If you didn’t hear the latest this morning, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a stay against yesterday’s grand jury indictment of Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s Attorney General.

Less than 24 hours after being indicted by a grand jury, Attorney General Liz Murrill has been granted an emergency stay in her case by the Louisiana Supreme Court, her office said Friday.

Murrill was indicted by a grand jury in Orleans Parish on Thursday, stemming from allegations that she sent threatening letters to elected Orleans Parish officials, including Mayor Helena Moreno, District Attorney Jason Williams and five city council members. Murrill was indicted on eight counts each of public intimidation and retaliation. Her bond was set at $400,000, with a $25,000 bond set for each count.

Shortly after her indictment, Murrill filed an emergency stay motion to fight the indictment.

On Friday morning, that motion was granted, with the court saying that Murrill “makes a compelling argument concerning the disturbing defects in the grand jury proceedings and in the trial court’s handling of those proceedings.”

In a statement following the motion being granted, Murrill called the indictment a “political witch hunt.”

It’s not an allegation that Murrill sent letters to Moreno, Williams and the five mental dwarves on New Orleans’ city council who were trying to schedule an election to replace a duly-elected and legally-serving clerk of court. She absolutely sent the letters.

Except the “threats” Murrill was making weren’t threats at all. She was explaining to them that Chelsey Richard Napoleon, the elected Civil Clerk of Court for Orleans Parish, who has nearly four more years left on her term, is, by dint of state law, now the Clerk of Court for the entire city. This was true because the state legislature passed a bill rolling the office of the Criminal Clerk of Court for Orleans Parish into the Civil Clerk’s office – and that change was validated by the state supreme court.

And Murrill also explained to them that what they were trying to do was illegal, and specifically that Louisiana has a usurper law which makes it a crime you can go to jail for if you attempt to throw a public official out of their job without legal cause. Calling an election to replace Chelsey Richard Napoleon, and appointing an interim clerk of court to replace her in the meantime, would fall within the definition of prohibited conduct in the state’s usurper law, Murrill said.

That really should have been the end of the issue. Except the idiot clown car in charge of New Orleans, who when they’re not supplicating themselves to the state in search of a nine-figure bailout thanks to the city’s colossal budget deficit, for some reason just didn’t want to let it go.

Somebody took one of the grand juries empaneled at the New Orleans Criminal Courts building and juiced them up with the idea that Liz Murrill was violating the state law against “intimidating a public official.” It’s an absurd legal theory, and hardly surprising that it didn’t impress the state supreme court. But it did apparently impress Leon Roche, the judge overseeing that grand jury, such that he appointed Laurie White as a special prosecutor to handle Murrill’s indictment.

Who’s Laurie White? Here she is, doing her best Norman Schwarzkopf impression on the steps of the Criminal Courts building…

Absolutely nobody believed the idea that the grand jury, sua sponte, decided they’d indict Murrill for sending those letters. That seed was planted by somebody, which is one reason Gov. Jeff Landry said in a statement that he was asking for an investigation into who it was.

Would that be grand jury tampering? We’ll leave that question hanging for now, because apparently we’ll find out.

That would seem to be the direction this saga will move in. It’s exceptionally unlikely the indictment of Murrill will outlive the Supreme Court’s stay. Then again, we’re talking about New Orleans, which is the most rancid judicial hellhole this side of Philadelphia.

A couple of things ought to be remembered here. First, if Laurie White’s name sticks in your memory, there’s a reason for that: three years ago she wasn’t some lawyer hanging around waiting to be weaponized by the Orleans Parish courthouse gang against the state government, she was a sitting Orleans Parish judge. Except she abruptly retired, and there was a story to that.

Ohhhh, what a story.

There was a federal lawsuit filed against Laurie White, which was dismissed on a technicality, but the facts of the case were… uncomplimentary. It seems that White and her husband were into what might be termed as the “freak-nasty,” and she was apparently propositioning the female employees of her court.  Specifically, per a Grok search we did yesterday after watching Girlboss Schwarzkopf give us her rather barky summation of the prosecution of Liz Murrill…

In early 2023 (filed around late January/early February), former Orleans Parish Criminal District Court secretary Emily Tooke sued retired Judge Laurie A. White (and the court) in federal court (Tooke v. White et al., Eastern District of Louisiana). The suit alleged sexual harassment and retaliation.

