The Thugs Are Out

Kudos to Raw Story for an incredible piece of journalism detailing the lengths to which the Administration's goons are trying to shut down any investigations into the perversion of the Justice Department. Jeers to the traditional media for its near-total blackout on these incidents. We're talking about serious business here.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.

In Alabama, for instance, the home of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman was burglarized twice during the period of his first indictment. Nothing of value was taken, however, and according to the Siegelman family, the only items of interest to the burglars were the files in Siegelman's home office.

Siegelman's attorney experienced the same type of break-in at her office.

In neighboring Mississippi, a case brought against a trial lawyer and three judges raises even more disturbing questions. Of the four individuals in the same case, three of the US Attorney’s targets were the victims of crimes during their indictment or trial. This case, like that of Governor Siegelman, has been widely criticized as a politically motivated prosecution by a Bush US Attorney.

It's more than just a bunch of Watergate-style burglaries, too.

The incidents are not limited to burglaries. In Mississippi, former Judge John Whitfield was the victim of arson at his office. In Alabama, the whistleblower in the Don Siegelman case, Dana Jill Simpson, had her home burned down, and shortly thereafter her car was allegedly forced off the road.

While there is no direct evidence linking these crimes to the US Attorneys’ office targeting these individuals, or to the Bush administration, there is a distinct pattern that makes it highly unlikely that these incidents are isolated and unrelated.

All of these crimes remain unsolved.

Read the whole thing. You'd think there was some kind of Nixon's plumbers' reunion tour or something.

For a really good look into the Siegelman story in case you haven't kept up, Thom Hartmann interviewed the former Alabama governor last week. Here's the audio.



I wasn't aware of this part:

[Thom Hartmann]: And, in fact, if I understand this correctly, you were being prosecuted by a woman whose husband was the campaign manager for the Republican who ran against you for governor and in the middle of the night in one county because of a voting machine malfunction after the election had apparently already been called in your favor, suddenly in the middle of the night when there were nobody expect Republicans standing around, they discovered a couple thousand more votes and said 'Oh, yeah, no no, Don Siegelman actually lost'. Do I have that right?

[cross talk]

[Don Siegelman]: You have it right. They electronically shifted votes from my column to my Republican's column.

[Thom Hartmann]: To Bob Riley's column.

[Don Siegelman]: I believe, yes, to Bob Riley's column. And oddly enough, it didn't effect a single down-ballot race. They took five thousand or six thousand votes of mine and shifted it over to Bob Riley and when they counted everybody else's votes, the shift at the top which logically would have made a difference at the bottom...

[Thom Hartmann]: Sure.

[Don Siegelman]: You know, had no impact whatsoever.

[Thom Hartmann]: So the people running for the lesser state offices, the folks who voted Democratic right down the ticket all of a sudden at the very top of the ticket were 'Oh, I'm going to vote for every Democrat except Don Siegelman, I'll put that over to Riley ' and only in this one area in this one county on this one set of machines that was discovered in the middle of the night. by the Republicans.

[Don Siegelman]: Yes, a couple of other interesting things, Thom, since you brought this up, but the two people who either were given credit or who gave themselves credit for stealing the election and swinging the election to my Republican opponent for catching this 'electronic glitch' as they called it, one was Karl Rove's partner, business partner, her name was Kitty McCullough also known as Kelly, oh gosh, I can't remember what her second name was but she had a different married name.

[Thom Hartmann]: But she's the one who discovered the extra votes that caused you to lose and caused Bob Riley to won, OK.

[Don Siegelman]: And the other person was a guy named Dan Gans who right after that went to work for an Abramoff/Tom Delay related company, a group called the Alexander Strategies Group. And he claimed credit on his web site that he was responsible for this, because he had an expertese in electronic ballot security.

That 2002 election, in places like Alabama and Georgia, was as dirty as the day is long.

You've got election theft, destruction of evidence (5 million emails), violation of subpoenas, perversion of the instruments of justice, railroading Democratic officials into jail, and now intimidation of witnesses, arson and burglary. It's all wrapped up with a nice little bow if any Woodwards and Bernsteins want to take a whack at it. Even, you know, Woodward, or Bernstein.

Michael Copps - Looking Out For You

I'm glad he's taken up this cause:

Doubts about an Alabama TV station’s explanation of a blacked-out segment of “60 Minutes” have been reinforced by a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission who says it “needs to get to the bottom of this.”

In an appearance before the National Press Club today, Michael Copps confirmed that he had urged Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the F.C.C., to investigate a question raised by the extraordinary timing of the malfunction at the station: It began just as a highly anticipated report about a major political scandal in the state was to begin, and ended in time for the program’s next segment.

Remembering a 1955 case of a Mississippi TV station that blocked a network news program about desegregation and spuriously claimed that cable trouble was to blame, Mr. Copps said, “The F.C.C. now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here,” according to Reuters.

John Kerry has been working on this as well. Apparently the FCC is investigating, as well they should. Equipment fails all the time - especially in little local stations like this - but the timing is extremely suspicious.

The Maverick's History

Just to add on to Digby's post about the true history of the conservative movement with respect to MLK, it should be noted that one of the two candidates most likely to get their Presidential nomination, John McCain, voted against making today a national holiday in 1983, and is spending today among some interesting company:

Nearly 24 years after voting against creating a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, John McCain is spending today at the inauguration of Alabama Governor Bob Riley who is a member of an organization that has been criticized for excluding African Americans. The "Grand Master" of the Grand Lodge of Alabama admits he knows of no African American members among the groups 30,000 plus membership. [AP, 9/30/2006] [...]

