Phil Bryant

Favre directly asked for help in getting government funds, not private funds or philanthropy, for the volleyball facility.

In 2019, then-Governor Phil Bryant texted Favre about the volleyball facility.

Quote, "We are going to get there.

This was a great meeting, but we have to follow the law.

So when we're talking about a kickback scheme, we're talking about an illegal arrangement where a public official awards a grant or contract to a vendor with the agreement that the recipient will kick back a portion of those funds to the official as a kind of favor for giving them the contract in the first place.

But we have, or at least I thought we had, [laughs] uh, competitive bidding processes to protect against misconduct like this so that politicians can't just give every contract to their buddies, right?

So the Mississippi DHS actually did used to have competitive bidding processes, but that all changed when Governor Phil Bryant appointed John Davis to be the DHS director in January 2016.

After taking over, Davis stopped the competitive bidding processes for awarding grants and pretty quickly got to work setting up corrupt deals, including those kickbacks.