We usually haven’t bothered to pay much attention to the Louisiana Board of Ethics. It’s known more or less as a joke, in that it commonly busies itself with minor violations which don’t involve much in the way of investigation and will generate lots of petty fines. As such, nobody even cares very much about the Board of Ethics’ occasional dings on political candidates for this failure to report, or that.

Serious corruption is never adjudicated by the Board of Ethics. The closest you’ll get to something like that was about a dozen years ago, when then-Democrat superstar in the making Caroline Fayard ran for Lieutenant Governor essentially as a self-funder, except her money was coming from her mega-rich trial lawyer father Calvin Fayard. The Board of Ethics laid down some hefty fines on the younger Fayard and she basically hasn’t been a candidate for state office since.

So the Board of Ethics, and its makeup, hasn’t been on our radar since.

But during the last eight years Gov. John Bel Edwards has stocked it with people who don’t come off as serious watchdogs – and do come off as serious political partisans – and that led to the story M. Fulton Robicheaux broke on Friday about the Board of Ethics filing charges against Jeff Landry for something which doesn’t look much like an ethics violation.

The long and short of the underlying alleged misdeed is that Landry saved the taxpayers several hundred dollars by flying on a private jet rather than paying for a commercial flight to Hawaii when he attended a conference of state attorneys general a couple of years ago. The conference was an official business affair, so a flight to Hawaii would have been justified travel on the taxpayers’ dime.

Instead, Landry caught a ride on a jet from an old friend, Lafayette businessman Greg Mosing, to the conference.

Mosing is worth well over $200 million. The Mosing family took their business, oifield service giant Frank’s International, public several years ago. These people have zero business in front of the state of Louisiana or the Attorney General’s office. No influence or access was peddled due to that favor.

And the complaint is that Landry didn’t submit a Form 413 disclosure to his superior, as the law requires.

Except Jeff Landry doesn’t have a superior to report to. He’s the Attorney General. Perhaps the law ought to be rewritten, but as it’s written the complaint apparently is that he didn’t file a form and submit it to himself.

This supposed big reveal appeared in an Advocate hit piece by Democrat attack dog Sam Karlin over the weekend.

What wasn’t in the piece was just how ridiculously partisan the Board of Ethics, which decided to make a stink about the plane trip years after it happened and just before the election, actually is.

Here’s who’s on that board.

Robicheaux noted that the board’s Chairwoman, a Lake Charles attorney named La Koshia R. Roberts, is a Lake Charles attorney and notary whose website could use some updating. So could her bio, which lists such accomplishments as “As a law student at the Southern University Law Center, La Koshia was a member of the Moot Court Board and was recognized by Who’s Who Among American Law Schools,” and “In 2006, La Koshia was named Young Lawyer of the Year by the Fourth Judicial District Bar,” not to mention “La Koshia is the creator of the book/manual and Court Bingo game used by Louisiana district court judges for the Louisiana “Judges in the Classroom” program,” and “She is also a member of the National Council of Negro Women, Inc.”

Robicheaux noted that Roberts’ Twitter is full of nasty and unhinged attacks on Louisiana Republicans going back several years. She’s a hard-core sky-screaming leftist who couldn’t possibly be trusted to supervise a serious regulatory board charged with policing political campaigns.

Also on the board is Anne P. Baños of New Orleans, whose work associations include Tulane University and the New Orleans Museum of Art. It isn’t hard to figure out her political orientation. Camille R. Bryant is an attorney at McGlinchey Stafford in New Orleans, practicing labor and employment law – including a role as a DEI facilitator. Anybody think that someone who lectures about “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” to make a living is an objective observer of politics?

Then there’s Mark A. Ellis, a pastor at something called the United Christian Faith Ministries in Baton Rouge. Ellis has social media posts trashing Donald Trump over the 2020 election and Trump’s reaction to the irregularities therein, which comes off as somewhat mild.

And Bill Grimley of Baton Rouge, a lawyer whose Twitter feed is full of reposts from Keith Olbermann and occasional references to the notion that Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. Can you imagine putting somebody who thinks there was nothing untoward in Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server for official State Department communications on a state board of ethics?

That’s what John Bel Edwards did.

Also on the board is Alfred W. “Butch” Speer, who spent a nearly interminable period of time as the clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives and now draws a lucrative pension from the state while he serves on an ethics board. We’re not saying that it’s unethical for him to serve, but having two separate sources of income from the taxpayers does rankle a bit.

But our all-time favorite member of the Louisiana Board of Ethics is this lady…

Jacqueline Scott of Shreveport isn’t a justice, nor is she a judge outside of the Judge Judy local TV knockoff show she does. She’s a slip-and-fall and criminal defense attorney who’s known around Shreveport for traveling around in a commercially-wrapped van and having an entourage with her everywhere she goes.

When we told a couple of people in Shreveport she was on the Board of Ethics, what we got was shock and laughter.

There are four members of the board who was appointed by the state legislature, though it appears most of those were actually Edwards nominees who were rubber-stamped. The only true non- Edwards appointee on the board is a Catholic priest from New Orleans named Jose I. Lavastida, the current vice-chairman who was originally appointed by Bobby Jindal.

It’s a comically partisan board full of unserious people, and it’s no surprise they’d uncork what can only be described as an attempt at election interference less than six weeks before the October 14 primary.

Will it matter? It’s rare that anything the Board of Ethics – or, for that matter, Edwards’ other fan club the Baton Rouge Advocate – does anymore does matter. Maybe this is different.

But we doubt it. Maybe Landry can offer to settle the issue of his plane ride in Scott’s Cajun Court. That wouldn’t make this attack any less dignified.