UPDATE: We just had a short conversation with the district attorney about his side of the story. We’ll have another post soon to elaborate – let’s just say that Gary Chambers’ take on his complicity with the Silky Slim contract is a lot less accurate than Chambers would have you believe.

ORIGINAL: …of all people. Yes, that Gary Chambers.

At his site Wednesday afternoon, Chambers posted a screenshot of an e-mail exchange between Moore and Dr. James Gilmore, the Assistant Chief Administrative Officer of the Baton Rouge city-parish government. Moore is seen responding “We will try” to an e-mail from Gilmore on May 2 of this year in which the latter asks for Moore or his staff to put together a proposal for Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed’s organization Stop The Killing – which Gilmore confusingly calls “Stop The Violence” – to do “mentoring” under the BRAVE program.

Gilmore was serving as the administrator for the BRAVE program, the looting of which we’ve covered in several articles since Reed’s outburst claiming that the mass murder of Baton Rouge law enforcement officers last year by the domestic terrorist Gavin Long constituted “justice” brought light onto the fact he and several other friends of mayor-president Sharon Weston Broome were catching lucrative and questionable contracts from that program, in a potential departure from its mission.

Gilmore also names Reed, noting his organization doesn’t carry the insurance required by the program but claiming that the parish attorney’s office will waive those requirements if the proposals are structured in the right way.

Here’s the e-mail…

Chambers is taking this as proof Moore lied when he said he didn’t know Reed had been awarded a BRAVE contract.  “There is no way that Moore can say that he was unaware of the contract based on the email he was sent and responded to,” Chambers wrote. He might be correct in that assertion.

Moore might respond that he wasn’t aware that “Stop The Violence” is associated with Silky Slim, given that his organization is Stop The Killing, and while Reed was mentioned at the bottom of the e-mail message he might have missed that reference. That could be plausible as well.

But it doesn’t look good.

What is also fairly clear from this e-mail exchange is that Gilmore was so intent on shoveling money to Reed from the BRAVE program that he was asking for Moore to write proposals on Reed’s behalf and asking that those proposals be structured in a way to paper over Reed’s deficiencies as a contractor – namely, his lack of insurance.

Chambers has had it in for Moore as the DA for years, writing in an exceptionally racist screed once that it was time to dump him for a black district attorney in Baton Rouge. Resurrecting that campaign as a diversion from the looting of the BRAVE program might be a tactic as good as any for those allies of Broome’s who are attempting to stifle the scandal – particularly when Moore might now have dirt on his hands, and a perceived false statement made in public – as a result.