Here’s a vignette from the overflow courtroom in the federal courthouse in Montgomery from Tuesday, plus a couple of wire stories from today.

During an afternoon break in the main courtroom where the action is going on, I went over to the overflow courtroom down the hall to check in on the “mainstream media.” Most of the reporters covering this trial mostly stay in that room, where they can have their laptops handy and watch the entire proceedings on a TV screen. This includes the free-lance reporter working for the New York Times, who never sat foot in the main courtroom on Tuesday.

The problem is, it’s kind of hard to cover the trial from there, since the audio is a tad iffy on the lawyers and the witness stand.

Many of the members of the media, especially photographers and the broadcast reporters, simply hang out in front of the courthouse in the vigil to find out what the sentence will be. For many news organizations, that’s all they care about: How long will the feds throw former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy in jail? And how soon?

Well, when I went into the overflow courtroom, there were only three reporters there. But being the joker that I am, I said, in jest, “I just thought I would come over here and harrass the mainstream media.”

In response to that, ole Bob Johnson with the Associated Press looked up, smiled and said: “Well, you’ve come to the wrong place. We’re just the Alabama media that is covering up the whole, real story.”

Now ole Bob is not one to cover anything up on purpose, I don’t think. But I must say, it is hard to glean what is really going on from his wire reports.

Can you make heads or tails of this?

AP: Prosecutors Say Siegelman, Scrushy Have Shown No Remorse
AP: Sentencing Hearing Resumes for Siegelman, Scrushy

One more story on Bob Johnson. Back during the trial of Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore, I was kicked out of a press conference because I was not on the official invitee list Moore’s PR people had put together to try and spin the story for the print media. You can read about it here. It was pretty funny.

Well, later on, during the Scrushy trial in Birmingham when I was covering that story for the New York Times, I ran into ole Bob on the street one day on the way back from lunch and had a conversation with him about that day.

He sort of dismissed me on that story, saying the local press had already “heard it all” and were not very interested in my questions, since they had all been asked and answered. But that is not true, because no one ever asked Judge Moore the question I wanted an answer to and never got.

That is, how do two small town Alabama lawyers and Sunday school teachers like himself and Hugo Black come to such drastically different conclusions about the meaning of the Constitution? Bob never asked any question like that and neither did anybody else. In fact, in all my days of popping into Montgomery to cover political and legal stories over the years, I’ve never seen ole Bob ask any questions at all.

Mostly, he tends to use the same old background paragraphs over and over again and never really do new, original news stories to inform readers in any detail about what is going on. Maybe that’s why people think the Alabama press is not getting the story.

I don’t know if it is laziness, incompetence or someone higher up telling them no one is interested in the gory details on these stories. But it certainly makes it hard to find out what’s really going on in Montgomery.

Will someone down there please explain this quantitative formula Judge Mark Fuller is using to arrive at the prison time for Siegelman and Scrushy? If you don’t understand it Bob, ask a damn question or two.

To follow the action in the federal courthouse in Montgomery, go to the WSFA channel 12 blog, Courtroom Chronicles.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the couragious early leaders in the Civil Rights Movement from Birmingham, came South to Montgomery from Cincinnati to testify on Don Siegelman’s behalf.

by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala., June 26 – The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth came all the way back home to Alabama from Ohio in the interest of justice and in support of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a “good man,”

“He’s been the target of the Bush Justice Department, which has now endangered the style of government we fought so hard for,” he said in an interview during an afternoon courtroom break. “It’s tragic after we’ve come so far in our efforts to vote in good government, where people in office do right.”

He quoted Saul talking to Samuel in the Bible: “The people we elect must be JUST in the fear of the Lord,” he said, paraphrasing.

He said there have been two tragically critical times like this in our history since African-Americans got the right to vote against these corrupt politicians, who for so long kept them down.

The first was Nixon, who got caught in his corruption and resigned in disgrace.

“He was seeing preachers upstairs, and had the plumbers downstairs,” he said, only partly in jest.

