by Glynn Wilson

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery on a break from his sentencing hearing in June, 2007.

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman will be back in federal court in Montgomery again Wednesday, this time making an oral argument before a different federal judge asking for a chance to be heard on issues related to “selective prosecution” and “government misconduct” in the handling of his case.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday morning, Siegelman, a Democrat, told me his attorneys will be making an argument that former U.S. Attorney Leura Canary — the wife of Bill Canary, head of the conservative Business Council of Alabama — had a partisan conflict of interest in bringing the alleged bribery and corruption case against him.

They will be revealing documentary evidence that Ms. Canary never actually recused herself from the case, he said, an issue we have reported on extensively in the past. She recused herself on the pages of the Birmingham News, but never actually filed a formal recusal document with the court, and e-mail messages show she was involved in directing the prosecution team even after she claimed to recuse herself.

Evidence will also be presented about judicial misconduct on the part of Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller, who handled the case against Siegelman. Because of that, Siegelman said, Fuller will not be hearing the evidence on Wednesday. Instead, U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles S. Coody will be presiding.

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Will the Republicans really fight Obama’s Supreme Court pick?

Or in the end, will they just play games to raise money and throw red meat to the base?

Most of the real experts say Sotomayor will most likely be confirmed. But there will always be wrinkles, or rumors of wrinkles…

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge, according to AP.

The talking heads are all a Twitter about this, but is it a lot of hot air about nothing?

Meanwhile, the rumor mill is alive and spewing down Montgomery way with this tidbit.

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WP

Bob Luskin and his famous client, Karl Rove

by Glynn Wilson

Dancing the Potomac Two-Step

Karl Rove’s attorney is very good at the Washington two-step. They say Robert Luskin is an earring-wearing, motorcycle-riding, bald-hippie liberal lawyer from Harvard. The only common thread we might find between these two men could be their cocktail preferences, or their drugs.

Otherwise, it seems odd that they would find themselves together at the epicenter of the biggest political coverup since Watergate, or maybe Iran-Contra. Or, there was that CIA agent, Valerie Plame-Wilson, Rove helped to out, in spite of Luskin’s denials that kept Rove from facing prosecution in that case. I. Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, took the fall for that one. Bush commuted his sentence almost instantly — after lying and saying he would fire anyone involved in the leak.

There has been much speculation over the Internets about whether Bush might have signed a pocket pardon for Rove and the others in his administration facing investigations. Nothing has popped out of that pigeon hole yet, and probably won’t.

It’s all about running out the clock. The statute of limitations clock.

On Monday, Luskin leaked a tidbit to his old pal Murray Waas from the Plame investigation days, side-stepping the House Judiciary Committee investigation where Rove faces a subpoena, and said his client was cooperating in a separate investigation being run by the Justice Department. Since Eric Holder is now instituted at Justice, sworn in today, there is some worry about what he and President Obama are going to determine about “executive privilege.”

The so-called separate investigation is a Bush Justice Department backshop job run by his old OPR unit, the so-called Office of Professional Responsibility, where everything was political – uh, not all about ethics.

They have been talking to all kinds of people in North Alabama trying to dig up non-existent dirt on Dana Jill Simpson, rather than investigating Rove. So the smart political move on the part of the Obama Justice Department, not to mention the right move legally, would be to forestall that post-haste and insist that Rove appear before the House Judiciary Committee — or better yet, appoint a special prosecutor.

After all, Luskin said Rove was claiming no “privilege” as it relates to the case of Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. In other words, he is now saying Bush was not in the loop, so there’s no privilege. We’re not necessarily buying it, but we’ll dance along for now.

Luskin could not be reached for comment on deadline, but he told Waas this regarding Siegelman: “At no time has he or will he assert personal privilege in that matter.” While declining to discuss specifics of what Rove has told investigators regarding Siegelman, Luskin said: “What Karl has said [to investigators] is entirely consistent with what he has said publicly–that he absolutely (had) nothing to do with this.”

Rove Will Cooperate With DOJ Probes?

Ms. Simpson’s lawyer Priscilla Duncan in Montgomery said if you weave your way in and out of Luskin’s verbiage, when he says Rove doesn’t mind answering questions about Siegelman, “it is clear that Rove talked to the Bush Justice Department, not anyone from the new administration. He’s playing with us.”

Luskin then insists that Rove doesn’t know anything about the Siegelman prosecution, she said.

“Did he know about the preliminary discussions that led to it? Did he talk with Leura Canary, his former partner’s wife? Or Alice Martin? We don’t know whether they’ve been invited to testify or not, but the committee’s subpoenas are a long and tortured process.”

