Ho, hum. Yawn…

Karl Rove’s minions have been hard at work today, high on meth and Red Bull, trying to follow-up the media coverage in the Siegelman appeal by trying to anonymously and otherwise discredit reliable sources.

Since I have other blog business to do around here and don’t have anymore time to waste on them, I’ll just leave it to former journalist of some note and now lawyer of some note in Montgomery, Priscilla Duncan, for the response.

A comprehensive statement of Karl Rove’s use of the media to attack Jill Simpson

by Priscilla Duncan

A response to: Unappealing Power Play

A Response To the Editors of The National Review

Dear Editors:

I am the legal counsel for Dana Jill Simpson, and we are demanding a retraction for the false and misleading statements in your August 5 editorial.

Ms. Simpson wrote an affidavit that was released just before Gov. Don Siegelman was sentenced last year. She was only the first of several persons who have testified regarding the political aspects of his prosecution. Included among them were law professor Scott Horton and former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones. Conyers’ inquiry was not solely based on her statement as you stated.

Ms. Simpson’s sworn testimony to the Judiciary Committee was structured exactly as Conyers and Lamar Smith requested. That testimony was backed up with about four pounds of Ms. Simpson’s documents, which you apparently haven’t taken time to examine.

She did not testify to Conyers in a private interview — where do you people get this stuff??

The hearing was in the form of a deposition to majority and minority counsel — three each. She was questioned four hours, sworn to tell the truth and there were no restrictions on inquiry. Ms. Simpson and I even offered to Republicans to answer questions over the telephone prior to the inquiry, but they evinced no interest.

During the time we were in Washington, we never met with Conyers or any member of the Committee or any member of Congress for that matter. Ms. Simpson has never met Conyers.

Ms. Simpson’s account has never changed, only the questions. Many of the “stories” as you refer to them, were detailed earlier to journalists or lawyers, but were not released due to their selection of topic. Other issues simply were not explored. 60 Minutes interviewed Ms. Simpson in three cities for more than 6 hours and telephoned numerous times on fine points. The two minutes of Ms. Simpson’s interview that 60 Minutes chose to use was not selected by Ms. Simpson. If there really were inconsistencies in her testimony, Karl would have something else to offer besides calling her “a lunatic,” a word Google associates with Rove 99,800 times.

In her Congressional testimony Rove is mentioned 16 times. Obviously, no one on your staff has read it, and you are repeating false information vomited out by Mr. Rove and his henchmen. Rove attacks Ms. Simpson because he knows she knows more. Her information about such matters is vast. Rove can’t afford to testify without knowing it all, and for this reason he has attempted to lure her into a defamation action against him for the scurrilous lies he has told about her in GQ, Weekly Standard , Powerline , News Busters and now The National Review.

I am sure Rove has steadily cursed the Republican counsel in the Judiciary Committee for not grilling Ms. Simpson with more gusto last fall — but then, Rove ran out of Washington like a scalded dog two weeks before Ms. Simpson testified on Sept. 14. He resigned Aug. 31.

As Ms. Simpson says, “Slander is the ultimate revenge of a coward.” Rove has trampled through government like a wild boar in a turnip patch for too many years. Now that he’s being hunted, he is hiding in the woods from the House Judiciary Committee. He needs to come out in the sunshine, tell the truth and stop being terrified of Ms. Simpson.

That it takes a small town lawyer in Alabama to do it, casts shame on all you puffed up big-city pundits. Barry Goldwater would be embarrassed by you and so would William F. Buckley.

PD

Don Siegelman Agrees

by Glynn Wilson

Alabama attorney and GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson is calling on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow a vote in the full House of Representatives on “inherent contempt” for former Bush political aide Karl Rove.

In light of the Judiciary Committee’s vote Wednesday finding him in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify under oath about his involvement in the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and the politicization of the Department of Justice, Ms. Simpson said in an exclusive interview it would be “useless” to turn the case over to the Bush Justice Department.

If the House simply finds Rove in “statutory contempt,” the case will just be turned over to Attorney General Michael Mukasy, she said. And his office has shown time and again that he is not interested in finding out the truth and holding former White House officials responsible under the law, including Harriet Myers and Josh Bolton.

“The time is now,” Ms. Simpson said. “Ms. Pelosi promised when she took over the House after the 2006 elections to clean up. It’s time for her to clean the White House for thumbing their noses at Congress.”

Ms. Simpson says she feels akin to the 127,000 people who signed a petition calling on Congress to send Karl Rove to jail, she said, and she thinks the House should use the Sergeant at Arms to arrest him. Inherent contempt and the Sergeant at Arms have been rarely used in American history, she said, “because most people don’t thumb their noses at the United States Congress.”

