Siegelman, Scrushy Show Trial Winds Down in Montgomery
June 26th, 2007 |
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
MONTGOMERY, Ala., June 26 - President George W. Bush likes to talk in black and white terms about evil. Let’s talk about evil.
As former Gov. Don Siegelman and deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy go before a federal judge to be sentenced this week in Montgomery, the eyes of the nation are once again focused on Alabama. What will they see?
If it were totally up to the Bush Justice Department, what they would see is another corrupt governor and businessman who deserve to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
The problem is that people across this country will also be treated to the final bit of circus in a show trial put on by prosecutors and a judge who were appointed to office by a corrupt president. They were not elected by the people, and their own qualifications are suspect. Yet they will stop at nothing to gain and hold power, even if that means wasting millions upon millions of dollars in taxpayer money to trump up bogus charges and keep the political opposition down.
 |
| Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Don Siegelman: Guilty? |
Don Siegelman was not the best governor Alabama ever had. I had hope for him when he was inaugurated in January, 1999. But looking back on it now, it is obvious that a corrupt political opposition was as much to blame for his failure as his own lack of sales ability.
The best hope for Siegelman to do great things for my home state was vested in a state lottery to help fund education and “hope” scholarships for every student who wanted to go to college. The reason it failed, we now know, was because of a plot by evil men.
Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and disgraced former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed were cooking up deals with one Indian Tribe in Mississippi to screw another Indian Tribe in Alabama, and to screw the people of this state out of a chance to gamble at a casino and buy a lottery ticket. Of course the churches went along with it, because the faithful believe gambling takes money from their collection plates.
Our current governor, the biggest media darling to ever hold the office, was involved with those evil men. Yet he escapes any local press scrutiny for those ties, ties that bind him to a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of our national government.
Even if skeptics want to dismiss the damning affidavit written by Republican lawyer Jill Simpson, which details a plot inside the White House and the governor’s office to get rid of Siegelman in the legal arena, not the political arena, the lobbying scandal should not be ignored. But it has been ignored by the mainstream, corporate news operations in this state.
As for Richard Scrushy, as he tearfully said again in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery this morning, he refused to lie about Don Siegelman to obtain a light sentence for himself. So these overzealous, political prosecutors threw him in with Siegelman on trumped-up charges of trading a seat on a hospital board, a board he had already served on, allegedly in exchange for money to retire the debt on the lottery campaign fund.
 |
| Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Richard Scrushy: Guilty? |
If the feds wanted to get Scrushy for something, they should have been able to convict him in Birmingham for knowledge of cooking the books in the HealthSouth scandal. But they did not get him in that case. An argument could be made that the reason they didn’t was because of Bush’s appointment of loyal Republicans with letters from the right preachers to the U.S. attorneys office - instead of hiring the most fit lawyers for the job.
For all the people in Mountain Brook who hate Richard Scrushy because they lost money on HealthSouth stock, perhaps you should begin to realize now that politicizing the justice system has tangible drawbacks.
I have covered many a corrupt politician in my time, including George C. Wallace, Guy Hunt and George W. Bush. But this case against Siegelman and Scrushy takes the cake.
It will be interesting to look into U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller’s eyes as he delivers the sentence. His days under the scrutiny of journalists will not be over when he delivers that sentence. There are things in his own background that deserve more scrutiny.
Will he throw the book at them? Or will some of those letters he has been reading tug on his heart strings and find some place in there for mercy?
Will he let them stay out of prison while the case is appealed? That might be a good idea, since the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has some interesting things to consider in this case. There is little doubt now that Karl Rove, Bill Canary and the federal prosecutors conspired to get rid of Siegelman politically in the legal arena. Chances are, they could not have beaten him in the political arena, at least not without cheating a bit here and there in places like Bay Minette.
Old Tom Delay out in Texas, the former Senate Majority Leader, made a similar argument in his case. He has said the Democrats were prosecuting him to get him out of Congress. Maybe it’s true, I don’t know, although I have less sympathy for Delay because of some of the evil he has wrought on this country.
So sit back and watch the show in Montgomery on TV. We’ll be here talking about it when it’s over…