We already knew Bush never offered or suggested immunity of any kind for Rove in the Siegelman case, we find out.

“Lawyers are free to lie to the press, but can lose their license if they lie in court and get caught,” she said.

In all that cooperation Luskin says Bush and Rove are so eager to give, she adds, “there is not one hint that it will be 1) under oath or 2) recorded. In other words, it’s the same ‘poison whisper’ campaign he offered the Judiciary Committee last year.”

“Rove’s entire career is to plant juicy stories with pliant media to steer the coverage away from him by implying that they are missing a much bigger story,” she said.

For more, including the MSNBC video from today, hit the jump…

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America Just Elected Its First Black President

Are the people of Alabama ready for an African-American governor?

by Glynn Wilson

ATLANTA, Ga. — Some historians say the final battle of the Civil War was fought at Sayler’s Creek, southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1865. Try bringing that up in a political bar like Manuel’s Tavern in downtown Atlanta, however, and see how fast you can start an argument.

While everyone knows that Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war, many an expert would argue that the old, lingering causes of the war survived in people’s attitudes long after the fighting on the bloody battle fields came to a gentlemanly end.

Ask the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, those who had to fight those battles all over again in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then there are thinkers and writers who will tell you, if you give them half a chance over a few shots of whiskey or a few pints of dark beer, that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 effectively erased the Union’s victory in the war and was finally, at long last, a victory for the old Confederacy. Putting aside the issue of election theft and the Supreme Court, ponder the idea that Bush came into office in large measure by the hands of mostly white voters from the old Confederate states of the Deep South, with some help from middle America and parts of the West.

Since Obama’s election even the TV pundits will tell you the only base left for the national Republican Party lies in the old states of the Confederacy, thanks in part to the scorched earth strategies of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, whose marches to Washington and Baghdad with Bush scarred the national character almost as much as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery “March to the Sea.”

Then consider that while Bush’s campaign coffers may not have been filled by the profits from cotton, hand-picked on plantations worked by slaves, the mega corporations that mostly supported his candidacy were interested in keeping wages low and gutting the rights of juries in courtrooms to punish corporate crimes against working people, humanity and the earth. Bush got most of his money to run in 2000 from oil and other energy companies, including Exxon Mobile and Southern Company, as well as insurance companies and the pharmaceutical giants. He came into office — in the world prior to 9/11 — with the prime objective to pass national “tort reform,” the watchword for stopping juries from rendering multi-million dollar judgments against multi-national corporations.

Rove had already accomplished that feat in Alabama — once known as the top state in the country for large jury awards against corporate malfeasance — by helping the Republican Party orchestrate a political takeover of the state Supreme Court.

If you ask just about any academic expert who studies the demographic numbers from public opinion polls and election results, you could say Americans finally fought the final battle of the Civil War on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. Symbolically, it took another Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put together enough of a national coalition to defeat Confederate attitudes once and for all.

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Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed Brian Benczkowski, former mouthpiece to U.S. Attorney Laura Canary of Siegelman indictment fame, to serve as his chief of staff, the Justice Department announced today.

Benczkowski, 38, currently serves as chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip.

“I am happy that Brian Benczkowski has agreed to serve as my chief of staff,” Attorney General Mukasey said. “Brian has been one of my closest advisers in the Department since my confirmation process, and his exceptional judgment and extensive experience in the Department will be of great value to me and to the Department in the upcoming months.”

Regular TPMmuckraker readers might remember Benczkowski as a mouthpiece for the DOJ on the ambiguity of torture and the word “exclusive” as it pertains to FISA.

Regular readers of this site and Harper’s magazine might remember him as the mouthpiece for Canary against Alabama attorney and GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson.

According to New York attorney and writer Scott Horton’s piece on The Benczkowski-Siegelman Letter:

On September 4, the Justice Department responded to the request of House Judiciary Chair John Conyers and three other members requesting information surrounding three cases—in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—in which substantial evidence has been presented to the effect that the prosecution was politically motivated. The core of the response by Brian A. Benczkowski, who is the Justice Department’s principal Congressional liaison, is that the Department will not furnish the documents sought because to do so would “chill the candid internal deliberations” that go into a decision to prosecute. In sum, Justice is claiming prosecutorial immunity.

This claim is outrageous for two reasons: first, the prosecutions in these cases are concluded; and second, because this rule is conceived not—as Benczkowski suggests—to let prosecutors act in the shadows, but rather to protect innocent citizens who become the subject of Justice Department considerations and whose reputations would be ruined by disclosure. And that consideration actually supports disclosure of the documents here: they may lead to the exoneration of an innocent man now sitting in prison who was the victim of a political vendetta.