“Mr. Rove has repeatedly thumbed his nose at the U.S. Congress, and he should have respect for the Constitution and the Congress,” she said. “The time has come to stop this.”

The Judiciary Committee voted 20-14 Wednesday to hold Rove in contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a subpoena to testify under oath before the committee.

“This is a constitutional crisis when the White House can just say we are not going to testify if we don’t want to,” Ms. Simpson said. “The Department of Justice has repeatedly NOT stood up for the Constitution and that only leaves Congress.”

She agreed to go to Washington to testify last year, she said, because she considered it a civic duty.

“Karl Rove should see it as a civic duty too,” she said. “Instead, he prefers to run around the country thumbing his nose at the Constitution.”

Ms. Simpson commended Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Commercial and Administrative Law subcommittee, along with committee chairman John Conyers and Birmingham Rep. Artur Davis, “for their valiant efforts to restore the integrity of the Constitution of the United States,” she said. “They need to do a thorough, to-the-bottom-of-the-bucket investigation. Otherwise there is going to be a revolt.”

Rove is claiming he has White House executive privilege, she said, “but that sure as heck doesn’t prevent him from spouting off his mouth everywhere he goes.”

“Rove thinks because he is an elite political operative no longer serving in government that he is above the law,” she said. “He thinks he is the law.”

“Furthermore,” she said, “President George W. Bush should want to get to the bottom of the story for his own legacy.”

While everyone’s attention is focused on Rove’s role in manipulating the Justice Department, perhaps they are ignoring an in-the-loop role by members of the Bush family as well. After all, isn’t Rove just a political operative who takes orders from the people he works for?

“George Bush owes a duty to the citizens of the Unites States to ask that his employees testify, if he really wants to heal the problems at the Department of Justice,” she said. “This is directly going to affect his legacy.”

In reacting to the story today, Don Siegelman said in an e-mail message: “I have always said I believe Jill Simpson. She is an American hero.”

Siegelman said the Texas Republican and ranking minority member of the committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, has made false statements himself, along with Rove in his written responses to the committee last week.

“We must encourage the full House to vote yes,” Siegelman said. “To do otherwise would advance the cause of this corruption of the DOJ and make it more likely to happen again.”

Rove didn’t even deny the central sworn allegation against him, that he and Bill Canary conspired to advance the prosecution against me by Canary’s wife,” Siegelman said.

Karl Rove and George Bush could not be reached for comment.

On Dan Abrams show “Verdict” on MSNBC, in an ongoing series called “Bush League Justice,” Julian Epstein, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, said Republicans will admit, off-camera, that the case against former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was “fixed.”

The segment mainly concentrated on the breaking news that Karl Rove finally gave written answers to some questions about the Siegelman case, reported below, although he was not under oath.

Epstein said Rove actually appeared to “incriminate” himself by refusing to answer a specific question about whether he contacted certain officials.

The other important thing about the segment shows more than ever that the “evidence” of White House involvement in the Siegelman case rests squarely on the affidavit and testimony of Alabama lawyer and GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson.

But there are more intriguing questions now that no one seems to be asking: What if Bush was “in the loop?”

And, there’s this just out on the Harper’s magazine Website:

New Allegations of Prosecutorial Misconduct in the Siegelman Case

Exclusive interviews with Jill Simpson, Scott Horton, and Don Siegelman

by Glynn Wilson

Updates below…

Jill Simpson breathes another sigh of consternation over the telephone from Rainsville as the news hits the blogs that Karl Rove has once again tried to deny influencing the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman — without raising his right hand and swearing to tell the truth under oath.

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on trial. We can finally now report that the woman in the background is Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, wife of Birmingham Civil Rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth, thanks to Bonnie Fountain, a photographer and copy editor in Birmingham.

The Talking Points Memo out of Washington, D.C., is claiming an “EXCLUSIVE” Wednesday on a story under the headline:

Karl Rove Issues New Denials in Gov. Siegelman Prosecution in Written Answers to HJC (House Judiciary Committee). Other bloggers are commenting there that they had it first, however, so who knows.

But we can report this from an EXCLUSIVE interview today with Jill Simpson.

“They’ve tried to call me a liar the whole time, but I swore under oath,” Ms. Simpson said. “The moral of the story for Karl Rove is, if what he is saying is true, then why won’t he go testify?”

The news, if it is news, is that the House Judiciary Committee received a copy of Rove’s written responses to questions from the ranking minority member of the committee, a Republican from Texas. Rove is trying to delay and/or avoid contempt charges by substituting a written denial that is not signed or sworn under oath.

Questions from Rep. Lamar Smith, R.-Texas, are now online, along with Rove’s answers, submitted by his lawyer, Robert Luskin.

