Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) was convicted on seven counts of public corruption last year. And he’s scheduled to be sentenced on June 26th. The Times today has an article about Siegelman’s attempts to stay out of prison and, in particular, the fact that his defense has now come forward with an affidavit from an attorney which arguably places his prosecution into the context of the US Attorney Purge and the larger politicization it was a part of.
The relevant passage of the pieces states …
Now they have an affidavit from a lawyer who says she heard a top Republican operative in Alabama boast in 2002 that the United States attorneys in Alabama would âtake careâ of Mr. Siegelman. The operative, William Canary, is married to the United States attorney in Montgomery, Leura G. Canary. Mr. Canary, who heads the Business Council of Alabama, was an informal adviser to Bob Riley, a Republican, who defeated Mr. Siegelman in 2002.
Earlier, Mr. Canary worked in the White House under President Bushâs father and has close ties to Karl Rove, Mr. Bushâs top political strategist.
In the affidavit, the lawyer, Jill Simpson, said Mr. Canaryâs remark was made in a conference call with her and Rob Riley, Governor Rileyâs son and campaign manager.
Ms. Simpson said Mr. Canary assured the younger Mr. Riley that âhis girls would take care ofâ Mr. Siegelman before he had a chance to run for the governorâs seat in 2006 and identified âhis girlsâ as Leura Canary and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham.
Now, on the other side of the equation is the fact that Canary recused herself from the case in response to Siegelman’s complaints and the case was run by a career prosecutor who says he ran the whole show by himself with no input from Canary.
But let’s set that aside for a second. Federal prosecutors are asking the judge to sentence Siegelman to 30 years in prison. Thirty years!
Now, given my focus on public corruption in the last few years, far be it from me to call for leniency on crooked pols. But this strikes me as wildly out of line with the sentences I’ve seen in the last couple years. For some context, Siegelman was acquitted on 25 counts and convicted on seven. With those charges Siegelman didn’t pocket any money himself but rather, in the words of the Times, persuaded a wealthy businessman “to pay $500,000 to retire the debt of a political group that had campaigned to win voter approval for a state lottery.”
Compare this to Duke Cunningham, perhaps the most brazen and audacious bribetaker in recent decades. Duke to cash payments from multiple federal contractors in exchange for securing defense contracts. Duke got eight years and four months in prison. Duke pleaded out, which probably took some time off his sentence. But nothing Siegelman was convicted of seems even remotely in Duke’s league and yet they want to give him a sentence almost four times as long?
What am I missing?
I think I’m starting to understand part of Fred Thompson’s presidential strategy — to connect himself to as many Bush administration scandals as possible, which is a very canny strategy. As John Dean points out here Thompson is perhaps the most prominent public advocate for a pardon for Scooter Libby as well as a frequent source of false statements about the Libby prosecution. He’s also considering hiring Tim Griffin, star player in the US Attorney Purge scandal, as his presidential campaign manager.
Griffin, remember, is the Rove deputy who was appointed US Attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas under the USA Patriot Act. (Another factoid: We haven’t reported all the details yet, but it was, ironically, Griffin’s loose lips, in a very roundabout way, that played an important role in bringing the scandal to the front pages.)
I assume that Thompson will probably be working to insinuate himself into other Bush administration scandals. So let us know if you find other examples.
Late Update: Thompson has been popping up in so many places preaching the Scooter gospel, I was wondering: did he get hired to represent, advocate, whatever on behalf of getting Scooter a pardon? We contacted Thompson’s spokesperson, Mark Corallo (who’s also worked for the Scooter fund and Karl Rove), and asked if Thompson has received any cash for his advocacy. Answer: No, says Corallo.
Greg Anrig, Jr. fisks George Will’s “Case for Conservatism.”
Hmmmm. That adds a little spice to the mix. I noted earlier today that attorneys for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) got an affidavit from a Republican lawyer from Alabama who says she was on a conference call in which the husband of the US Attorney in the case said “his girls” were going to take care of Siegelman. Now Time has the actual affidavit. And it includes this quote …
Canary said “not to worry â that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman,” the Simpson affidavit says.
Now, even for those of us who’ve been hot on the trail of the Attorney Purge should recognize that there are a lot of legitimately corrupt pols that will try to use the scandal to skate. But this seems like a lot more than smoke or vague allegations.
The affidavit is from Dana Jill Simpson, an apparently respected Republican lawyer from the state. William Canary, is a GOP operative with close ties to Rove, according to the Times. And his wife is the US Attorney in the jurisdiction in question.
If he said he talked to Rove and that Rove said he’d contacted the Department of Justice about pursuing Siegelman, I think this requires a much closer look.
