Andy Taggart Fingering Moore … and Hood?

In a confusing post on the Ledger’s Red-Blue Blog, Republican pundit Andy Taggart complains that two of the attorneys now caught up in the Dickie Scruggs bribery scandal—Tim Balducci and Joey Langston—did not give back the settlement money from MCI-Worldcom that paid their attorney fees for recouping $108 million for the state:

A little over a year ago, then State Auditor Phil Bryant sent a demand letter to Joey Langston and the Langston Law Firm, where Tim Balducci used to practice, seeking recovery of the $14 million in attorneys fees improperly paid to Langston and Balducci in the MCI tax settlement case.  Former Attorney General Mike Moore had represented MCI during the settlement.

The post seems designed to implicate former Attorney General Mike Moore (who played the odd role of representing MCI in the case) and current Attorney General Jim Hood, who awarded the contingency contract. What isn’t clear from this extremely partisan post is fourfold: (a) What did Moore know, and when did he know it? And did he know about anything illegal? (b) Ditto for Hood; same question, remembering that he and Moore are not necessarily joined at the brain. (c) What is the law that would have required them to give back the attorney’s fees that the company paid them? (d) Positing that those attorneys are now “known scumbags,” what exactly is the relevance of this to that case?

We’d really like some of the salivating pundits in the state to connect more dots for us, rather than deal in partisan innuendo. Maybe they know stuff they can’t tell us, or think they do. Time will tell.

Also, someone sent us an e-mail earlier saying that because the bad attorneys gave money to certain candidates, then that means those candidates are dirty. This is an intriguing slippery slope for pundits who play journalists on the Web. Our advice is to do as investigative journalists do and use campaign reports as a path to ask more questions and do more investigation. We’ve learned the tragic way that, in a world without campaign-finance reform, just about every political candidate out there could be indicted based on their campaign-finance report. There is nothing wrong with showing who is supporting whom, and pondering the questions that raises. But it is going too far, ethically, to proclaim a politician automatically guilty of a serious crime simply by virtue of the names that appears on their campaign reports.

Legwork. Digging. Interviews. Sources. And then there’s empty punditry.