You know what they say,
That’s Politics
State & Local
I Accuse…
BY
Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine
PUBLISHED
July 16, 2007
Today
forty-four attorneys general from forty of the fifty states of the Union
petition the United States Congress demanding a formal inquiry into the
prosecution of Don Siegelman, the former Governor of Alabama, who was
falsely charged, tried and convicted in federal court proceedings in Alabama.
These proceedings constitute an indelible stain on the reputation of our nation
for justice, which cannot be purged until they are set aside and those who
committed these crimes mockingly in the name of justice are held to account for
their misconduct.
The
Bush Administration’s Department of Justice, with corrupt and malicious motive
and intent, and in unseemly connivance with the Administration’s political
retainers in Alabama, conceived and pursued a prosecution against Don
Siegelman, through a grotesque and partisan perversion of justice, secured his
conviction. This was done for a criminally corrupt purpose—in order to eliminate
a popular elected official of an opposing party and to cement the Republican
Party’s control over all attributes of state and federal power in Alabama, and
to help bolster the fundraising advantages of the Alabama Republican Party by
making those who donate to its opponents fear prosecution.
Dare
to tell the truth, as we pledge to tell it, in full, since the normal channels
of justice have failed to do so. Our duty is to speak out; we do not wish to be
an accomplice in this travesty.
The
truth, first of all, about Siegelman’s trial and conviction: At the root of it
all is a group of evil men whose motivations are, and have from the beginning
been, the basest political manipulations. The trial was a mockery and a farce
which shamed and disgraced our courts, pursued by prosecutors who scorn justice
and presided over by a judge who showed it only contempt.
Throughout
they acted with the concerted aim of manipulating popular opinion for partisan
political purposes. The public was astounded; rumors flew of the most horrible
acts, the most monstrous deceptions, lies that were an affront to our history.
The public, naturally, was taken in. No punishment could be too harsh. The
people clamored for the humiliation of the defendant.
How
flimsy it is! The fact that someone could have been convicted on this charge is
the ultimate iniquity. I defy decent men to read it without a stir of
indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the
undeserved punishment being meted out. And how childish and irrational the
charges are, how groundless the accusations! How the majesty of the nation’s
name and its prosecutorial authority was degraded by this spite and malice. It
is said that within the deliberation room, the jurors were naturally leaning
toward acquittal. Then machinations began to pressure the jurors improperly.
Evidence of this was produced, and swept aside by the judge, who refused to
make serious inquiry. This judge was not impartial, but bent on an injustice. I
know of no greater crime against the state than the one committed here.
And
now the prosecutors and the judge who committed this travesty will attempt to
conceal their wrongdoing with claims of secrecy. Enough! Let truth be on the
march. Let their misdeeds in the name of justice be fully exposed to the light
of day, and let them be punished.
An
iniquitous verdict has been rendered that will forever weigh upon our courts
and will henceforth cast a shadow of suspicion on all their judgments. The
conduct of this court is inescapably criminal. We are told of the honor of the
courts; we are supposed to love and respect them. But this is not about those
courts, whose dignity we are seeking, in our cry for justice.
Ah,
what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what
corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty
whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back
down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice, with the travesty
of partisan politics as a pretext.
It
is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in
the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison
the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of with false
charges.
Truth
and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled,
unrecognized and ignored!
Truth
is on the march, and nothing will stop it. This court and these prosecutors
have, decidedly, a most singular and perverse idea of justice.
This
is the plain truth and it is terrifying. I repeat with the most vehement
conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the
beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one
side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the
other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I
said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows
and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything
with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most
resounding of disasters, yet to come.