Now it is Bush, who allows the justice system to be turned into a Republican hit squad for Democrats, especially black Democrats.

Of the Siegelman case, he said, “This is a deliberate attempt to destroy a good man. He was a rising star in the Democratic Party.”

But he doesn’t think people have seen the last of Don Siegelman. He said: “I think he’ll be back.”

by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala., June 26 - A Mobile lawyer who is an expert in banking law and campaign finance told a federal judge Don Siegelman did not benefit personally from the contribution Richard Scrushy made to the lottery campaign, a contribution that is at the heart of the Bush Justice Department’s case against the former governor and one of Alabama’s wealthiest businessmen ever.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

U.S. attorneys Steve Feaga and Louis Franklin

“It wasn’t a bribe. I know it wasn’t a bribe,” insisted John C.H. “Jack” Miller, an attorney with the Miller-Hamilton law firm and former chair of the state Democratic Party.

He described the process of loaning money to third party campaigns, like the lottery fund, and said it was “common practice” in Alabama and across the country for politicians to sign those loans and see that they are paid off later through private donations.

The aggressive prosecution team, led by U.S. Attorney Steve Feaga, objected to Miller’s characterization, reminding U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller in the sentencing hearing that a jury had already convicted Siegelman of taking a bribe from Scrushy.

Defense attorney Art Leach objected to that as a mischaracterization of the charges and accused the prosecutors of “badgering the witness.”

Miller testified he has known Mr. Siegelman since he was an “up and coming” leader in high school in Mobile. He approved many loans for Siegelman over the years to help finance his campaigns for state offices, and he said Siegelman was the best fund raiser in Alabama political history and never failed to pay any of the loans back, on time.

“His word is as good as gold,” Mr. Miller said. “Don Siegelman is a totally honest man.”

When asked if he thought Mr. Siegelman was a flight risk, he cracked up everyone in the courtroom when he laughed and said, “No. If he was going to flee, he would already have flown.”

When a defense attorney asked Mr. Miller if he thought Siegelman should go to jail for his conviction, he said no.

“It would be a grave miscarriage of justice,” he testified, especially since one of his predecessors, Guy Hunt, a Republican, received probation and later a pardon for personally benefiting from taking $200,000 in inaugural funds. A proposal was launched recently by the state legislature to vote him a retirement income, because he is sick and broke up in Cullman.

After Mr. Miller’s appearance in court, he said in an interview that he thinks the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will throw the case out.

He said there is little doubt that the prosecution of Siegelman and Scrushy on the charges presented was “a political persecution.”

“This is a rogue prosecutor,” he said.

While Judge Fuller has ties to Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s son Rob from his University of Alabama fraternity days and has been accused by a Republican lawyer in North Alabama of a business conflict of interest, Mr. Miller said the judges appointed for life to the appeals court will not be partisan when ruling in the case.

“I believe in the system, ” he said.

When asked about the state of justice in America with a White House willing to trample on the rights and freedoms of Americans and fight corrupt wars in the Middle East without just provocation, he held out hope.

“There’s a new day dawning,” he said.

He pointed to the Democratic Party victory taking back control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 election, and the polls showing the Democrats winning in head to head fights with Republicans in the presidential election to take place in November, 2008.

“We’ll get the White House back,” he said. “With two branches of government, we can force justice.”

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala., June 26 - President George W. Bush likes to talk in black and white terms about evil. Let’s talk about evil.

As former Gov. Don Siegelman and deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy go before a federal judge to be sentenced this week in Montgomery, the eyes of the nation are once again focused on Alabama. What will they see?

If it were totally up to the Bush Justice Department, what they would see is another corrupt governor and businessman who deserve to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

The problem is that people across this country will also be treated to the final bit of circus in a show trial put on by prosecutors and a judge who were appointed to office by a corrupt president. They were not elected by the people, and their own qualifications are suspect. Yet they will stop at nothing to gain and hold power, even if that means wasting millions upon millions of dollars in taxpayer money to trump up bogus charges and keep the political opposition down.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Don Siegelman: Guilty?

