Attorney General Jim Hood has released a new ad in his campaign for Governor attacking his Republican opponent Tate Reeves.
The ad makes mention of a statewide taxpayer funded investigation that the Hood’s office pursued into the implementation of a frontage road that connected the Jackson subdivision that Reeves lives with his family to Lakeland Drive, in particular, the Dogwood shopping center.
In the ad, it begins with an animated creation of where Reeves resides, where the frontage road is being constructed, and how it connects to Dogwood. The ad asserts that Reeves used political pressure in order to have the $2 million project pushed through the Legislature.
It then cuts to Jim Hood standing on a dirt road that he says is his property, as he tells those watching he built that road himself with ‘horse-power and sweat.’ He then says that if he is elected governor the roads he builds will be for ‘you’ and not himself. While Reeves was not convicted of any crime after the investigation, Hood still claims he was ‘caught.’
Reeves has not wavered from his statement that he nor his staff had anything to do with pushing for the building of the road and that the investigation was politically motivated by Hood.
The investigation itself was controversial from the start, since many speculated Hood would be running against Reeves in the gubernatorial election of 2019. Some asserted that it could have come to fruition in order to gain an advantage over his opponent and wondered if there was a conflict of interest.
The case was dropped last month after the Attorney Generals office issued his report that could find no basis for prosecution. An non-binding opinion letter written by former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice David Chandler reviewed the accompanying 43-page investigative report.
After the report was released AG Hood’s office said no further action would be taken by this office, and if charges were pursued they would need to be done so by the next Attorney General.
Sarah Ulmer
