THE DON SIEGELMAN CASE AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

THE DON SIEGELMAN CASE AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

The Eleventh Court of Appeals has granted former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman a release from prison on bail appeal. It found that he was not a flight risk and that his appeal raised significant and “substantial questions of law and fact.” He convicted of accepting a bribe in what appeared to be normal political conduct, rewarding a political contributor. Siegelman was released on March 28, 2008 and returned to Montgomery.

The former Democratic governor has claimed he was subjected to a political prosecution. The case has attracted considerable attention because so many irregular circumstances attended it. It was argued that Karl Rove was behind the prosecution, the jury was tainted, and that there were good reasons why the judge should have recused himself. Democrats have pointed to it as a perfect illustration of how politicized and corrupt the Bush Justice Department has become. We can expect that there will be enormous pressure and massive efforts to see that the conviction is upheld.

Siegelman intends to testify before Congress. His goal is to get Karl Rove to also appear and tell what he knows about the prosecution or take the Fifth Amendment. Rove has previously refused to answer a Congressional subpoena, and the Department of Justice’s refusal to act on two recent contempt citations suggests there is little point in subpoenaing Rove again.

Governor Don Siegelman was found guilty of bribery and sentenced to 7 years, 4 months in prison in June 2007. Richard Scrushy, a wealthy Health South executive, also went to prison. He gave a total of $500,000 to Siegelman’s Alabama Education Foundation, a campaign to use lottery money to support secondary education lottery campaign to support education. Scrushy had served on Alabama’s Certificate of Need Board under the three previous governors. It decides what hospital facilities need to be created. Scrushy wanted to get off the board, but the governor persuaded him to accept reappointment. The three previous governors had appointed this man to state boards, and he had contributed to them. Not long before this case, the lead prosecutor handled the conviction of another Alabama governor. In that case, the defendant profited personally but the prosecutor still recommended probation.

The Sigelman case was unusual in that the defendant did not profit from the so-called bribe. Prosecutors argued that the Siegelman campaign had guaranteed the debt of the Alabama Educational Foundation, and that Scrushy’s contribution in effect prevented the governor from having to pay off the foundation’s debt. It is doubtful if the governor personally would have had to pay off that debt. The rewarding of a contributor with an appointment is not unusual at the state or federal level. Professor Stephen Gillers of the New York University School of Law noted that the prosecution was unable to prove corrupt intent.

Siegelman was Alabama’s leading Democrat, having been elected to each of the state’s four top offices. This case, put a permanent end to his political career. Grant Woods, former Arizona Attorney General and co-chair of the McCain campaign, said: “I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square.”

The case was based on the testimony of Nick Bailey, who had been indicted for taking bribes. The governor did not know his assistant was selling state contracts. Bailey also admitted that he was not present when Siegelman appointed Scrushy to the board. But he said that Siegelman came out of the meeting with a check for $250,000 to the foundation. The prosecutors had the cancelled check and knew that it was cut days after the meeting. Yet they did not produce the check during the trial.
Bailey told a friend, Amy Methvin, that that he was going to repeat in court what the prosecutors told him to say as part of a “quid pro quo.” The witness met with the prosecutors about 70 times to go over and memorize the testimony. He was repeatedly required to write out his testimony as an aid to memorization. Those notes should have been turned over to the defense. They were not.

Gary White, a Republican commissioner in Jefferson County, was pressured to give inaccurate testimony or face malicious prosecution himself. He refused and was prosecuted. Recently, a federal judge in Birmingham looked into the matter and “established a prime facie case of impermissible conduct” on the part of the prosecutors.

Time and CNN learned in October 2007 that another witness, Clayton Young, in the case also told US Attorneys on May 8, 2002 that he had also made illegal contributions to several ranking Republicans. The problem is these Justice Department officials did not move against any of the Republicans. Clayton Lamar (Lanny) Young, Jr. is a landfill developer and lobbyist who found it necessary to work both sides of the political street. He admitting making illegal contributions to Siegelman, but he added that he gave tens of thousands to leading Republicans such as one-time state Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is now a U.S. Senator, and William Pryor, Jr., another attorney general who is now a federal judge. He named other prominent Republicans. Young went into detail about how the political money was laundered and reached the candidates. Somehow Time obtained the transcript of his testimony.

Attending the meeting with Young in the office of U.S. Attorney Canary was his personal attorney, US prosecutors, FBI agents and investigators from the office of the Republican state attorney general, and someone representing public integrity section of the Department of Justice in Washington.

