Siegelman was indicted by US Attorney Leura Canary, whose
husband is a close friend of Karl Rove, and his seven-year
sentence--the second-longest ever given to a politician convicted of
bribery in this country--was doled out by Mark Fuller, a Republican
judge who owes his lifetime appointment on the federal bench to the
President. The bribery charges have nothing to do with personal
enrichment but rather with donations Siegelman helped secure for a
campaign to pass a lottery bill that would have increased funds for
Alabama's ailing public schools.
Yet his case would probably
never have been investigated by Congress if it weren't for the sworn
statements of a lawyer and Republican Party operative from
Alabama--statements, introduced into the public record at Tuesday
morning's hearing, that have been the subject of much contentious
debate among members of the committee.
The attorney, Dana Jill
Simpson, was a longtime Republican player whose sworn affidavit alleges
that Siegelman was tried and convicted as part of a conspiracy to keep
him from running for political office in the future.
Simpson
grew up in rural northern Alabama in a small town called Rainsville, in
the foothills of the Appalachians, a place known mostly for its tasty
tomatoes. In a state that once voted solidly with the Democrats, she
comes from a long line of Republicans, at least on her mother's side.
Her
father, an accountant and a Democrat, knew five-term Alabama Governor
George Wallace well enough to get a letter from Wallace advocating her
admittance to the University of Alabama law school in the early 1980s.
Once admitted, however, she followed her mother's family tradition and
got involved with the Moral Majority in antiabortion campaigns,
supported Ronald Reagan's re-election bid in 1984 and went on to work
as a volunteer for many Republicans over the years, including the Ten
Commandments Judge, Roy Moore.
It was there at the university
in Tuscaloosa that she came to know another ambitious Republican
lawyer, Rob Riley, son of future Alabama Governor Bob Riley, who has
been as loyal to Bush as any Republican governor in the nation. The two
even share the habit of wearing cowboy boots with their dark suits.
Simpson
ran against Rob Riley for president of the school's student government
in 1987. Riley, as the fraternity machine candidate, won, but the two
developed a friendship anyway and went on to try legal cases together
for years.
Serving as president of the Alabama Student
Government Association is a long tradition for those who want to be
governor of the state, just as joining Yale's Skull and Bones has been
for many Presidents, and Siegelman himself had served as its head in
the late 1960s. Over the next three decades, Siegelman successfully ran
for just about every public office in the state. He served as secretary
of state and lieutenant governor, and after losing his first run for
governor in 1990 he won in 1998 against a social conservative, Fob
James--despite the fact that the state had long since turned red.
The
people of Alabama split their tickets in the 1998 election, electing
conservative Republican lawyer William Pryor as Attorney General. And
almost from the day they each took office, Pryor began to plot a way to
get rid of Siegelman -- through the courts.
Siegelman, with
his good looks, charm and willingness to compromise with the business
crowd, was a popular governor at first, who fulfilled his campaign
promise to rid the state's public schools of shoddy portable
classrooms. But his biggest pledge, to pass a state lottery to fund
public education, went down to defeat--largely due to the efforts of
out-of-state gambling interests tied to convicted lobbyist Jack
Abramoff, who used the Christian Coalition to turn out the religious
vote against legalized gambling.
When Pryor's initial
corruption investigation of Siegelman failed to uncover enough evidence
to bring state charges--and after George W. Bush won the White
House--he began to communicate with federal investigators. (In 2004
Bush granted Pryor an interim appointment to a federal judgeship on the
US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.)
During the
early Bush years, Jill Simpson was still trying cases with Rob Riley.
Together, the two hatched a plan to defeat Siegelman in 2002 by running
Rob's dad for governor. Then a three-term Congressman, Bob Riley tossed
his hat into the race and beat Siegelman by the slimmest of margins,
3,120 votes, in the closest election in Alabama political history. (The
race, according to a study out of Auburn University, may have been
marred by voting irregularities; an electronic recount moved thousands
of votes from Siegelman's column to Riley's, though no vote counts for
other candidates changed.)
The election was so close that a
week and a half later, on November 16, Simpson took part in a political
dirty trick to get Siegelman to concede the election rather than fight
for a recount. Riley asked her to photograph a rally of the Ku Klux
Klan in Scottsboro, Alabama, where she caught images of a lawyer
aligned with the Democratic Party putting up "Riley for Governor"
signs. It turned out later that the lawyer was likely set up by the
Riley campaign.
Last spring, as she watched the legal case
against Siegelman proceed, Simpson was asked by the Rileys to conduct
further "research" she considered to be unethical and illegal about a
powerful member of the state legislature. For this longtime Republican
ballplayer, it was the last straw. In May Simpson signed a sworn
affidavit in which she asserted that she was in on a telephone
conversation in which she overheard members of the Riley campaign plot
to get Siegelman to concede the election.