Just a lil’ more background on Karl Rove, Alabama and William Canary.
As the article in this morning’s Times explains, William Canary — the guy who allegedly said he’d talked to Rove about getting the DOJ to take care of Don Siegelman — is the head of something called the Business Council of Alabama.
The BCoA happens to be the GOP group that brought Rove to Alabama in the early 1990s to help flip the state’s Supreme Court to the GOP. My old pal Josh Green detailed the relationship in great depth in this November 2004 article in The Atlantic Monthly.
So, we can be quite sure that Canary knows Rove very well.
The article also explains how Rove used the vote fraud bamboozlement and charges that his client’s opponent was a pedophile to win a court race. But, that’s just a bonus.
A new poll finds that the American public gives Rudy and Hillary the best odds of winning the nominations of their respective parties. That and more political news of the day in our Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
When bureaucracy meets bamboozlement, or Where’re Pynchon and DeLillo When We Need Them.
According to the Post, despite the fact that even the most confirmed yahoo now concedes that late Saddam-era Iraq had no WMDs, the UN has not and apparently cannot get around to shutting down the office charged with monitoring Saddam’s weapons and disarming the now-disheaded Saddam Hussein.
Writes Colum Lynch: “Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan’s East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein’s deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq — inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.”
The reality of the situation is even more comic and bizarre then the headline. Even I wasn’t completely sure I understood it after reading Lynch’s article in the Post. But the essence of it seems to be this: the US and the Brits want to shut the thing down, but the Russians say the word has to come from the inspectors themselves. The inspectors, in turn, say they can’t definitively say that Saddam/Iraq has been disarmed because they haven’t been given access to the records of the Coalition-led Iraq Study Group.
Meanwhile, the current head of the inspectors, a Greek weapons expert named Dimitri Perricos doesn’t really seem to want to give up the gig. Indeed, Perricos warns that the Iraqi inspectorate should be kept going because insurgents, terrorists or some new Iraqi government could well reconstitute the weapons at some point in the future. (Hey, where was this guy when Bush and Cheney and Hanity really needed him, right?) Presumably, Martians might also reconstitute the weapons. But he seems not yet to have played this card.
We quote form the Post quoting Perricos …
“Look, Iraq is not Denmark,” he said. “They’ve made botulin, anthrax, VX, sarin; they’ve made the whole spectrum of horrifying items, and they’ve used them. We don’t know how things are going to develop in the region, and we want to be sure there are some controls.”
Last month, Perricos showed the U.N. commission’s board satellite imagery of plundered Iraqi chemical factories that produce chlorine, which has been used by Iraqi insurgents in chlorine-bomb suicide attacks. He warned that insurgents may obtain more deadly chemical weapons on the black market, according to U.N. officials.
You get the sense the Russians are getting a bit of a kick out of this.
Congress wants to talk to Ashcroft about the hospital room showdown.
Annals of poorly edited press releases.
This is pretty damn funny. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) was putting out a press release praising first responders. In the process of putting the press release together, the press aide composing it wrote in some editorial comments to the effect that first responders don’t really do jack.
Unfortunately those glosses got left in the copy when the thing was released, leaving the senator to say …
“First responders in Colorado have recently provided critical services in the face of blizzards and tornados,” added Allard. “Since I donât think first responders have really done anything significant in comparison to their counterparts who have dealt with real natural disasters, I have no idea what else to say here…”
Allard isn’t running for reelection. Good idea.
Maybe I’ve let my subscription lapse on Far-Right Talking Points Weekly, but at what point did conservatives decide that the word “outspoken” is insulting?
Crooks & Liars posted a surprising video from CNN in which conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham shared her thoughts on the president’s immigration policy (she doesn’t like it). Before a commercial break CNN’s John Roberts told viewers, “Will the new immigration reform bill fix the problem? We’ll ask the outspoken Laura Ingraham about that next.”
Apparently, that’s no longer acceptable in conservative circles.
INGRAHAM: By the way, John, how did you introduce me for this segment before the break. The outspoken Laura Ingraham. Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I’m going to check.
ROBERTS: Yeah, we do actually.
INGRAHAM: OK, I’m going to check that.
ROBERTS: Are you denying that you’re outspoken Laura?
INGRAHAM: No, why would you say that?
ROBERTS: I just think that we’re appropriately characterizing you…. You’re definitely outspoken. You were outspoken about immigration on Wednesday’s show.
INGRAHAM: How about radio talk show host and author. That’s quite effective.
How does one know that conservative political correctness has gone over the edge? When “outspoken” becomes a point of contention.
Post Script: For what it’s worth, Michael Medved and Fox News’ Chris Wallace described Ingraham the same way, and she didn’t seem to mind.