Brett Favre under scrutiny for allegedly seeking welfare funds to build a sports facility

Anna Wolfe:

He says that he doesn’t know that this money came from a federal fund called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, most commonly known for providing the welfare check to very poor families.

But he did know that it was grant money. And, in some cases, the text messages show even that he said that — he figured that she was supporting him with federal grant money. At one point, he told his business associate — he was working with another company to try to get welfare money for a pharmaceutical start-up company that ended up receiving $2 million in allegedly stolen welfare funds.

And he told his business associate at the time that he knew that Nancy New, this nonprofit founder, would be helpful, because she gave him $5 million via grant funds for the volleyball stadium. So, you kind of see in the text messages their mentality around this spending. This was something for Brett Favre personally, in the way that he’s describing it in these text messages.

And it also shows some — their attempts to sort of operate in secrecy, right? None of the money that was being spent from these nonprofits was really being recorded and then reflected back to the state agency. So, when I was trying to get expenditure reports and asking the agency to show me how they were spending the money and what they were doing for people in poverty, there wasn’t any data to show for it, because that nonprofit had kind of turned into a black hole, as she described in that text message where she says, we don’t publicize that information.