailluminator.com/2026/05/23/louisiana-criminal-justice/
Immigration detention
Camp 57 opens at Angola; Landry’s July state of emergency — Louisiana Illuminator https://lailluminator.com/2025/09/03/ice-detainees-angola/
The New Orleans jail
89-90% of the jail population awaiting disposition; Black men 88% of the jail vs 19% of the city — MacArthur Safety and Justice Challenge https://safetyandjusticechallenge.org/our-network/new-orleans-la/
Risk assessments and inability to afford bond — Vera Institute https://www.vera.org/publications/new-orleans-jail-population-quarterly-report
Governor’s pardon power
La. Const. art. IV § 5(E) https://senate.legis.louisiana.gov/Documents/Constitution/Article4.htm
Don’t get me started.