Simpson's affidavit
tells of a conference call she was on just two days after that Klan
rally, whose topic was the 2002 recount battle. She has phone records
that prove the phone call took place. Also on the call were Bill
Canary, a senior GOP political operative and adviser to Governor-elect
Riley; the governor's son, Rob Riley; and Terry Butts, a former member
of the Alabama Supreme Court who worked for Riley's election in 2002
(he later ended up representing Siegelman's co-defendant.)
According
to Simpson's affidavit, Canary said "not to worry about Don Siegelman"
because "his girls" would "take care of him." Canary made it clear "his
girls" was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the US Attorney who
first brought the case against Siegelman in the Middle District of
Alabama, and Alice Martin, the US Attorney for the Northern District of
the state, whose own case against Siegelman was later thrown out by a
federal judge. Both "girls" were recent Bush appointees and past
members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal fraternity.
During
the conference call, Rob Riley asked if he was sure "these girls" could
"take care of" Siegelman and get him out of the way of any future
political race. Canary told him "not to worry" and that he had already
worked it out with Karl Rove, who had spoken to the Justice Department,
which, he said, was already "pursuing" an investigation of Siegelman.
Simpson
testified that Butts said he could get Siegelman to concede and that
"it would all be over," including future prosecutions, if Siegelman
would just step aside. That same day, Siegelman withdrew his recount
request.
Four months after testifying in that affidavit,
Simpson went to Washington and gave a sworn deposition to the House
Judiciary Committee in which she shared further details about the call,
including discussion of a plan to keep Siegelman out of future
elections for governor--by threatening him with legal action if he ever
ran again.
At Tuesday's House Judiciary Committee
hearing on three cases of selective prosecution involving the Bush
Justice Department, Siegelman's conviction and Simpson's evidence were
center stage.
Former US Attorney Doug Jones, now in private practice in
Birmingham, testified about what he called "a disturbing trend" of
selective prosecutions on the part of the Bush Justice Department.
"There is no question in my mind that the Department of Justice in
Washington was behind the investigation," Jones told the committee. And
he said there is no question in his mind that it was "driven by
politics." That trend was documented by University of Missouri
communications professor Donald Shields, who spoke Tuesday about his
findings, in a peer-reviewed study, that the Bush Justice Department
has investigated and tried far more Democrats than Republicans. "There
is no question" that politics has been involved, Shields testified
Tuesday. "The numbers don't lie."
Artur Davis, a Democratic Representative
from Birmingham, echoed the view of Jones and Shields. "At every turn
we see partisan politics, Washington politics, Karl Rove politics,"
Davis said.
Siegelman, whose case is now under review by a federal
appeals court in Atlanta, has charged that the federal prosecution of
him was "political" since he was first indicted in Birmingham by US
Attorney Alice Martin, a Bush appointee, on corruption charges. He
continued to say it after that case was thrown out of court in 2004,
and when he was indicted again in 2005 by Leura Canary. Her husband,
Bill, a key player in that fateful 2002 conference call, is president
of the Conservative Business Council of Alabama and previously worked
in Washington as a special assistant for intergovernmental affairs for
George H.W. Bush. It was Canary who invited Rove down to Alabama back
in 1994 to help orchestrate a Republican takeover of the Alabama
Supreme Court.
The next political prosecution worked. A
federal grand jury indicted Siegelman and ex-HealthSouth chief Richard
Scrushy in October 2005 on what prosecutors called a "widespread
racketeering conspiracy" including bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of
justice and mail fraud. The case centered on two $250,000 checks
Scrushy wrote to a political group to pay off the debt it had incurred
supporting Siegelman's campaign for a state education lottery.
Prosecutors alleged that Scrushy wrote those checks in exchange for
reappointment to a state hospital regulatory board on which he had
served under previous governors.
After a long deliberation and
indications that the jury was hopelessly hung, and after the judge
issued a charge telling the jurors he had "a lifetime appointment" and
could wait as long as it took for them to reach a unanimous verdict,
some jurors started reading online news coverage and communicating by
e-mail, pressuring others to come to a guilty verdict so they could all
go home. On June 29, 2006, they found Siegelman not guilty of all
twenty-five racketeering charges but found him guilty on one count of
bribery and five instances of mail fraud. They found both Siegelman and
Scrushy guilty of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
But no one listened to Siegelman's claims of a political prosecution until May, when Simpson came forward.
CBS's
60 Minutes has interviewed Simpson for a show to air in the next few
weeks. In that interview, she tells much of her story and documents her
own close connections to the Bush White House and Karl Rove. But I was
the first reporter to do an in-person, on-the-record interview with
her, back in June.
