by Glynn Wilson

Highly placed sources in Alabama legal and political circles are now saying the White House may soon break the logjam on the replacement of the unpopular U.S. attorney in Montgomery with the appointment of assistant U.S. attorney Tamara Matthews Johnson, an African-American woman with Republican leanings who has been involved in many of the political prosecutions against Democrats, including the case against Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford.

That is where things are headed today, according to one key source who insisted on remaining anonymous. The name was confirmed with others who have their ears to the ground in Montgomery and Washington.

Ms. Johnson is now “a strong contender with the inside track” — that is unless activists on the Democratic Party side of things act quickly to stop the White House train from rolling in the wrong direction.

As has been reported before somewhat accurately, according to the sources, Republican U.S. Senator Richard Shelby has held up the appointment of former public defender Joseph Van Heest, while Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions objected to Michel Nicrosi, a Montgomery native and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District, as well as attorney George Beck, some of the names floated for the job.

A special committee appointed by Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis to recommend judicial appointments to the Obama administration named Van Heest as its second choice. Sources who know him say he would be an excellent choice, although Shelby’s objections are too strong to overcome, they say.

The Obama administration has charted a policy of not naming new U.S. attorneys until replacements can be found, in what our key source calls “a bad policy.” The administration is also reportedly searching for candidates who would not face controversial confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, thus the reason Republican Senators such as Shelby have a voice at all with a Democrat in the White House and a solid Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

While much speculation has appeared in the blogosphere and the mainstream media about who will replace Bush appointed prosecutor Leura Canary, who failed to recuse herself in the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, none of the speculative reporting is spot on target, according to our source, who has been directly involved in talks with the White House staff and the Department of Justice.

Ms. Johnson ostensibly has the inside track in part because of a close friend on the White House staff from law school, but her appointment “would be disastrous,” the key source says. In spite of being black, she is a right-wing Republican in the mold of Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas, and would be the “absolute worse thing that could happen” to the Middle District of Alabama.

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Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman appears on Fox News today discussing HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy…

The governor got in a couple of good points saying that Scrushy would be a free man today if he had agreed to testify against Siegelman.

“He could have thrown me under the bus any time he wanted to and walked out of that courtroom a free man. Richard Scrushy is in prison today for something he absolutely did not do.”

by Joan Brunwasser

Welcome back for the second half of my interview with The Locust Fork News-Journal‘s editor and publisher, Glynn Wilson. So, Glynn, if, according to you, it takes a huge investment of time and energy to understand a story, that explains why the mainstream press has not done its job on many important stories. You, on the other hand, are eminently qualified to discuss the Siegelman/DoJ case. So, if Rip Van Winkle approached you and said, “Ever since I woke up, I keep hearing the name Siegelman. What’s up with this guy?” could you walk him through it so he would grasp why the Siegelman case is so significant?

Hmmm. Well, as you know from researching the case yourself, it is a complicated deal. It’s hard to boil it down to a sound bite for TV, but this is what I can say.

Like any politician, Don Siegelman is certainly no perfect human being. This may be hard for people who live in so-called blue states to grasp, but just identifying yourself as a Democrat in a red state like Alabama invites irrational attacks from the right. And in what I like to call “the Bush years,” they really didn’t care about the Constitution or the abstract concept called “the rule of law.”

People who believe the Bible fundamentally and get their news from Fox and Rush Limbaugh and conservative Big Mule rags like The Birmingham News don’t care about facts or the truth. Many of them still believe George Bush was “the man.” They didn’t get the OpEdNews memo.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind.

When Bob Riley stole the election from Siegelman in 2002 in the closest race in Alabama political history, (according to whistle-blower Jill Simpson, a Republican operative with close ties to the Rileys at the time) the Rileys threatened to use the legal system to investigate Siegelman if he ever ran again. So when he announced in 2004 that he would run again in 2006, the Karl Rove-Bill Canary political machine kicked into high gear to go after him. Canary’s wife, Laura Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, then launched the investigation of Siegelman.

Even though the career prosecutors in the Department of Justice could not really find enough evidence to bring charges, and told attorney Doug Jones nothing was likely to result from the case, a “top down” review of the case was ordered from Washington after Rove, Bush’s political adviser, had communications with people in the DoJ. That we know, even though the Birmingham News editorial page editors continue to deny it.

I have been asked numerous times by average people not on the hard right or left how it could be possible that the courts could be so corrupted in a case like Siegelman’s that politics would trump truth and justice. It is perhaps hard to fathom, but just ask Paul Minor in Mississippi or any of the U.S. attorneys who were fired on orders from the White House for not being politically loyal enough. Rove was a student of Machiavelli, who wrote and told King Henry VIII that kings either rule by love or fear. Bush was not the kind of man who inspired love, so he had to rule by fear by demanding absolute loyalty.

