How Ms. Simpson Discovered A Corrupt Judge
June 20th, 2007After the 2002 election, Ms. Simpson continued to stay in touch with Rob Riley and others in the Republican Party as Bob Riley moved into the governor’s mansion in Montgomery and took over the reins of government. Her law practice flourished and life was pretty good in North Alabama, until the 2006 governor’s race started heating up in 2005.
During that campaign, in part since the Rileys had not helped her with her federal contract case and others, in other words they didn’t do their jobs, Ms. Simpson decided to publicly support Judge Roy Moore in the primary – even though she insists she intended to vote for Riley all along in the general election.
But her network of volunteers knocked up signs for the Ten Commandments Judge. And they were an ambitious group, Ms. Simpson says.
Just before a scheduled trip to the area by Riley, the volunteers plastered her office with Judge Roy Moore for governor signs. And the Riley campaign hit the roof.
“There were some hurt feelings,” Ms. Simpson admits.
Once Judge Moore lost the Republican primary race to Riley, the Riley campaign started calling upon her again – this time asking Ms. Simpson for something she could not and would not deliver.
She was asked to investigate state Senator Lowell Barron, a powerful Democrat in the state legislature from Jackson County, who she had known all her life and respected. It was rumored that Barron was having an extramarital affair with another man’s wife, a man who died in a fall from a mountaintop in the area. There were further rumors that Barron and a certain “yardman” were present at the accident, suicide – or murder – and that Barron may have pushed the man off the cliff.
Ms. Simpson says she knew the rumors were not true and that what they asked her to do was not only unethical, but illegal, in her view, so she absolutely refused to go along. The Riley campaign had also asked her to participate in some meetings to try and exclude four state senators from being able to run in the fall election because of problems with financial disclosure forms. She also refused to get involved in that controversy.
“I told them hell no,” Ms. Simpson said. “So they stopped calling me after that.”
All along, the Bush Justice Department kept up the pressure on Siegelman, trying to get him out of the way in any future election.
Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Birmingham who represented Siegelman early on in the case, met with federal prosecutors in Montgomery in the summer of 2004 and felt Siegelman’s chances of getting off were good.
“Frankly, we got the strong impression that they didn’t have a case,” Jones told a reporter for the Anniston Star.
But by that fall, Jones said, the Montgomery prosecutors stopped returning his calls, but finally told him “they went up to D.C., and the headquarters people told them to go back and look at the whole case again, from start to finish. Normally, that’s not that unusual. But in light of all that is going on right now (in Washington with the politicization of the Department of Justice), well, it takes on a whole new meaning.”
So U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, a Bush appointee, went ahead and indicted Siegelman on May 27, 2004 on federal charges of participating in a bid-rigging scheme with his former chief of staff and a major contributor to his political campaigns.
After a major fight with federal prosecutors and switching judges three times, the trial started in October 2004. The next day, however, in part due to the oversight of what constitutes “intent” to commit a crime on the part of U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon, charges against all three were thrown out “with prejudice,” meaning that charges could not be re-filed ever again based on the same charges and the same disallowed evidence.
But that was not to deter the Bush Justice Department or the Riley machine.
On October 26, 2005, Siegelman was indicted again on charges of racketeering, bribery, and extortion, along with his former chief of staff, a former state transportation director and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy.
Ms. Simpson says she followed the case with much interest, especially in light of what came out in her affidavit about the Bush Justice Department “conspiracy” to “get” Don Siegelman by Canary’s “girls.”
Among Ms. Simpson’s hobbies, she likes to collect all manner of political memorabilia. She proudly shows me a signed, color photograph of Karl Rove, for example. She gets kicks spending a lot of her time signed onto the Internet using the Web to “do” legal research.
After Siegelman and Scrushy were convicted, she remembered something Rob Riley had told her in a meeting in Birmingham in 2005. Riley had indicated after the first trial against Siegelman was lost that they had “found another judge” in Montgomery who might very well be able to put through a successful conviction.
Because of Rob Riley’s braggadocio, Ms. Simpson said, she began checking out the judge, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller. What she found was so astonishing to her that she eventually felt compelled to call one of Siegelman’s lawyers to report it. But that first phone call was never returned.
