More Siegelman

Mark Kleiman:

Scott Horton has been all over this story (as has Glyn Wilson of the an affidavit about the husband of one of the two female U.S. Attorneys for Alabama boasting that "his girls" were going to put Siegelman out of action had her house torched and her car run off the road — plus the Justice Department angle, the Abramoff angle, and the Rove angle, this one smells to me like a major scandal brewing.

I'm just catching up on this story myself, but here's the latest from Scott Horton. Also check out this post from Laura McGann that lays out much of the relevant information.

Comments

Wow, you managed to make a quote from somebody else incomprehensible. Well done, Matt.

Posted by John | June 29, 2007 10:15 AM

Full quote from Kleiman, without links:

Scott Horton has been all over this story (as has Glyn Wilson of the Locust Fork Journal blog) and it's had a couple of mentions in the mainstream press, but the basic media narrative is still "corrupt politician goes down" rather than "political persecution succeeds." Other than Horton, with TPM cheerleading, and Wilson, who seems to know the case cold but whose blog I hadn't heard of before, no one is covering "the Siegelman scandal" yet. But given some of the lurid details — the woman who gave an affidavit about the husband of one of the two female U.S. Attorneys for Alabama boasting that "his girls" were going to put Siegelman out of action had her house torched and her car run off the road — plus the Justice Department angle, the Abramoff angle, and the Rove angle, this one smells to me like a major scandal brewing.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 29, 2007 10:19 AM

That was just a transcription, I don't necessarily endorse it. Might be something here, might not.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 29, 2007 10:29 AM

My casual impression is that this guy is guilty. I haven't seen anyone say he isn't. So, assuming that he is in fact guilty...

I fail to see how a scandal about Republicans pulling out the stops to bust a bad guy is going to make them look bad.

It's going to make them look tough on corruption - it's going to make them look good.

You have been warned...

Posted by Chuck | June 29, 2007 10:33 AM

Siegelman's is a strange banner for the left to carry. As governor of Alabama, he was more or less a "five on a scale of 10" as far as an overall appraisal goes, but from a progressive perpsective, he was a total dud. As articles on other sites have noted, Siegelman did nothing to restructure Alabama's horribly regressive tax laws, which make the federal code look leftist by comparison. His signature policy initiative was to increase funding for education by creating...you guessed it, a state lottery, that most progressive of revenue-raising schemes! When that plan went down in flames, thanks to opposition from a rather unique coalition of evangelicals and activists for the underpriviledged, Siegelman basically retreated into the governor's mansion and spent the rest of his single term battling corruption charges.

Posted by Claudius | June 29, 2007 11:14 AM

Siegelman sounds like a case where a DI punishes someone who's NOT the cause of a problem to make everyone else in the company verrrrry cautious about making a problem for the DI.

Siegelman, had their been no Abramhoffs and Duke Cunninghams for the Republicans, probably would have escaped notice. Of anyone, right or left. He sounds like a typical electoral time server. Wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 29, 2007 11:27 AM

clips with one parentheses are tough to decipher. then we have the husband getting her car run off the road. do what?

Posted by conbrio | June 29, 2007 11:47 AM

I've read a lot of stuff about how the prosecution was unfair and politically motivated, but very little so far on what exactly the guy is alleged to have done and what sort of evidence there was. The most I've seen so far was this bit, posted by MY yesterday, via Mark Kleinman:

He was convicted of appointing someone to a state board that the same man had been appointed to by three previous governors, in return for a contribution in support of a referendum campaign.

I'd definitely like to hear more before I start to believe that this was a miscarraige of justice, but it certainly sounds fishy, so far.

Re: Claudius, I don't care if the guy was the second coming of FDR or the second coming of Ronald Reagan, Democrat or Republican. If he was prosecuted and convicted improperly then there is a scandal. Just because you might not want to vote for someone doesn't mean that person deserves to rot in prison.

Posted by Rob Mac | June 29, 2007 12:23 PM

Conbrio -- Yglesias's quote is garbled, -- check my comment or Kleiman's link. Basically the claim is that a woman signed an affidavit, and (according to Glyn Wilson, before signing the affidavit but after beginning to speak out) that woman's house burned down and her car was run off the road.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 29, 2007 12:29 PM

One almost begins to wonder about the moral climate in the Alabama Republican Party.

Posted by KH | June 29, 2007 12:55 PM

Claudius has a point. I'll add that Siegelman's Repub opponent in 2002, Bob Riley, won largely because he campaigned on reforming the regressive tax laws. His efforts went down to defeat too, but unlike Siegelman he kept working and made a comeback after looking like he was going to lose the nomination to Roy Moore.

I'm of two minds about this -- I'm really glad to see Scrushy get some punishment at last, and Siegelman really was crooked, but these charges look shaky. Even though "his girls" weren't responsible for this batch but the one before.

Posted by Mac | June 29, 2007 12:58 PM

How can we know Siegelman was crooked? The Federal government brought well over 100 charges against him over several years, and he was convicted on a grand total of two. The first case they brought was thrown out of court entirely. How many people are there in public life who could stand having the full force of the Justice department up against them for years on end and never tripping up on even a technical violation?

The actual charges he was convicted on -- supposedly rewarding a businessman for a contribution to the state lottery campaign with an appointment to a board that the businessman had previously served on, and not revealing information about the sale of a $9,000 motorcycle -- seem, ummm, not very major.

Here's an LA Times article on the affair that's much better than the links Matt put up:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-siegelman26jun26,1,3825613.story?coll=la-news-politics-national&track=crosspromo

Posted by mq | June 29, 2007 2:39 PM

I know he was crooked because I live in Alabama and am familiar with the situation, and because I know (liberal, Democratic -- yes, we have some down here) people familiar with the situation who say that yes, he's crooked. I read the newspapers in Alabama, the conservative ones and the moderate ones (no liberal newspapers, no) and I've corresponded and linked and counter-linked with Glynn Wilson in the past. I've been following this situation, and blogging about it, since Siegelman was in office, and he lost re-election in 2002. The original charges were thrown out because of the incompetence of the Birmingham federal prosecutor, a typical Bush hack who shouldn't be allowed to run the DA's office in Clay County (pop. 14,254), much less the state's largest city and district.

Posted by Mac | June 29, 2007 3:25 PM