Don Siegelman was not the best governor Alabama ever had. I had hope for him when he was inaugurated in January, 1999. But looking back on it now, it is obvious that a corrupt political opposition was as much to blame for his failure as his own lack of sales ability.

The best hope for Siegelman to do great things for my home state was vested in a state lottery to help fund education and “hope” scholarships for every student who wanted to go to college. The reason it failed, we now know, was because of a plot by evil men.

Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and disgraced former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed were cooking up deals with one Indian Tribe in Mississippi to screw another Indian Tribe in Alabama, and to screw the people of this state out of a chance to gamble at a casino and buy a lottery ticket. Of course the churches went along with it, because the faithful believe gambling takes money from their collection plates.

Our current governor, the biggest media darling to ever hold the office, was involved with those evil men. Yet he escapes any local press scrutiny for those ties, ties that bind him to a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of our national government.

Even if skeptics want to dismiss the damning affidavit written by Republican lawyer Jill Simpson, which details a plot inside the White House and the governor’s office to get rid of Siegelman in the legal arena, not the political arena, the lobbying scandal should not be ignored. But it has been ignored by the mainstream, corporate news operations in this state.

As for Richard Scrushy, as he tearfully said again in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery this morning, he refused to lie about Don Siegelman to obtain a light sentence for himself. So these overzealous, political prosecutors threw him in with Siegelman on trumped-up charges of trading a seat on a hospital board, a board he had already served on, allegedly in exchange for money to retire the debt on the lottery campaign fund.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Richard Scrushy: Guilty?

If the feds wanted to get Scrushy for something, they should have been able to convict him in Birmingham for knowledge of cooking the books in the HealthSouth scandal. But they did not get him in that case. An argument could be made that the reason they didn’t was because of Bush’s appointment of loyal Republicans with letters from the right preachers to the U.S. attorneys office - instead of hiring the most fit lawyers for the job.

For all the people in Mountain Brook who hate Richard Scrushy because they lost money on HealthSouth stock, perhaps you should begin to realize now that politicizing the justice system has tangible drawbacks.

I have covered many a corrupt politician in my time, including George C. Wallace, Guy Hunt and George W. Bush. But this case against Siegelman and Scrushy takes the cake.

It will be interesting to look into U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller’s eyes as he delivers the sentence. His days under the scrutiny of journalists will not be over when he delivers that sentence. There are things in his own background that deserve more scrutiny.

Will he throw the book at them? Or will some of those letters he has been reading tug on his heart strings and find some place in there for mercy?

Will he let them stay out of prison while the case is appealed? That might be a good idea, since the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has some interesting things to consider in this case. There is little doubt now that Karl Rove, Bill Canary and the federal prosecutors conspired to get rid of Siegelman politically in the legal arena. Chances are, they could not have beaten him in the political arena, at least not without cheating a bit here and there in places like Bay Minette.

Old Tom Delay out in Texas, the former Senate Majority Leader, made a similar argument in his case. He has said the Democrats were prosecuting him to get him out of Congress. Maybe it’s true, I don’t know, although I have less sympathy for Delay because of some of the evil he has wrought on this country.

So sit back and watch the show in Montgomery on TV. We’ll be here talking about it when it’s over…

A reporter from the Huntsville Times caught up with White House political strategist Karl Rove last Thursday while President Bush was in Alabama for a photo op at a problematic nuclear power plant. The reporter asked Rove about the allegations made by a Republican lawyer Jill Simpon in an affidavit reported on at length below.

Rove’s response (with a smile, according to the TPM Muckraker) to “such an explosive accusation?”

“I know nothing about any phone call,” Rove said. At which point a White House press aide stepped up and said, “What he meant to say was that he has no comment.”

Huntsville Times story

If you are keeping up with the story on the Siegelman-Scrushy sentencing scheduled for this week, you may as well read Dana Beyerle’s story from the Sunday Florence Times-Daily.

Siegelman, Scrushy Sentencing Will Go On This Week as Scheduled