aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 25, 2008

Political prosecution in Alabama

60 Minutes had a piece last night asserting that the former Democratic governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, is in prison not but instead because he’s a member of the wrong political party. He was the most popular Democrat in that very Republican state.

The story convincingly demonstrates that both Democrats and Republicans are suspicious that multiple Justice Department investigations were politically motivated and politically influenced.

Now 52 former state attorneys-general have asked Congress to investigate whether the prosecution of Siegelman was pursued not because of a crime but because of politics.

From the 60 Minutes piece:

[A] Republican lawyer from Alabama, Jill Simpson, has come forward to claim that the Siegelman prosecution was part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor. Simpson told 60 Minutes she did what’s called “opposition research” for the Republican party. She says during a meeting in 2001, Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political advisor, asked her to try to catch Siegelman cheating on his wife.

“Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?” Pelley asks.

“Yes,” Simpson replies.

“In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides,” Pelley clarifies.

“Yes, if I could,” Simpson says.

She says she spied on Siegelman for months but saw nothing. Even though she was working as a Republican campaign operative, Simpson says she wanted to talk to 60 Minutes because Siegelman’s prison sentence bothers her conscience.

Simpson says she wasn’t surprised that Rove made this request. Asked why not, she tells Pelley, “I had had other requests for intelligence before.”

“From Karl Rove?” Pelley asks.

“Yes,” Simpson says.

Siegelman was manacled and frog-marched from the courthouse to the paddy-wagon and taken directly to prison, highly unusual in a white collar case

[Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona says it’s politics, not bribery.] “You do a bribery when someone has a real personal benefit. Not, ‘Hey, I would like for you to help out on this project which I think is good for my state.’ If you’re going to start indicting people and putting them in prison for that, then you might as well just build nine or ten new federal prisons because that happens everyday in every statehouse, in every city council, and in the Congress of the United States,” he says.

“What you seem to be saying here is that this is analogous to giving a great deal of money to a presidential campaign. And as a result, you become ambassador to Paris,” Pelley remarks.

“Exactly. That’s exactly right,” Woods says. [...]

“Help me understand something. You’re blaming the Republican administration for this prosecution. You’re saying it was a political prosecution. You are a Republican. How do I reconcile that?” Pelley asks.

“We’re Americans first. And you got to call it as you see it. And you got to stand up for what’s right in this country,” Woods says.

RELATED: AP on Rove & Jill Simpson from 3 days ago and Raw Story investigates from November 2007. TPMMuckraker has a good roundup of coverage, as does Harper’s magazine.