"The reason I did what I did is because I
believe everybody has a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial," she
said then. "I did not believe Mr. Siegelman or Mr. Scrushy got a fair
trial."
Since Simpson came forward in May, she has not exactly
been embraced as a truth-teller by the local press in Alabama--and she
has been isolated and assaulted by the very Republicans she once
helped. In September she told House Judiciary Committee staff that her
law practice and her family members have suffered a backlash. "It has
been very stressful," she testified, "and it's been difficult for my
family." She says business at her law firm has dried up since she went
public about political collusion in the prosecution of Siegelman.
Several
Alabama newspapers have quoted Rob Riley disputing Simpson's version of
events and attempting to discredit her. Not long after the story broke
on June 1, Riley told a Birmingham News reporter that he had not seen
her in years and never tried cases with her. But she has boxes of
records proving they tried many cases together over the years, some of
which she provided to the House Judiciary Committee. It became evident
at Tuesday's hearing that Riley filed an affidavit with the House
Judiciary Committee denying that the 2002 conference call ever took
place, but Representative Davis said it should be discounted by the
committee, since Simpson's phone records clearly corroborate the call.
Terry
Butts, the State Supreme Court justice who claimed on the call that he
could get Siegelman to concede, hurled insults at Simpson, saying her
affidavit was written "by a drunken fiction writer." In a story October
23 on National Public Radio, Rob Riley called her charges "crazy."
Did
the attacks go beyond mere words? On February 21, just after Simpson
began to leak what she knew about the phone conversation with the
Alabama Bar Association, one of Siegelman's lawyers and lawyers for
Richard Scrushy, Simpson's family home in Rainsville burned down. A
cursory investigation of the house fire by the Rainsville Fire
Department and Simpson's insurance company turned up no evidence of
arson.
Then on March 1, as Simpson was returning from
Birmingham after a meeting with Scrushy and his legal team, a car
followed her "for a long way" on state Highway 431 before swerving into
her lane, twice and running her off the road. The driver turned out to
be a former police officer working as a private investigator. The state
trooper who investigated the accident said he saw no evidence of foul
play. Police officers in Attalla and Gadsden who know the investigator
say they doubted foul play in the wreck.
But the coincidental
timing of the incidents scared her, nevertheless. "I made the decision
in May to speak truth to power," Simpson said in an interview. "Anytime
you speak truth to power, there are great risks. I've been attacked,"
she says, but she felt a "moral obligation" to speak up.
Meanwhile,
the Canarys continue to deny any political plot, as has US Attorney
Louis Franklin, who claims he was the sole person behind Siegelman's
prosecution.
Yet there is ample evidence that Siegelman's case
was reviewed by the Public Integrity Division of the Justice Department
in Washington, which issued an order to bring the case to court no
matter what the evidence showed. Former US Attorney Doug Jones, who as
a lawyer in private practice represented Siegelman briefly in 2004, has
said the case against Siegelman appeared weak and indications were it
would not be pursued back in 2004--until a "top-down" review was
ordered in Washington. He testified before the House Judiciary
Committee October 23 and said that the Siegelman prosecution was
"driven by politics."
"There is no question in my mind that
the Department of Justice in Washington was behind the investigation,"
he said, adding, in response to questions from committee members,
"there is no question" there were people in the Justice Department who
were "out to get Siegelman."
"I'm no fan of Rove. I think he
is a disgusting political animal," Jones said in an earlier interview.
"I don't like the way he has interfered, and I do think his
fingerprints are on a lot of the prosecutions that have gone on around
the country. No question about that. Congress ought to investigate
that, because it's wrong.
"Once you become Attorney General
you are supposed to leave the partisan politics at the door," he
continued. "It does not appear that this Justice Department has done
that, whether it's with Siegelman or some of the other cases around the
country."
It is unclear yet whether Simpson will be called to
testify in future hearings before Congress. And House Judiciary
Committee chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, has not yet
indicated whether he will continue to pursue charges against Karl Rove,
who resigned in August while defying Congressional subpoenas in a broad
claim of White House executive privilege. But Simpson's affidavit got a
bit of sunshine this week.
Simpson said she hopes people
understand how hard it is to speak out against the Bush/Rove political
machine and to abandon party loyalty to serve the law.
"But
I've done it, now," she says. "And I will take whatever consequences
that may come from it, because it was the right thing to do. I just
couldn't walk away from the fact--and there's no doubt about it--it was
a political persecution."
source
Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, one of the most popular progressive governors in Southern political history, is cleaning toilets in a Louisiana jail today, convicted on bribery charges in what may be one of the worst abuses of the federal courts by the executive branch during President Bush's tenure. 