The point of prosecuting Siegelman was not about the law. It was about politics from the start.

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Editor’s Note: In case you missed it at OpEdNews.com, here’s part one of the interview…

by Joan Brunwasser

Glynn Wilson is editor and publisher of The Locust Fork News-Journal. Readers trying to get to the bottom of the Siegelman case, the politicization of the DoJ, the story of whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson, and other steamy tales will fare better with the Locust Fork News-Journal than with virtually any of the mainstream press. Glynn is an old-school newspaperman, in the best sense, with decades more experience than I have. So, I’m going to mostly pass him the ball, and get out of the way while he runs with it.

Welcome to OpEdNews, Glynn. Where are you based, who are your readers and how come you’re so on top of these important, but much ignored, stories?

The Locust Fork News-Journal is an alternative, independent news website ranging the diverse landscape of the American South, covering politics and science, nature and media stories from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. We’ve even filed Mojo assaults on New York a time or two.

As editor and publisher and chief investigator, news feature writer and columnist, I now reside on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, very near the Jefferson-Blount County line and just a few minutes from the Locust Fork River, a fork in the Black Warrior River. When it was launched four and a half years ago, the site was designed as an innovative merger between a blog and a news page. (I was not new to web publishing, having been the editor and publisher of The Southerner magazine, southerner.net, the first magazine published online back in the 1990s.)

Just as other news websites with more of a “reality-based” as opposed to a “faith-based” intellectual view of the world, our readers tend to be more educated on average and computer savvy, as well as more liberal, progressive and also independently-minded than your average conservative talk radio listener or Fox News viewer. We do have a fair amount of libertarians and independents that also use the site, however, and judging by the number of sustained attacks from the right-wing attack machine, we have a lot of conservative readers, too.

While we have a large base in Alabama, we also have fans in New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and other southern states, as well as the West Coast and the Great Northwest. As you probably find with OpEdNews, many people in California and Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington tend to use us. There are many ex-patriot Southerners out there on the other coast. We also get a fair amount of international traffic, I guess mostly from search engine hits as well as locals abroad.

Why I was on the Siegelman story and the Jill Simpson story and have a better handle on the politicization of the DoJ – and have the largest archive on it – is a long story. But let’s see if I can boil it down for your readers.

I have been a reporter and writer for about 30 years, an academic for nine of those, and covered a lot of Siegelman’s campaigns for office in Alabama all the way back to the 1980s. For context, I wrote the definitive story on his inauguration in 1999, when he was heralded as Alabama’s first “New South” governor. The New South Rises, Again: Alabama Gets Its First ‘New South’ Governor.

During Siegelman’s term as governor, I was not in my home state of Alabama, since I had moved first to Georgia, and then to Tennessee, and eventually New Orleans chasing an academic career teaching journalism, as well as free-lancing. I wrote for The Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor and then The New York Times out of New Orleans.

During the 2004 election, I broke a big piece of the Bush AWOL story and moved to DC for awhile, but then in 2005, I found myself back in Birmingham with a family situation – when The New York Times called and wanted me to help them cover the first trial of HealthSouth’s Richard Scrushy, Siegelman’s co-defendant in their second trial.

It was during that trial, and after I completed the free-lance work for The Times on the case, that I decided to start LocustFork.Net.

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by Glynn Wilson

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was lobbied to drop the case against former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman during his trip to Birmingham Thursday for the swearing in of Joyce White Vance as U.S. attorney for the state’s northern district, sources say.

Several people, including Alabama Democratic Party officials, spoke to Holder on behalf of Siegelman, and about firing U.S. Attorney Leura Canary — the prosecutor married to Karl Rove’s political ally Bill Canary of the conservative Business Council of Alabama — according to sources present for the swearing in.

Barry Ragsdale, an attorney who is a friend of the Vances and has been associated with the Over the Mountain Democrats in the past, acted as master of ceremonies for the swearing in. Apparently he is a funny guy, and made several jokes, including poking fun at Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller of Alabama’s middle district, the federal judge who presided in the controversial case against Siegelman and his co-defendant Richard Scrushy.

“I’m glad Karl Rove gave you permission to be here,” Ragsdale quipped, according to the Birmingham News account of the swearing in.

Rove, of course, was the chief political adviser to President George W. Bush, who recently testified in an investigation of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on political prosecutions and political firings of U.S. attorneys.

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Poor Turd Blossom, so Misunderstood…

What we want to know is, is it true right-wing Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch is getting Rove’s column in the Wall Street Journal sans pay, as well as his appearances on Fox News? If so, he’s hardly qualified to call himself a professional writer, as he tends to do these days in a way that totally hides his still active clandestine role in manipulating events — through the many government employees hired during the Bush years still on the job.

