Jill Simpson grew up in the Rainsville area of Northeast Alabama as the daughter of two parents who were both politically active – on opposite sides of the political fence.

She was raised by a Republican mother, whose family was mostly made up of potato farmers, and a Democrat father, who knew George C. Wallace so well that the four-term governor was able to help her gain admittance to the University of Alabama Law School even though she was initially turned down.

She had been accepted at Cumberland Law School in Birmingham and Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee – a far more prestigious school. But she really wanted to go to Alabama, where as an undergraduate student in the 1980s she met and became close friends with Rob Riley, the politically ambitious son of Bob Riley.

That’s the same Bob Riley who was a three-term Congressman from Alabama who would be elected governor in a razor-close race in 2002 – in part thanks to her.

While an undergrad at Alabama, Ms. Simpson was an active pro-life advocate who joined the university’s Young Republicans, a group that actively supported the reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984. She remembers going to see Ronald Reagan speak there in 1985, and still admires the former president.

When I met her on the Southside of Birmingham in 1989, she was just out of law school and beginning to set up a practice “in the big city.” But after a year and a half in Birmingham, she discovered she could get more work as a lawyer handling divorces, bankruptcies and Social Security cases in the region she called home. So she moved back to Dekalb County and set up a lucrative law practice in the place her daddy had practiced accounting all his life.

Over the years of working out of Rainsville, she also developed an interesting legal specialty representing “storm gypsies,” a shorthand term for rednecks with trucks and tools who go in and clean up the landscape in the aftermath of ice-storms, tornadoes and hurricanes.

And it is that legal work that gave her the expertise to do what Siegelman’s and Scrushy’s teams of lawyers and $30 million could not do in Montgomery: Oust a federal judge for an ethical and legal conflict that may get him removed from the case by the appeals court – if he does not recuse himself before the June 26 sentencing date.

But again, that is getting ahead of the story.

Back in 2001, while doing federal contract work for her storm gypsy clients in Washington, D.C. and hounding the Federal Emergency Management agency, Ms. Simpson would often run into her old friend Rob Riley at the classy watering holes of D.C.

When Rob Riley told her his dad had decided to run for governor, she agreed to help.

At that time, she says, the Rileys had virtually no money to run a campaign for governor. So she put together a volunteer operation in North Alabama that could “knock up signs” and such for virtually nothing.

Lt. Gov. Steve Windom of Mobile was the clear Republican favorite, with all the support of the Bushes, Karl Rove, Bill Canary and the rest of the machinery of the Republican National Committee and the Alabama Republican Party. But Windom was already in a major mudslinging dogfight with then-governor Siegelman.

So according to Ms. Simpson, the Riley campaign was able to take the high road in the primary campaign “and float above all that muck.”

She figured out that Riley only needed to take 13 North Alabama counties to win the primary. And the strategy worked. Riley won.

“We beat Karl Rove and Bill Canary in the primary, with almost no money,” she says with a touch of glee in her voice.

Along the way, in their effort to raise money, Ms. Simpson tried to get the Rileys to help her collect on a contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for one of her storm gypsy clients. It was a $4 million deal for cleaning up after an ice storm in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a contract that was tied up in the federal bureaucracy in Washington. What’s a Congressman for but to help a citizen collect legally earned money being held up in Washington? She promised to split the money with the Rileys if they would help free it up in the bureaucracy.

But the contract was never paid. Why? Because once President George W. Bush heard about Riley’s situation, she says, he agreed to make a fund raising visit to Alabama. That visit raised roughly $4 million for the Riley for governor campaign and gave Rob Riley the budget he needed to run a real campaign for his dad.

Once the primary was over and the Rileys had the money raised by Bush and the RNC, they didn’t have as much of a need for Ms. Simpson’s volunteer network. So she didn’t hear back from them much during the general election campaign – until about a week before the election, and significantly during the recount that ensued.

Part 1:An Introduction to North Alabama Law and Politics
Part 2: Back to the Beginning: Jill Simpson’s Legal and Political History
Part 3: How the 2002 Election Was Stolen in Bay Minette
Part 4: How Ms. Simpson Discovered A Corrupt Judge
Part 5: How and Why Ms. Simpson Wrote and Signed the Affidavit

Tags: HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy on Trial

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Alabama Politics, Don Siegelman on Trial, HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy on Trial, Jill Simpson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.