Adam Zagorin has a new article up on Time magazine, and it's a scorcher. Seems a witness has come forward to say that Rove may have been behind the Siegelman prosecution in Alabama.
Don Siegelman was the former Democratic governor of Alabama convicted in 2006 of bribery and conspiracy and faces thirty years in prison. But today Zagorin reports a twist in this tale.
Now Karl Rove, the President's top political strategist, has been implicated in the controversy. A longtime Republican lawyer in Alabama swears she heard a top GOP operative in the state say that Rove "had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman, with help from two of Alabama's U.S. attorneys.
Zagorin identifies this lawyer as Dana Jill Simpson. On May 21 she filed an affadavit and Time has a copy.
Zagorin continues
According to Simpson's statement, William Canary, a senior GOP political operative and Riley adviser who was on the conference call, said " not to worry about Don Siegelman" because "'his girls' would take care of" the governor. Canary then made clear that " his girls" was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Ooooo Alice Martin. She's the lead USA in the Abramoff case. Small old world, isn't it?
Anyway back to Zagorin
Canary reassured others on the conference call — who also included Riley's son, Rob, and Terry Butts, another Riley lawyer and former justice of the Alabama supreme court — that he had the help of a powerful pal in Washington. Canary said "not to worry — that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman," the Simpson affidavit says. Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.
Good stuff in there so go, as they say and read the whole thing.
Lotsa good stuff in there and a primer if you don't recall the case.
Update from Josh Marshall
Now, on the other side of the equation is the fact that Canary recused herself from the case in response to Siegelman's complaints and the case was run by a career prosecutor who says he ran the whole show by himself with no input from Canary.
But let's set that aside for a second. Federal prosecutors are asking the judge to sentence Siegelman to 30 years in prison. Thirty years!
Now, given my focus on public corruption in the last few years, far be it from me to call for leniency on crooked pols. But this strikes me as wildly out of line with the sentences I've seen in the last couple years. For some context, Siegelman was acquitted on 25 counts and convicted on seven. With those charges Siegelman didn't pocket any money himself but rather, in the words of the Times, persuaded a wealthy businessman "to pay $500,000 to retire the debt of a political group that had campaigned to win voter approval for a state lottery."
Compare this to Duke Cunningham, perhaps the most brazen and audacious bribetaker in recent decades. Duke to cash payments from multiple federal contractors in exchange for securing defense contracts. Duke got eight years and four months in prison. Duke pleaded out, which probably took some time off his sentence. But nothing Siegelman was convicted of seems even remotely in Duke's league and yet they want to give him a sentence almost four times as long?
What am I missing?