If Murdoch is actually paying Rove something, perhaps the publisher should start holding him to the same standards other columnists must meet, like accuracy and truthfulness.

I’m convinced Karl Rove spent his entire juvenile years sitting in front of a mirror figuring out how to lie — without sounding like he’s lying — by twisting the meaning of words to the breaking point. He seems completely unable to utter one sentence that does not contain some kind of a twist on the facts.

Next time he faces Congress, this time in a public televised hearing, would somebody please ask him a simple question to see if he can manage it? I don’t care what it is, maybe: “What color is your shirt today?”

See if he can do it? I suspect he can’t. He would say something like:

“Well, it could be white, but it might be ivory or pearl, or…”

Guest Column
by Rep. John Conyers

In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove says that I — and others — owe him an apology for allegations that have been made about him during the course of the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the dismissal of United States Attorneys and related issues about the politicization of the Department of Justice.

Mr. Rove’s self-serving assertions on this subject are simply inconsistent with the documents that the Judiciary Committee recently released and his claims have been discredited by the analysis of the documents and reporting on these matters by credible news outlets across the country. Anyone interested in the truth can read the documents for themselves (here) or the reporting on these matters from the top papers in the U.S. — The Washington Post (here) and The New York Times (here) — as well as alternative, independent news sites such as The Locust Fork News-Journal (here).

Mr. Rove’s points are largely a repeat of his prior discredited statements, and the purpose of this post is not to rehash Mr. Rove’s rehash.

What may be of broader interest is the apparent editorial decision of the Wall Street Journal to prominently feature Mr. Rove’s self-serving assertions in its editorial pages, while burying and redacting the original story documenting the facts contained in these documents in the news pages.

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by Glynn Wilson

Karl Rove admits having a “senior moment” in his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, dancing around the key allegations that he had direct knowledge and an active role in the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and the firings of U.S. attorneys. He takes what Washington insiders call the Ronald Reagan defense, a.k.a. the “Alzheimer’s defense,” as in “I don’t recall.”

In other words, and in contradiction with other published reports that Rove once again denied his role in manipulating the justice system from the White House, Rove’s testimony is what we call in the news business, “a non-denial denial.”

In transcripts and documents released Tuesday by the committee, Rove freely admits his friendship with former Alabama Attorney General William “Bill” Pryor, who started the first investigation of Siegelman in 1998.

Rove admits the role he and his campaign operation played in turning Alabama’s Supreme Court Republican. He admits knowing Bill Canary of the Business Council all the way back to the days when he worked for George Herbert Walker Bush, and to communicating with Canary “maybe a dozen times” while Rove was the top political adviser to President George W. Bush in the White House

Under questioning from Elliot Mincberg, majority chief counsel for investigations and oversight, Rove admits meeting Bill Canary’s wife Leura Canary, the federal prosecutor who first brought the second case against Siegelman in Montgomery.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, but I don’t have any great familiarity,” Rove testifies. Then later, when asked how he communicated with her, “in person or on the phone,” he says, “I’m sure I had contact with her, but I literally couldn’t tell you if I have ever talked to her or if I have ever seen her in person. I believe I met her at something in Alabama, but — I am sure Bill has introduced me to her, but I don’t know. It may have been to the White House holiday party or something. But I don’t recall.”

Right.

Rove admits he most likely advocated for her to get the nod as U.S. attorney initially, “If she passed the process with Justice.”

When asked if the issue of political corruption in Alabama ever came up during her confirmation process, Rove answered: “Not that I recall.” When asked if the issue of Governor Siegelman ever came up in his conversations with her, he testified: “Not that I recall.”

According to legal analyst Scott Horton, a contributor to Harper’s magazine and a lecturer at Columbia, “the documents collectively make it clear that Karl Rove was not only at the center of the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys, but also exercised close oversight over other matters at the Justice Department. The case in New Mexico seems clearly to be one where the dismissal of a U.S. attorney occurred in order to corruptly influence a criminal investigation.”

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The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has released thousands of pages of new documents today in its investigation of White House political manipulation of justice, including never before seen White House e-mail messages and the transcripts of two depositions with former Bush political aide Karl Rove.

We are going through the documents now and will have a full report later on, but for now, you can download and evaluate the documents at this link on the House Judiciary Committee Website.

At a glance, the documents seem to indicate Rove was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate hiring and firing at the Department of Justice.

Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary committee, says the newly released transcripts show that former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove was the “driving force” behind several of the firings of U.S. attorneys.

“After all the delay and despite all the obfuscation, lies, and spin, this basic truth can no longer be denied: Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons,” Conyers said in a statement.

The 6,000-plus documents show that Rove “played a critical role in the firing of the U.S. attorney in New Mexico following the 2006 elections.”