Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. A huge scandal is brewing with Joe Biden. What we feared two years ago appears to be happening. According to reports, Biden is about to nominate a U.S. Attorney despite overwhelming evidence that she committed federal felony crimes against the most vulnerable people.

Two years ago, in April 2021, news reports suggested Biden was getting ready to nominate Keva Landrum to be U.S. Attorney for New Orleans. At the time, I wrote about how we had uncovered civil rights violations that Landrum committed, and then her nomination we dormant.

Then, yesterday, local media reported that her nomination was back on. As you think about this, you need to know the back story:

A few years ago, we uncovered that Landrum was running a modern day debtors' prison when she was a local judge. She was separating families from their children and parents, and jailing people in brutal conditions as a way of extorting cash payments.

Landrum and other judges were illegally jailing poor people in NOLA if they couldn't pay court debts. They even created a "Collections Department" inside the court to illegally collect debts! When our clients couldn't pay, they were caged. We sued them all. It gets worse.

Judge Landrum and other judges took a cut of the profits to run their courts, creating an unconstitutional financial conflict of interest that destroyed whatever "neutrality" they were supposed to have as judges. It gets worse.

The violations of constitutional rights were so egregious that the federal court in New Orleans issued a judgment against Landrum and other judges declaring that they were violating the basic 14th Amendment rights of some of the poorest people in New Orleans.

Landrum appealed, and a unanimous (conservative) federal appeals court held that her financial conflict of interest violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the simple due process right to a neutral judge.

For years, Landrum and other judges devastated thousands of lives in New Orleans, overwhelmingly Black and indigent people. They then fought us @CivRightsCorps for years in federal court as we tried to stop them. Read more about our case here: civilrightscorps.org/case/new-orlea…

To my knowledge, this would be the first U.S. Attorney ever to serve after a federal court judgment finding that they were rampantly violating federal constitutional rights. And *this* is the person that Biden wants to appoint to "enforce the law."

It is a federal felony crime under 18 U.S.C. 242 to intentionally violate constitutional rights. And because Louisiana keeps secret ethics complaints against prosecutors and judges, we can't know the results of any ethics proceedings into her conduct.

A lot will depend now on @SenatorDurbin and @SenSchumer to see what kind of civil rights legacy they want for themselves. Just incredible disregard for constitutional values by Biden if he moves forward with this nomination.

I want to also add: the DA in NOLA at the time asked the Attorney General to prosecute Landrum and other judges for their crimes. And our case uncovered that they were also using the extorted funds for personal and spousal insurance benefits. Somehow, they were never charged.

This scandal is a fantastic example of how the crimes committed by powerful people are ignored. Eventually, they are lost to history, and the perpetrators are often rewarded. The entire episode--including Biden's role--should be one of the great political scandals of our time.