In an unsurprising move, Lafayette attorney Hank Perret has resigned as chairman of the Louisiana Board of Ethics. The well-respected Perret, who was courted by the Jindal administration to be its chief council before Jindal hired Jimmy Faircloth, told _The Advocate:
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The board has been charged with enforcing the ethics code. That changes in August, so I think this is an ideal time to get those new members of the board who can support the new law as it goes forward.
Perret did not return calls for comment, so I ran his statement through The Independent Weekly’s high-powered talking-points-and-prepared-statements translator, and here’s the result:
The Jindal administration has so badly bungled its vaunted ethics reform that I want no part of it, and I’m not gonna waste countless hours of my time. Jindal and his cohorts have discouraged whistleblowers by not allowing anonymous ethics-violation complaints. They’ve neutered the Ethics Board by handing off oversight of ethics complaints to administrative law judges. And most importantly, they’ve made the inexplicable decision to change the existing standard of “reliable and substantial” evidence of ethics violations to “clear and convincing,” making it virtually impossible to prosecute and prove ethics wrongdoings. So I’m outta here, and I feel sorry for my successor, who’ll have the thankless task of presiding over nothing more than a glorified dog-and-pony show.