Key Allegations from the Lawsuit and Related Reporting

• The party: A Christmas/holiday party in December 2021 held at White’s home. White gifted Tooke (her secretary at the time) a revealing “Unwrap me Satin Bow Teddy” lingerie item (plus makeup and peppermint oil), while other staff received non-sexual gifts. The suit claimed White and her husband had propositioned Tooke beforehand via text/phone, pressured her to stay overnight with them, made comments about her alleged promiscuity, advised her to “wear something sexy,” and warned her to watch her drink. Tooke refused the advances and felt uncomfortable. A co-worker (court clerk Patrice Warren) drove her to the party.
• Complaint: Tooke filed a sexual harassment complaint with the court’s human resources department days after the party.
• Retaliation/firing: She alleged White later belittled her publicly (calling her lazy, promiscuous, etc.), and she was fired in March 2022 (reportedly for recording a conversation, though the suit framed it as retaliation). Warren was also fired months later; she claimed it was partly for refusing to sign an affidavit supporting White (White attributed Warren’s firing to performance issues and a DWI conviction).

White repeatedly denied all allegations of harassment or inappropriate conduct, stating the claims were false and salacious. The court hired an independent law firm to investigate the complaint; White said it cleared her of wrongdoing (though she claimed she never received a copy of the report, and findings were not made public).

Not long after the allegations surfaced, White retired from the bench. The rumor goes that she was about to go in front of the state judicial commission over her propositioning her employees, and the state attorney general’s office which will represent judges in matters involving the performance of their jobs told her to go fish, and something happened which made Laurie White decide to ply her trade in the private sector instead.

Except the complaint against her is still pending at the state level, and guess whose office is still representing her?

You can’t make this up. And in her application to the Louisiana Supreme Court for a stay in the case, Murrill laid out the entire sordid fiasco…

Poor Laurie. Her comeback lasted for a whole press conference, and now it’s back to the salt mines. Or the peppermint oil mines, as the case may be.

But what of Leon Roche, the judge who presided over this brief, but spectacular circus? What do we know about him?

Well, for one thing he’s the cousin of state senator Gary Carter, the New Orleans Democrat who had the temerity to call his colleague Jay Morris a “racist” for bringing the bill redrawing the state’s congressional map after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. Carter also threw a massive fit over another Morris bill which eliminated the position of criminal clerk of court that started this fight.

Morris had a third bill in this year’s legislative session which reduced the number of judges in the Orleans Parish Criminal Court. That bill was going to pass more or less as written, and it would have eliminated Roche’s position on the bench – but Carter prevailed upon senate president Cameron Henry to change the criteria by which the judgeships were reduced so that Roche survived.

And then Roche paid off his salvation by illuminating exactly why he should have been made redundant. His reputation as a judge is… not the best.

Landry called what happened in New Orleans yesterday a “kangaroo court.” He’s hardly wrong. And while the idiot clown car which runs that city is furious that he used his line item veto to scrub a host of state projects in the Big Easy, the clown car’s denizens are likely to get a lot angrier at what’s coming thanks to this debacle.

Let’s remember that the state bailed out the city of New Orleans to the tune of more than $100 million earlier this year, on terms which were pretty generous compared to what could have been imposed. Then the city took essentially a payday loan from the Caesar’s Palace casino, getting a one-time check for some 30 years of lease payments. Word has it they’ll come begging to the state for another $125 million soon.

And when that happens, Moreno and city council chair J.P. Morrell – who have blamed New Orleans’ fiscal woes on LaToya Cantrell, the former mayor, which is pretty cute given that Moreno and Morrell were on the City Council more or less the whole time Cantrell was trashing NOLA’s finances and could have put a stop to it; neither one of these two leftist fools can escape responsibility for the current situation – will have to explain to the governor and attorney general and the rest of the State Bond Commission why the city shouldn’t go under fiscal administration by the state.

Or maybe don’t bother trying, because that’s precisely what’s going to happen.

And it’s probably for the best.

And when it does, they had better not complain. What Landry could, and maybe should, do is to say that not one dime of Louisiana taxpayer money should be spent bailing out the city of New Orleans until Helena Moreno, J.P. Morrell, Jason Williams and the other four idiots on the City Council who tried to violate the state’s usurper laws so they could get a pet clerk of court all resign.

That would be mean. It might even occasion a second bite at the stupid-indictment apple, this time against Landry. And maybe Laurie White can make another peppermint oil-fueled appearance on the steps of the kangaroo courthouse on Tulane and Broad.