But, as TPM Muckraker has already noted, the Benczkowski letter is already raising eyebrows across Washington because it is replete with clearly false statements—not matters on which there is a difference of opinion, but on which things are presented as facts which are simply, and demonstrably, untrue. In an important editorial appropriately labeled “The Smell of Arrogance,” the Anniston Star has said that “skepticism is warranted” in looking at the claims of the Benczkowski letter.

However, I believe the correct word is not “skepticism” but “disbelief.” When they issue a letter that is so heavily larded with conscious lies, the response deserves to be disregarded entirely. This letter provides another demonstration of why an investigation is urgently needed and why Congress must continue its press deep into the center of the cabal that produced this travesty.

The letter racks up an amazing tally of rank falsehoods. I’ll look at just two paragraphs:

The focus of recent controversy has been a May 2007 affidavit signed by Alabama attorney Jill Simpson. . . In the affidavit, Ms. Simpson claims to have overheard statements she attributes to U.S. Attorney Leura Canary’s husband.

Falsehood: there was no allegation of “overhearing.” Simpson was a participant in the conversation, which was a conference call involving people at several locations—though it is unclear whether those on the phone knew all the participants, as often happens. This fact also explains why, when participants say they don’t recollect being on a call with Ms. Simpson, this means nothing. It’s certainly not a denial that the conference took place.

The national media has interpreted the alleged statements as linking the prosecution of former Governor Siegelman to Karl Rove.

In fact, Jill Simpson made clear this was her understanding. In fact, William Canary and Karl Rove have a long-running and well-documented personal friendship. The attempt to suggest that it might be something else is a desperate ploy.

At the time Ms. Simpson alleges the purported statements were made, Mr. Siegelman was already under federal investigation…

Ms. Simpson states this in fact; the statements attributed to Rove by Canary occurred in the past. The purpose of this statement is to mislead and distort.

The alleged conversation described by Ms. Simpson has been denied by all of the alleged participants except Ms. Simpson.

This is false. In fact, Bob Martin of the South Alabamian, who specifically researched this issue, concluded correctly that “none of the participants have actually said they absolutely did not participate in the call.”

I have kept track of all these statements, which are numerous, and all of them essentially amount to a claim “not to remember” the conversation—which is very different from the statement in the Justice letter. If you say you don’t remember you can change your mind later with no worries. Two of the participants have now contradicted themselves repeatedly as to what happened, and one responded to the allegations by immediately lawyering up and halting communications with the media. This is a key point, yet the Justice Department has not investigated it, and instead it has repeatedly made false statements about what has happened.

Indeed, even Mr. Siegelman states that Ms. Simpson’s affidavit is false as it relates to him.

This statement is false. When it was first made, by the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, I put the question to Siegelman—and he confirmed that he believed the affidavit to be accurate. He said only that he personally could not recall an incident in it relating to some alleged KKK activity, but that was because this involved his staff, not him personally. This is a typical example of disregard for the truth and the gross and conscious distortions put out by the Justice Department in this case. The Justice Department also challenged the underlying claim as to KKK activities. I have since obtained and viewed videotape footage of the event described by Simpson from a local police department. Her account is completely accurate. I also learned that the Justice Department had never made inquiries or looked into the matter.

Moreover, according to Ms. Simpson, she met with Mr. Siegelman…for several months before signing the statement at their urging.

This statement is false. Ms. Simpson has never met with Governor Siegelman nor has she ever said she did.

She also claims to have provided legal advice to them.

This statement is false.

This hardly exhausts the demonstrably false statements in the letter—it’s just a beginning. For instance, it also falsely reports what happened with respect to jury-tampering allegations, and it twists and distorts the document production request itself so as to elide request for documents from Alabama officials (by reducing the request to party officials).

These false statements line up, item for item, with false statements made by Leura Canary’s office in Montgomery. These paragraphs make it painfully obvious that main Justice conducted no independent review whatsoever of the allegations concerning the events in Montgomery. Instead it simply regurgitated the false statements it was fed by the Montgomery office.

Moreover, the manipulations combined with the false statements suggests that there is much here that the Justice Department desperately wants to obscure. This conduct is consistent with a wide-ranging cover-up. The Benczkowski letter thus provides more evidence that the internal rot at Justice lies in the head and reaches down, in this case, to the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery who is the wife of an Alabama G.O.P. kingpin.

It is obvious Benczkowski is the Bush family choice for this position, because he is a loyal liar for their oil sponsored political baseball team. Now we figure it out after all these many years. That’s how the Bush’s run government. Like a failed baseball team…