That could have been the end of it, and she said to herself: “Oh, well. I tried.”
But eventually she put together such a revealing picture of a very rich federal judge who owned companies doing millions upon millions of dollars worth of business with the U.S. government, including making uniforms for the FBI and training Saudi and Iranian pilots – all while doing business with the Justice Department in eliminating Siegelman from politics forever.
What Scrushy didn’t know and was later distressed to learn is that he was not even close to being the richest man in that courtroom. It was the judge.
Back during the heady days of 2002, Ms. Simpson had followed Don Siegelman around looking for dirt for the Rileys. Their nickname for Siegelman had been “The Cockroach.” As the story goes, “he was like a cockroach. You couldn’t kill him” or “get him to go away.”
Now she found herself tracking the judge who was going to put him away perhaps for life.
Amazingly, Justice Fuller received a $178 million contract through a privately held company to train pilots and navigators for the U.S. government DURING THE SIEGELMAN, SCRUSY TRIAL. The company is called Doss Aviation of Alabama.
For another company called Aureus International that is listed as a division of Doss Aviation on the company’s Website, Fuller is also listed as the majority owner, according to Ms. Simpson’s research. The company does a comparable amount of business making uniforms for the U.S. military and the FBI, which played a major role in the investigation and prosecution of Siegelman and Scrushy.
Two FBI agents were granted special permission by Fuller to sit at the prosecution table every day during the trial – not only to aid in the prosecution, but to put on a show for the jury.
Yet legal cannons and codes of conduct say it is a “duty” on the part of any judge to disclose any potential conflict of interest before trying a case, and to disclose all of his sources of income fully in official financial disclosure reports.
U.S. District Judge Karen Bowdre called a conference with the attorneys before the Scrushy trial in Birmingham, for example, and revealed that she had ridden horses at the same stable as Scrushy’s wife and had met her. Neither the defense nor the prosecution balked at that and she presided over the trial anyway. That trial resulted in a not guilty verdict for Scrushy.
But in Fuller’s case, no pre-trial conference was called. And Fuller lists no income from Aureus on any of his disclosure forms to date. He is about one month late in filing his forms for last year, according to the online disclosure reports, and legal experts say he may be preparing to cover his tracks in a future filing.
In addition, the controlling laws in the case say if a “reasonable person” were to conclude that the judge has a conflict or the appearance of a conflict, the judge should recuse himself. It doesn’t say what a judge would conclude, but what a lay person would conclude. That is what the 11th circuit court panel will have to consider – if not prior to sentencing, then on appeal.
In fact, in the first chapter of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, it says, in part:
“…a judge … should not serve as an officer, director, active partner, manager, advisor, or employee of any business other than a business closely held and controlled by members of the judge’s family.”
All of this is laid out in a petition filed with the appeals court by Scrushy’s legal team. You can read the document here.
As for why Fuller might have risked his own legal and political future to help convict Siegelman, the only answer can be a certain arrogance of power, perhaps because Fuller’s own background reveals interesting ties from his college days to Rob Riley, and from their ties as being campaign managers in Washington when Riley ran his dad’s Congressional campaigns and Fuller ran Terry Everett’s. The record also shows he has major ties to the military-industrial complex operating largely out of Enterprise Alabama, home to Rep. Terry Everett, who basically acts as Fuller’s paid lobbyist in Washington to obtain federal contracts for his defense-related companies. His companies not only clothe and equip the troops. They wash their vehicles and pump their gas too.
A search of Everett’s campaign finance disclosure forms shows Fuller has contributed thousands of dollars personally to Everett’s campaigns. Fuller’s office did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Now that all kinds of accusations of scandal have surfaced in the national press about the political manipulation of the U.S. justice system by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, the judiciary committees in the U.S. House and Senate, led by the new Democratic Party majority, are investigating and holding hearings.
And there is an indication that Ms. Simpson may be called to testify before it is all over. She has already obtained special legal counsel in preparation for expected appearances, and sources in Washington say those committees are considering calling her.
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
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