In past efforts to pander to a far right base that doesn’t trust him, McCain campaigned in Alabama for George Wallace Jr., a popular speaker at a white supremacist hate group, continues to employ a strategist who denounced the creation of a Federal holiday honoring Dr. King as "vicious" and "profane," and even hired the man responsible for the racist ads against Harold Ford in the Senate race in Tennessee in 2006. [New York Times, 4/20/00, San Diego Union Tribune, 1/18/00; Associated Press, 11/17/05, Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, Summer 2005; AP, 6/6/05; New York Times, 10/27/06; New York Times, 10/26/06; Union Leader, 12/8/06]

Here's a little more about Bob Riley and this secretive Masonic organization known as the Grand Lodge of Alabama, which has quite a ring to it, no?

"This is not rocket science: Bob Riley is the Governor of Alabama and is running for re-election. The President of the United States came to Birmingham, yesterday, September 28th, to help raise more money for Riley's re-election campaign.

However, that which the mainstream media fails to address or conveniently chooses to ignore is that Bob Riley is a Mason; a member of the Grand Lodge of Alabama. So far so good. No big deal. Lots of well-known people are Masons. But, when we learned and then exposed on our former morning drive radio talk show that Governor Bob Riley's Grand Masonic Lodge discriminates against African Americans, by formal resolution that they will not allow a black man to become a member we knew that his affiliation ­ because he is the governor and wants to be the governor for four more years ­ was and is 100% wrong."

(Incidentally, Russ and Dee Fine, two conservatives who have a radio show in Birmingham, publicized this heavily in the fall of 2006, and were then fired in the middle of their show shortly thereafter.)

So that's who Mr. Straight Talk is consorting with today. Is it a Reagan-style dogwhistle? You be the judge.

UPDATE: I am completely sorry. This happened a year ago on Martin Luther King day. I was sent the link today and mistakenly assumed it was current. The fact that there's a primary in Alabama on Feb. 5 added to it. McCain's in Florida today.

Mr. Straight Talk's history remains accurate, however.

The Siegelman Case And The Politicization of Justice

Wingnut noise machine freak-outs like attacking a sick 12 year-old serve a useful purpose, regardless of the lies. The intent is to distract the media and even the progressive movement while the politicized federal government goes about their deceitful business. The quintessential example of this is the Don Siegelman case. Siegelman, the Democratic former governor of Alabama, was railroaded and convicted of corruption in office last year. Apparently, the lobbyist who "blew the whistle" on Siegelman had dealings with a lot of Alabama politicians, many of then Republicans.

On may 8, 2002, Clayton Lamar (Lanny) Young Jr., a lobbyist and landfill developer described by acquaintances as a hard-drinking "good ole boy," was in an expansive mood. In the downtown offices of the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, Ala., Young settled into his chair, personal lawyer at his side, and proceeded to tell a group of seasoned prosecutors and investigators that he had paid tens of thousands of dollars in apparently illegal campaign contributions to some of the biggest names in Alabama Republican politics. According to Young, among the recipients of his largesse were the state's former attorney general Jeff Sessions, now a U.S. Senator, and William Pryor Jr., Sessions' successor as attorney general and now a federal judge. Young, whose detailed statements are described in documents obtained by TIME, became a key witness in a major case in Alabama that brought down a high-profile politician and landed him in federal prison with an 88-month sentence. As it happened, however, that official was the top Democrat named by Young in a series of interviews, and none of the Republicans whose campaigns he fingered were investigated in the case, let alone prosecuted.

The Siegelman investigation was clearly politicized, a fact stated by 44 former state Attorney Generals from both sides of the aisle. But this revelation calls things into question even further. It seems that the initial cause of the investigation included a lot of actionable information on Republicans - but that information was simply forgotten.

The prosecutor in the case claims that nothing untoward was done here - that Lanny Young's description of payments to Jeff Sessions were "legitimate." Does this sound legitimate to you?

Early in the investigation, in November 2001, Young announced that five years earlier, he "personally provided Sessions with cash campaign contributions," according to an FBI memo of the interview. Prosecutors didn't follow up that surprising statement with questions, but Young volunteered more. The memo adds that "on one occasion he [Young] provided Session [sic] with $5,000 to $7,000 using two intermediaries," one of whom held a senior position with Sessions' campaign. On another occasion, the FBI records show, Young talked about providing "$10,000 to $15,000 to Session [sic]. Young had his secretaries and friends write checks to the Sessions campaign and Young reimbursed the secretaries and friends for their contributions."

If true, Young's statements describe political money laundering that would be a clear violation of federal law.

This Time article is a blueprint for how the Justice Department has acted in the Bush/Rove era, as a political arm of the Republican Party. And we've seen this habit throughout the federal government. We've seen Scott Jennings briefing members of the General Services Administration about how they can help Republican candidates (Jennings, incidentally, resigned last week, right on the heels of this Time article, interestingly enough). We've seen the efforts to install a known vote suppressor, Hans Von Spakovsky, onto the Federal Election Commission. And now we're seeing it in this case in Alabama. There's a hearing scheduled about this in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Jeff Sessions sits on that committee. He must recuse himself. The Justice Department has refused to turn over any documents regarding the Siegelman case. How can the Democrats confirm someone to run that Department without them?

Free Siegelman

44 former state Attorneys General, both Democrats and Republicans, have written to demand that the Congress investigate the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Seigelman to see if it was politically motivated. This is tangentially related to the US Attorneys scandal and the Justice Department's habit of covering up for Republicans while punishing Democrats. Alabama's US Attorney wasn't among those fired; is this the result? The Siegelman case is fishy as all get out, with Karl Rove perhaps playing a central role. In the letter, the former AGs cite half a dozen instances where the law doesn't seem to be properly applied, and the case appears to be politically motivated. Bravo for these men and women coming forward on behalf of justice over political expediency. The letter is here.