Two more Baton Rouge officials testified Wednesday before a grand jury as part of the Louisiana Attorney General’s investigation into political corruption in Baton Rouge.
Council member Twahna P. Harris, who was elected in 2024, and Chauna Banks, who sat on the council from 2013 to 2024, each received subpoenas last week and testified Wednesday in the probe, which has now yielded nine arrests.
Eight current or former Metro Council members have before the grand jury. Harris served as a Metro Council legislative aide before she was elected.
Council members, including Banks and Harris, have said they are and offered little additional information.
After testifying, Banks spoke briefly to the media and said she was not the focus of the grand jury’s investigation.
“I’ve been told from beginning to end, that I was not a target,” Banks said. “It's been emphasized and re-emphasized, even without me asking.”
Harris declined to comment following her testimony Wednesday morning other than to say she was not a target of the attorney general’s investigation.
Banks said her testimony to the grand jury and prosecutors was “to educate them on issues” as a former council member and explain different city-parish processes.
Since the 12-person group was empaneled in October 2025, it has indicted several current and former public officials, including sitting council member Cleve Dunn Jr.; Courtney Scott, a former high-ranking administrator under former Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome; and Pearlina Thomas, who was chief administrative officer of the Capital Area Transit System.
Dunn pleaded not guilty last week. He faces 10 counts, including conspiracy, theft, money laundering and more.
Prosecutors say Dunn — with the help of Thomas — used his influence as an elected official to steer a transit contract to an associate who then paid him a kickback worth 90% of the payment.
Scott is accused of receiving nearly $200,000 in kickbacks from city-parish contractor Veronica Mathis, who had several city-parish contracts during the Broome administration. She also has pleaded not guilty.
Broome was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury in April but has not done so. She has denied wrongdoing.
Many of the corruption charges filed so far involve contracts that were funded with federal dollars between 2022 and 2024, including American Rescue Plan Act grants during the COVID-19 era.
Banks did not speak to specific accusations involving those funds Wednesday, but said the city-parish did not receive much guidance from the U.S. Department of the Treasury at the time.
“(ARPA) was literally about providing quality of life opportunities for those communities that have been disadvantaged historically,” Banks said.
She argued that there is “a lot of misinformation” about how things worked during that period and how local officials used the tens of millions of dollars that poured into the city-parish from the federal government, and she hopes her testimony cleared things up for investigators.
“There are just so many dynamics, both professionally, politically, and personally, that get us kind of caught up in things,” Banks said. “I hope that the things that I said resonated, and that a fair and just system would be the result.”