harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002487
The CBS piece, for which I was repeatedly interviewed, came through on its promise to deliver several additional bombshells. The most significant of these was the disclosure that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turnover potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. The accusation was dramatically reinforced by the Justice Department's failure to offer a denial. It delivered a fairly elaborate version of a "no comment," and even that came a full twenty-four hours after it had conferred with the prosecutors in question. The gravity of the accusations made and the prosecutors' failure to deny them further escalates concerns about the treatment of the former Alabama governor. Republicans Lead the Attack But the show was dominated by one of 52 former attorneys general from 40 of the 50 states who have called for a Congressional probe of the conduct of the Siegelman case, former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods. He leveled a series of blistering accusations at the Bush Administration's Justice Department. With the Alabama GOP this evening issuing a near-hysterical statement in which it characterizes the CBS broadcast--before its transmission--as an anti-Republican attack piece, it was notable that Woods, like the piece's other star witness, is a Republican. Grant Woods is co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee, and a lifelong friend and advisor to the presumptive 2008 GOP presidential candidate. Attorney General Woods has this to say about the Bush Justice Department's prosecution of Siegelman: "I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square. This was a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of." In other words, not being able to beat Siegelman at the polls, Woods believes that his own party corruptly used the criminal justice process to take out an adversary. Not something that a senior Republican would raise easily about his own party. Crimes for Democrats, Fundraising as Usual for the GOP Start with the notion that the conduct that figures in the accusations is actually a crime. The basic charge is that businessman Richard Scrushy gave $500,000 to the Alabama Education Foundation, a vehicle Siegelman created to run a campaign for a state education lottery, and Siegelman in exchange appointed him to the state's hospital oversight board. WOODS: You do a bribery when someone has a real personal benefit. It's that you're exchanging an official public act for a personal benefit. Not, "Hey, I would like for you to help out on this project which I think is good for my state." If you're gonna start indicting people and putting them in prison for that, then you might as well just- build nine or ten new federal prisons because that happens everyday in every statehouse, in every city council, and in the Congress of the United States. PELLEY: What you seem to be saying here is that this is analogous to giving a great deal of money to a presidential campaign. Indeed, Karl Rove pursued financing for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and again in 2004 by organizing a special elite status--called "Pioneers" and "Rangers"--for persons who donated or raised $100,000 or more for the campaign. These donors understood that if they wanted to be appointed to a government office, like an ambassadorship, they only had to ask for it. So how many Bush-Cheney donors in amounts of one hundred thousand and more were appointed to government offices or to positions in the Bush-Cheney transition team? And in how many of those cases did the Justice Department initiate investigations of corruption? The Justice Department's rationale is that this crime is one that can be committed by Democrats alone. When a Republican does it, it's normal campaign fundraising. False Evidence But even if we accept that it's possible for the Bush Department to create a new category of "Democrats Only" Crimes, we still have the basic fact that the evidence on which the Siegelman conviction was secured was false, and was known by the prosecutors to be false from the beginning. Indeed, the evidence of this is now so overpowering that the Justice Department refused to answer charges on camera, just as it has resisted Congressional demands to turn over documents and wrongfully failed to comply with FOIA requests. The key testimony at trial came from a man named Nick Bailey, who, unbeknownst to Siegelman, was a crook. And he's now in prison, where CBS interviewed him--notwithstanding the Justice Department refusal to authorize an interview. The prosecutors nabbed him and then told him he could get a light sentence if he worked with them to nail Siegelman, their real target. This very process is a perversion of the justice system, which as former US Attorney Jones very properly says, requires that prosecutors investigate crimes and not people. Bailey testifies that he saw a check change hands at a meeting at which Scrushy's appointment to the oversight board was decided. There was no- there was no way possible for Siegelman to have walked out of that meeting with a check in his hand. PELLEY: So, Siegelman could not have had that check- JONES: No. PELLEY: -in his hand that Bailey- JONES: It was- PELLEY: -testified to seeing? JONES: Absolutely impossible and they knew that, absolutely impossible. PELLEY: That would seem like a problem with the prosecution's case... JONES: It was a huge problem especially when you've got a guy whose credibility was going to be the linchpin of that case. So the Justice Department's silence in response to the charges was masked with a platitudinous statement. They stated that Siegelman's case was pursued and developed by career prosecutors, that it was based on the law, and justified by fair evidence. Each of the statements is about as honest as Attorney General Gonzales's statement, under oath, before Congress, that he just couldn't remember any details concerning any decisions to fire eight US Attorneys on December 7, 2006. First, we know that the first two career prosecutors assigned to the case, including the most experienced prosecutors who worked on it, came to the same conclusion that Grant Woods did: no reasonable prosecutor would ever have charged this case. The Justice Department has consistently made false statements about the roles of the two earlier prosecutors, and their role only emerged in the last few months. It's extremely noteworthy that throughout the history of this case, whenever a career prosecutor concluded that charges should not be brought, that career prosecutor ran into a bump in his career and was off the case. The message to the remaining career prosecutors was plenty clear. In fact it is clear that the career prosecutors' views were overridden by political appointees driven by a strong partisan political agenda. Second, they claim that the case was brought on a fair reading of the law. It was not, and indeed reasonable career prosecutors never would have acted on the basis of the reading they advanced, and a fair detached judge never would have allowed the case to go forward. Third, they claim that evidence was produced to sustain the charges. But the key evidence that the prosecutors brought forward was false, and they knew it was false. In this case proceeding on the basis of that false evidence was a corrupt wielding of prosecutorial power, pursued for a corrupt partisan political end--the elimination of a political adversary. They withheld the Bailey notes which would have demonstrated that his memory on this was conflicted or wrong and would therefore have devastated his testimony. There is mounting evidence that one or more witnesses were unethically pressured to give false evidence or face retaliation. This suspicion surrounds not only Nick Bailey, but also Jefferson County Republican Commissioner Gary White. Note the affidavit of his wife, which a federal judge in Birmingham stated only two weeks ago he found "established a prima facie case of impermissible conduct" by the ...
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