The Justice Department people had an obligation to check out the entire story, not just the part about Democrat Siegelman. Not to do so would be to abuse prosecutorial discretion. Several of the attorneys present had worked for Sessions and Pryor. They had a conflict of interests here and should have reused themselves and also informed a third party about the details involved in the situation. Those involved in the prosecution neither looked into the charges against Republicans, nor recused themselves and found an honest third party to inform about what was transpiring.

Siegelman’s attorneys found some of Young’s testimony amid thousands of documents acquired through discovery, but Judge Mark E. Fuller refused to permit them to introduce the information. He ruled it irrelevant. Not long before Fuller became a federal district court judge; he had been involved in the campaign to prevent Siegelman from being reelected.

During the sentencing procedure, the home of Susan James, one of Siegelman’s lawyers, was entered and her files accessed. Nothing appeared to have been taken. The Siegelman home was also invaded at that time.

Prosecutors also demanded that he pay $118,000 in restitution charges connected with charges on which a jury acquitted him. The judge first ruled for the prosecution and later changed his mind.

Two jurors were caught exchanging e-mails about how they could sway fellow jurors to vote to convict. They also searched the Internet to find more evidence against Siegelman. Some of the Googled information was a WSFA TV Courtroom Chronicles blog presenting evidence against the former governor that was presented while the jury was out of the room. Their e-mails were even featured on a WOTM Special Report. The judge was not inclined to pursue the matter.

Chief Federal District Judge Mark E. Fuller denied bail while the case was on appeal. The judge also denied granting the former governor the customary 45 days the convicted are given to put their affairs in order. Siegelman was shackled in leg irons and handcuffs and taken out of the courtroom and off to a federal penitentiary. In essence, the judge decided the former governor was an extreme flight risk. Maybe this was because Civil Rights leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth stood by the former governor during the trial. The civil rights hero managed to escape his house in 1956 when the Klan tried to blow it up with 16 sticks of dynamite. Subsequently, Fuller’s office has delayed releasing the trial transcript, which has held up the appeal.

The U.S. Marshall’s service provided Siegelman with a tour of federal prisons, feeding him bologna sandwiches and similar fare and only permitting him to read the King James version of the Bible. The tour started in Atlanta; then he was moved in the middle of the night to Texarkana, passing through Michigan, New York, and Oklahoma. Finally, he was settled in the Oakdale, Louisiana federal penitentiary, where he worked as a prison janitor.

Before sentencing, Siegelman took his case to the press. Prosecutors retaliated by threatening to charge him with obstruction of Justice and heaping “disrespect on this court.” Judge Fuller wasted no time in indicating that 5 to 7 years could be added to the sentence. After the sentencing, the prosecution again raised the threat of contempt charges and obstruction of justice charges. After the Siegelman was jailed, Assistant U.S. Attorney Feaga threatened to bring obstruction of justice charges against Siegelman. Most likely he was referring to efforts to interest the press in this highly unusual case. Colonel Feaga is a reservist who is connected to t he JAG office at Langley Air Force Base, where Doss Aviation, a firm tied to Judge Fuller, is a fuel distributor. It is possible that Feaga could play a role in reviewing the contracts let there.

Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Alabama, a Republican operative and attorney, signed an affidavit one month before the sentencing in which she swore that campaign workers discussed pressing the case against the governor in a 2002 teleconference with Rob Riley as a way to force Siegelman to not pursue his case in the disputed election. Simpson said she also heard Canary say he would get two of “ his girls “—US attorneys in Alabama— “to take care” of Sieligman. One of the women was Canary’s wife who was eventually forced to recuse herself from the investigation

During the call, the governor’s son, Rob, said that the work of “these girls” would insure Siegelman could never run for office again. She added that Bob Canary said he had discussed the matter with his friend Carl Rove. Adrianna Huffington has reported that former BellSouth exec Richard Scrushy became a big target in the prosecution because his conviction would help along a class action case against BellSouth, in which Alabama Governor Riley’s son was a lawyer for plaintiffs.

Mr. Canary had received $38,000 for serving as advisor to Riley’s running mate, Steve Windom, and that money flowed into a joint account with Canary’s wife, Leura. William Canary then became Riley’s campaign advisor. After the election, his wife Leura fact used her job as assistant U.S. Attorney against Siegelman. Republican political operative Bob Canary admitted under oath that he had been instrumental in getting the Department of Justice to go after Siegelman. . Subsequently, the Department of Justice has offered inaccurate and misleading information about the deep involvement the two women in t he prosecution.

The governor’s attorneys did not use Simpson’s sworn statement in the case; perhaps it came in too late.