One way Rove tries to deal with the 14 questions from Smith is to deny without really denying certain key things, which in Washington politics, as opposed to a court of law, is called a “non-denial denial.”

Smith’s Question: Before former Alabama Governor Donald E. Siegelman’s initial indictment in May 2005, did you ever communicate with any Department of Justice officials, State of Alabama officials, or any individual other than Dana Jill Simpson, Esq., regarding Governor Siegelman’s investigation or potential prosecution? If so, please state separately for each communication the date, time, location, and means of the communication, the official or individual with whom you communicated, and the content of the communication.

Rove’s Answer: I have never communicated, either directly or indirectly, with Justice Department or Alabama officials about the investigation, indictment, potential prosecution, prosecution, conviction, or sentencing of Governor Siegelman, or about any other matter related to his case, nor have I asked any other individual to communicate about these matters on my behalf. I have never attempted, either directly or indirectly, to influence these matters.

But if he had said that under oath, a lawyer or a Congressman could say, “but what about that phone record we have here as exhibit X?”

Or maybe: Was your friend Bill Canary, head of the conservative Business Council of Alabama, just lying about that? Perhaps we should get him up here to testify as a rebuttal witness?

Ms. Simpson’s position is that the written responses are nothing more than what Rove has said already in other forums, and the questions have been “asked and answered.” But they are not the key questions and they have certainly not been answered under oath.

From talking to attorneys, Ms. Simpson believes Rep. Smith wanted to have her subpoenaed to testify along with Rove — if the committee goes forward with the full contempt citation and takes the extraordinary step of having Rove arrested.

“But he doesn’t have the votes,” she said, since the committee is made up of a majority of Democrats since the 2006 election.

The Republicans on the committee who questioned Ms. Simpson last year were not very prepared for the interview, she said, “So they regret not asking me a bunch of questions.”

And the bottom line for Rove is, he wants to know what other evidence Ms. Simpson has about the relationship, evidence that has so far not been revealed in sworn testimony. And typical of lawyers, until a case gets into court, and everybody is under oath, the entire case is not going to be laid out.

“Karl Rove can go do what he wants to do, say what he wants to say, but he has a duty to testify,” Ms. Simpson said.

While the story so far has included the line that he is operating under a broad claim of executive privilege since the events occurred when he was still working in the White House as President George W. Bush’s chief political aide, conversations with the president are supposed to be kept confidential. But now other bloggers are reporting that Bush never actually exempted Rove from testifying under executive privilege, probably because Bush doesn’t want to reveal that he was in the loop on the Siegelman case.

So the story today amounts to the same old spin from the spin master himself, according to Washington political experts.

According to Scott Horton, a New York attorney and writer who has followed the case closely and blogged about it himself for the Harper’s magazine Website, if Rove indeed had no discussions with anyone about Siegelman, then he had no need to refuse to appear and answer questions under oath.

“But the questions and answers are both very carefully tailored to look comprehensive while they are not,” he said. “If Rove were to appear, his relationship and dealings with Bill Pryor, whom he served as a paid political advisor as Pryor was assembling a case against Siegelman, would be fair game and he would be compelled to answer them; similarly, he would be forced to enumerate and discuss his dealings with Bill Canary, his wife, U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, and Bob and Rob Riley.”

“Second,” he said, “his final pages consist of an extended effort to trash Jill Simpson with rank falsehood and innuendo, largely drawn from Rove’s own sock puppets. In the end the main point remains this: Rove needs to take an oath and submit to the Committee’s questions, just as Jill Simpson did. His contempt of Congress is obvious, and the reason he won’t testify is also increasingly plain.”

Ad 1: After appearing on Verdict with Dan Abrams on MSNBC Wednesday night, Siegelman said this in an e-mail interview:

“Rove built his career in Alabama working with Bill Canary. Canary and Rove’s client started investigating me in 1999,” Siegelman said. “Rove’s partner’s wife accelerated the case federally in 2001. Rove’s partner’s wife indicted me during the 2006 campaign and brought me to trial less than four weeks before the Democratic primary.

“There is sworn testimony that Rove’s partner said that he had it worked out with Karl to destroy me and that two Alabama U.S. attorneys would do the job. Both those U.S. attorneys did in fact indict me. And now, Rove refuses to deny that he talked to Bill Canary about prosecuting me.

“Does anyone believe all this is circumstantial? How much more proof do you need? They sent me to prison on less evidence than this.”

Other breaking news out on this subject from Wednesday:

AP: Siegelman Supporters Call for Expanded Probe

AG Says Siegelman Findings to be Released

Six Questions for Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias

One from the archives, important facts and clues for the newbies on this story: The Nation: A Whistleblower’s Tale