President Barack Obama nominated George L. Beck to Replace Laura Canary as U.S. Attorney in Montgomery today, according to an announcement from the White House.
“For his diligence and relentless pursuit of justice, I have named George L. Beck to serve as a U.S. Attorney,” President Obama said in a statement. “I am confident he will serve the people of Alabama with distinction.”
According to the backgrounder put out by the White House, Beck has been a shareholder of Capell and Howard, P.C. since 2004. He was a sole practitioner from 1986 to 2003 and from 1979 to 1982, and was a partner at Baxley, Beck, Dillard & Dauphin from 1982 to 1986. From 1971 to 1979, he served as Deputy Attorney General for the State of Alabama.
Prior to that, Mr. Beck worked as an associate at St. John and St. John from 1966 to 1971.
“Mr. Beck has served our country honorably, enlisting in the Alabama Army National Guard in 1966 and rising through the ranks to be honorably discharged as a Colonel in 2001,” the president said.
Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman outside the U.S. Court of Appeals building in downtown Atlanta.
by Glynn Wilson
Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman will be back in court again on Wednesday, Jan. 19, this time before the same panel of Republican-appointed justices on the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who upheld parts of his conviction in Atlanta two years ago.
But due to the age of the justices and the warmer climate closer to where two of them live, Siegelman said in a telephone interview this weekend, the next round of Siegelman’s appeal will be heard in Jacksonville, Florida.
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the convictions of Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy back in June of last year and ordered the appeals court to review them again, in light of a recent high court ruling questioning the application of a vague honest services fraud law in the case of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling.
“I believe that the U S Supreme Court vacated the earlier ruling of the Eleventh Circuit and sent my case back because the court wants a different result,” Siegelman said. “That’s good news for me.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican political operative Karl Rove’s help for Sweden as it assists the Obama administration’s prosecution against WikiLeaks could be the latest example of the adage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
These days, Sweden and the Obama administration are apparently undertaking a political prosecution as audacious as the ones perpetrated by the notorious Bush Justice Department against Democrats across the Unites States.
The pending investigation and prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could criminalize many kinds of investigative news reporting about government affairs, not just the WikiLeaks disclosures that are embarrassing Sweden as well as the Bush and Obama administrations. Authorities in both countries are setting the stage with pre-indictment sex and spy smears against Assange, along with an Interpol manhunt.
“This has Karl’s signature all over it,” a reliable political source told select reporters in encouraging us to investigate Rove’s Swedish connection. “He must be very happy. He’s right back in the middle of it. He’s making himself valuable to his new friends, seeing the U.S. government doing just what he’d like — and screwing his opponents, big-time.”
The Obama Justice Department, staffed by leftovers from the Bush administration, swooped in this morning and arrested casino owners, Alabama state legislators and lobbyists in what is being billed as a federal political corruption investigation but looks more like political prosecutions designed to taint the upcoming Nov. 2 election.
VictoryLand owner Milton McGregor and state Sen. Harri Anne Smith of Solcomb were arrested Monday morning and charged with conspiracy for allegedly taking campaign bribes to promote pro-gambling legislation, according to WKRG.
Other names listed on the federal indictment include Country Crossing owner Ronald Gilley and state Senators Larry Means, Quinton Ross and James Preuitt, lobbyists Thomas Croker, Robert Geddie and Jarrod Massey, Jarreel Walker Jr. and Joseph Crosby.
A federal grand jury in Montgomery has been investigating whether political corruption or vote buying was involved in an unsuccessful effort to pass legislation to legalize bingo and casinos in Alabama.
The Department of Justice held a press conference at 10 a.m. CDT in Washington, D.C.
Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks, the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor, reacted to the news in a press release.
“These are accusations, not convictions,” Sparks said. “And just because these indictments have been handed down does not mean that gaming is going away.”
Obama Appointee Eric Holder Takes No Questions in Tuscaloosa
by Glynn Wilson
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The nation’s top lawyer came all the way down from Washington D.C. to little old Alabama on Tuesday and gave a tightly controlled hour-long presentation honoring the 50th anniversary and influence of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill A Mockingbird at the University of Alabama’s law school. But he celebrated that story about justice by taking no questions from the media or the audience, as President Barack Obama did in a town hall meeting on Monday.
