Results for :  

"siegelman"

Needless to say there’s quite a lot in these indictments of former FBI counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal et al. There are a number of points I want to note. But let me start with this one.

A fair amount of this information has been public for a long time. I was surprised to see the September 2022 Insider article on the investigation that Josh Kovensky linked in his write up. But I also found this Twitter thread from independent journalist Wendy Siegelman from December 13, 2021. She flags and discusses a November 29th, 2021 FARA filing which actually details a number of the basic relationships if not the specific crimes set forth in today’s New York indictments. Indeed, if you read the FARA filing you can easily identify a number of people in the indictment. People like “Agent-1,” for instance, who appears to be Yevgeny Fokin. I was surprised to see so much of this revealed in a FARA filing more than a year ago.

There are people who get convicted of campaign finance violations who you can make a decent case got a raw deal, even if you think campaign finance law is an important democratic safeguard. Here at TPM, we covered a case like that closely: the prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was targeted by Karl Rove and some powerful state Republicans.

Dinesh D’Souza, who President Trump pardoned today, saying he was “treated very unfairly,” definitely doesn’t fall into that category. As Tierney Sneed explains, D’Souza knowingly had his mistress and his assistant make $10,000 contributions to a GOP candidate, with the understanding that he’d pay them back – a clear scheme to get around individual contribution limits. The mistress even told her husband, in a conversation he recorded, that D’Souza had told her that if caught, he planned to eventually plead guilty, though not before first trying to “get his story out there.” That “story,” it seemed, was that he had been targeted by the Justice Department because of his (unhinged and racist) attacks on President Obama – a claim the judge in the case called “nonsense.”

US District Court Judge Mark Fuller was arrested Sunday morning and charged with misdemeanor battery for assaulting his wife. Police responded to a call from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlanta. Fuller’s wife said her husband had assaulted her; she was treated for wounds by paramedics but declined to be taken to a hospital.

Fuller is best known for presiding over the trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), which Siegelman’s supporters believe – with some reason – was a politically motivated prosecution.

Fuller is a judge in the Middle District of Alabama.