Ms. Simpson’s house was burned to the ground and her car forced off the road by an Alabama law enforcement officer and was totaled. Attacks upon her have caused her to reaffirm her statement and add:

A former lawyer came to see me and said he was sent by Governor Bob Riley and Gerald Dial. This man asked me to do things that I worried were illegal and certainly unethical in the Senate election contest against Democratic Senator Lowell Barron, Senator Zeb Little, Senator Roger Bedford and Senator Hank Sanders [ all Democrats] . I did not want to get mixed up in these things and told him I was not interested in any involvement.


Simpson knew Governor Riley since their student days at the University of Alabama, and she has boxes full of files to prove she worked with him in many matters. Riley denies any close association with her. She broke with him in 2006 after being asked to do what she thought was “dirty, untrue” research to frame a prominent Democrat.

When a reporter for the Huntsville Times asked Rove about the case, he said, “I know nothing about any phone call.” Later, on March 3, 2007, Rove and his wife Darby held a dinner party for an attorney who had been a key member of the prosecution team in Montgomery at their vacation home at Rosemary Beach in Florida.

Acting US Attorney Louis V. Franklin, who put Siegelman away, claimed that only he had decided to indict Siegelman, but he took over the case only after others had pursued the matter. Franklin went out of his way to insist that Carl Rove was not involved in the case in any way. He made the very unusual claim that he was able to act virtually independent of Washington in this case. In his zeal to nail Siegelman, Franklin requested a 30-year sentence. Rove had worked several campaigns in Alabama, and there is strong evidence that he had worked closely with an FBI agent in 1990 in investigating the office of Texas Agriculture Commissioner John Hightower. Rove was then working for Hightower’s opponent, Rick Perry.

The effort to jail Siegelman began in 1999, before the conference call Simpson recalled. Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, the Republican who upheld the very questionable 2002 vote count, began an investigation of Siegelman. He decided there was not enough evidence to bring a case under state law, and he approached Karl Rove about bringing in the Department of Justice.

The “girls” who went to work on Siegelman had been Federalist Society members and recent Bush appointees: Alice Martin in the Northern District and Leura Canary in the Middle District. A federal judge was to throw out Martin’s case. Canary eventually had to recuse herself. After this, the case seemed to be losing steam. Then the younger Rob Riley told her in 2005, “We’ve found another judge.” This was Judge Fuller. Rob added that Fuller would “hang Don Siegelman.” The new effort to jail Siegelman began just as he was cranking up another effort to run for his former office. Later, Simpson told the House Judiciary Committee that Fuller hated Sigelman because Fuller believed the governor had him audited back when the judge was a district attorney. This testimony prompted Virginia Republican Randy Forbes to demand a Justice Department investigation of Simpson. Fuller was also unhappy with a Siegelman-appointee who replaced him as district attorney. The new D.A. dug up evidence that Fuller and his senior assistant were engaged in a pension-spiking scheme.

In 2002, Fuller was a member of the executive committee of the Alabama Republican Party during the Riley-Siegelman election. He has financial ties to a Houston firm that has been a CIA front, and he owns 43% of Doss Aviation, whose subdivision, Aureus International, sells supplies to the FBI, which was involved in the case. The Chief Judge, a federal employee, is listed as a corporate officer of Doss, a firm with many federal contracts.

It is claimed that beneath the surface, the fierce opposition to Siegelman in 2002 was due to his efforts to head off casino gambling on Indian reservations. These activities were to be controlled by Russian organized crime. Imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff had been involved in the scheme. A scandal subsequently erupted involving fraud connected with casino identity cards. Some Alabama businessmen who invested in the casinos also were bilked out of millions.

G. Douglas Jones, one of Siegelman’s lawyers and himself a former U.S. attorney has learned that at that time the Siegelman investigation seemed to be running out of steam. Then, people in Washington insisted that the local US attorney “Take another look at everything.” Jones says that the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ was “intimately involved.”

The case should be considered in the context of a hard-fought reelection campaign in 2002, which Siegelman conceded to Rob Riley after a two-week legal battle. During the campaign, a GOP deep cover operative was photographed placing Riley signs at a Klan rally. The idea was to then claim the man was a Siegelman employee. Siegelman lost after the results in heavily Republican Baldwin Country were restated to reduce his total by more than 7,000 votes. It was said that a computer glitch caused his total to be overstated. No Democrats were present when the county’s returns were restudied and restated. Attorney General Bob Prior ruled that there was nothing wrong with the procedures involved in restating the vote, and state courts upheld him. President Bush then rewarded Prior with a recess appointment to the federal bench.

CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” recently ran a segment on the Siegelman case which clearly demonstrated that the prosecutors used testimony they knew to be untrue and that they failed to exculpatory evidence to t he defense attorneys. When the segment aired, WHNT, which serves northern Alabama, had a mysterious service interruption. The station, which had been hostile to Siegelman, claimed there was a technical problem emanating from New York.

The House Judiciary Committee is attempting to review the matter, but it turns out that some of Rove’s e-mails relating to his Rosemary Beach dinner party for Steve Feaga, one of the prosecutors, have been lost. The White House has put out many stories about the millions of lost e-mails, the latest being that they were lost when the hard drives of replaced computers were destroyed. It was reported that Assistant Attorney General Craig Morford and former Senator Fred Thompson also attended the dinner party.

Members of the House Judiciary Committee are asking that the Justice Department turn over documents on the prosecution of Siegelman and on two other cases they believe may have been politically motivated. Although the deadline for turning over the documents has passed, the Justice Department had not complied with the request. Jill Simpson testified before six staffers of the House Judiciary Committee on September 14, 2007. Some Democratic insiders suggest she accept the free representation of a DC insider, David Laufman, who has long been associated with GOP causes and political operations. She decided to stay with one of her Alabama attorneys. On the day that the Eleventh Circuit announced the decision to release Siegelman on appeal bond, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers announced the committee wanted Siegelman to testify because the Justice Department was still stonewalling the committee on this matter.

The Department of Justice has rejected a FOIA request by an Alabama attorney who wanted to see the paperwork on claims Leura Canary had a conflict of interest in the case. On the other hand, it somehow it provided the Mobile Press-Register with a key document. That paper was also given all sorts of information about the Siegelman grand jury proceedings although providing such information violate Rule 6(e). The trouble is the rules do not apply to this information because there is no one to enforce them.

Investigative journalist Josh Marshall recently reported that unnamed lawyers in the DOJ believe the Department should take another look at the case and the prosecution. An FBI investigation of the prosecution’s ties to politics and the White House was opened, but great pressure has been exerted to prevent the agents from looking very far.

Governor Riley and his son have been accused of commissioning some distasteful research into the life of John Caylor, an investigative journalists, who has probed the Siegelman case and also alleged corruption tied to Governor Jeb Bush in Florida. Not long after the clandestine research began, Caylor’s mother, Nellie Ruth Caylor, was murdered on August 2, 2006 by unknown assailants. She supported her son’s activities and was afraid for her life. Her death was most probably a coincidence, but it is worth mentioning because there has been violence in the Siegelman case and because the police report on her death did not seem to match the facts. Caylor claims first-hand knowledge that an assistant prosecutor tied to the Siegelman case attended a dinner party at Karl Rove’s Florida house on or about March 3, 2007. Caylor claims to have copies of records that show that back in the 1980s Mark Fuller assisted the CIA in moving various kinds of contraband during the Iran/Contra days.

Fifty-two Republican and Democratic former state Attorneys General have signed a statement claiming the case needs to be reviewed by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. There statement included reference to the jury irregularities.

The New York Times noted that the firing of the eight US attorneys provided evidence that the Bush has used the Justice Department partisan purposes, and it suggested that There is reason to believe [Siegelman's] prosecution may have been a political hit, intended to take out the state’s most prominent Democrat, a serious charge that has not been adequately investigated." One might even wonder about the remaining 1,192 Republican U.S. Attorneys. Are they pleasing the White House by engaging in political prosecutions? We know that this Justice Department has investigated seven Democrats for every Republican it has looked at. The most recent political prosecution is that of Cyril Wecht in Pittsburgh; who is being represented by the state’s former Republican Governor, Richard Thornburg.

If Siegelman was indeed a political prisoner, it is unlikely that most of the mainstream press will tell the public or that Congress will ever get the information it needs to review this matter. The case has the makings of “Watergate of 2008, ” or perhaps “Justicegate.” Expect the Bush White House to move heaven and earth to see that Siegelman’s appeal fails. This case is just the tip of an iceberg of political corruption in the DOJ. Conservative legal analyst Bruce Fine has noted: “We have a Justice Department that has substantially been turned into a political arm of the White House.” The prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman demonstrates this and shows that justice is again off the tracks in Alabama and the continued stonewalling of efforts to look into this case and those of the eight fired U.S. attorneys demonstrates that the Department of Justice has not returned to the rule of law since Alberto Gonzales left.