In his remarks focusing on the theme of a literary truth derived from the book, the theme that “an individual can make a difference” if they focus on “doing the right thing,” Holder never mentioned the criminal prosecution of the British Petroleum corporation and its partner in the crimes against nature in the Gulf of Mexico, Halliburton, which I would have asked about if there was anything resembling democracy left in the US of A.
Nor did Holder have a single encouraging word about the prospects for ending further political prosecutions against Democrats out of Montgomery by Bush appointed U.S. attorney Laure Canary, the wife of conservative Business Council president Bill Canary, who worked for the Bush family and with political hit boy Karl Rove to take over the Alabama Supreme Court in the 1990s — a political feat the liberal trial lawyers in Alabama have yet to figure out how to counter.
Holder’s remarks about ‘Mockingbird’ are relevant to reflect upon further in a column perhaps, once the transcript comes out. But the locked-down nature of his appearance does not inspire confidence that he truly understands either the dilemma we face as a state and country in obtaining justice, or his willingness to pay more than lip service to the rights of Americans to be secure in their homes.
Political strategist Karl Rove has announced that he will be coming to Birmingham to promote his new book of political fiction to try and shore up president Bush’s “legacy” in office, Courage and Consequence, according to the local CBS affiliate, Channel 42 News.
He will be signing books at the Books-A-Million at Brookwood Mall at 3 p.m. Tuesday, April 27.
During the stop in Alabama, the so-called “architect” of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the architecture including election theft here and there in Florida, Ohio and Baldwin County, Alabama, will also be the featured speaker for a dinner hosted by the Alabama Republican Party at 6 p.m. at The Club in Birmingham.
Auburn Republican Mike Hubbard tells Alabama news organizations he’s “excited” to get Rove to come to town and help raise money.
While I have no doubt Republicans will flock to see the bald-headed white guy who president Bush called “Turd Blossom,” we doubt he will draw crowds like Sarah Palin.
Some Democrats who support former Governor Don Siegelman say they are working on mounting a protest of Rove’s visit.
They’ve designed a sign that says, “Restore Justice: Jail Rove. Free Don.”
“If you stand on the side of Gov. Don Siegelman, you’ve got a rare opportunity this coming Tuesday in Birmingham to add your voice in calling out Karl Rove as he continues his book tour,” said the Rev. Jack Zylman of Southside.
An Alabama Senator with long-standing ties to the US military-industrial complex and an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama is backing down from a direct confrontation with the White House today after taking the unprecedented step of announcing last week that he would filibuster all the president’s appointments to secure earmarks for his home state.
US Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who switched from the Democratic Party to be part of the Gingrich revolution in 1994, placed a hold on more than 80 presidential nominations before the Senate last week. He relented on Monday, saying he had simply been trying “to get the White House’s attention.”
Locust Fork News-Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was interviewed Thursday by the OpEd News on the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the subject of change.
Here’s the blurb and link.
It’s only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y’all remember W, the worst president in history, right? So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground. Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups’ demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not. Remember, it took 8 years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the “peace dividend?”
Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman made his case once again on Fox News on Tuesday. He is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will take up his conviction in a review of the law against honest services mail fraud.
The Supreme Court is considering about a half-dozen cases on the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption, and could consider the conviction of Siegelman and his co-defendant Richard Scrushy as part of that review.
Civil liberties groups and associations of defense lawyers have lined up on the side of the accused, but so have conservative, libertarian and business groups. Their briefs and public statements are signs of an emerging consensus on the right and left that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained, according to The New York Times, giving Siegelman supporters hope that his case may also be considered for the counts involving the law against “honest services mail fraud,” what critics call an over-broad and vague statute the court should strike down.
This so-called “overcriminalization” is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy, and even the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the argument in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services,” is, the brief said, both “unintelligible” and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”
There’s no concrete word on when the high court may announce a decision in those cases. If the court refuses to hear the case, Siegelman will face Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller again in Montgomery for re-sentencing, if he refuses to grant a motion for a new trial.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