I
accuse the court of allowing farcical charges to proceed before it, of doing
manifest injustice and colluding in the conviction of an innocent man. The
pursuit of justice must now be unrelenting. Without it we surrender to the
forces of tyranny which are now descending upon our country.
www.harpers.org
Noel Hillman (photo) is a federal judge in Camden, New
Jersey appointed to the court by President Bush in the spring of 2006. He
gathered the support of New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, and his
appointment was considered uncontroversial. Hillman was portrayed in the
confirmation process as a “career prosecutor.” Early in 2007, the Bush White
House decided to appoint Hillman to a coveted seat on the Third Circuit Court
of Appeals. Again, Congressional support was lined up and Hillman’s
confirmation seemed all but a “done deal.” And then something happened. New
Jersey’s leading newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, put it this way in a report on June 10:1
Hillman,
a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey and the lead Justice Department
prosecutor in the Jack Abramoff Capitol Hill lobbying scandal, had full White
House support and the backing of New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, but the
Bush Administration pulled the nomination for reasons that remain a mystery.
Did
Hillman’s deep involvement with the prosecution of Alabama Governor Don
Siegelman, Wisconsin administrator Georgia Thompson, and a growing number of
other cases in which political manipulation of prosecutions are involved cost
him a court of appeals judgeship? This is what sources close to the process on
Capitol Hill are telling me.
Hillman
is a “loyal Bushie,” and a long-time protégé of Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff, with whom he served in the New Jersey United States
Attorney’s office. Hillman followed Chertoff to the DOJ’s Criminal Division in
2001, and was later selected by Chertoff to head the Public Integrity Section (PIN), one of the
most sensitive, and also one of the most intrinsically political positions in
the Department of Justice. Reduced to its essence, PIN decides who and what is
corrupt in the American political landscape.
Four
Judges
Hillman
is also one of four sitting federal judges who have played roles in
connection with the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. The
quartet consists of U.W. Clemons, a judge in Birmingham who dismissed the first
proceedings against Siegelman with prejudice and went out of his way to suggest
he suspected inappropriate conduct on the part of prosecutors. Clemons is the
only Democratic appointee among the judges. And, as the case unfolds, I firmly
believe that all of Clemons’ suspicions will be fully validated.
The
balance are not only Republicans—they were all appointed by George W. Bush.
Moreover, Karl Rove is suspected of having played a role in each appointment.
Mark
Fuller is the judge to whom the case was shopped when Clemons dismissed it. In
fact, moving the case out of the district in which it was initiated so as to
evade the control of the federal judge to whom it was assigned was the first clear-cut
sign of prosecutorial misconduct in the history of the Siegelman prosecution.
William
Pryor, a ferociously partisan figure and one of the most controversial judicial
nominees in recent memory, previously served as Alabama’s attorney general. He
used his position to initiate a criminal investigation of Siegelman within
weeks of Siegelman’s inauguration as governor. Throughout the history of the
Siegelman investigation and prosecution, Pryor figures right at the center of
it, concocting new theories, discarding old ones, and ultimately, after
concluding that there was an insufficient basis under Alabama law to act,
lobbying the Justice Department to bring a case. Throughout this period, Pryor
consulted with and involved senior Alabama GOP figures in the matter. Pryor is
also a friend and confidant of Karl Rove, whom he hired to manage his election
campaign, and who played a key role in his ascendancy to the federal bench.
The
fourth judge is Noel Hillman. Hillman was, through the core period in which
this case was developed, the head of the Public Integrity Section (PIN) within
the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. His unit had responsibility for
the prosecution of elected and appointed public officials at all levels of
government—state, federal and local. It also had responsibility for criminal
action involving elections officials.
Hillman
and the U.S. Attorneys Scandal
Congressional
hearings conducted over the last five months have raised very serious questions
about the conduct of PIN under Hillman’s leadership. Former U.S. attorneys in
San Diego and Arizona, for instance, expressed concern about the way in which
politically sensitive cases involving Republicans were being handled. They
noted extremely lengthy delays in getting authority to issue subpoenas and
bring charges before the grand jury. Hillman did not stymie this process
altogether, but it is clear that he used bureaucratic procedures to put the
breaks on. Conversely, other federal prosecutors have indicated that when
Democrats were in the crosshairs, all caution was thrown to the winds, and
intense pressure was applied to bring and hype charges. The strongest examples
of this so far have come out of New Mexico, where David Iglesias described the
immense and improper pressure brought to bear to indict a Democratic official
before the 2006 elections. He resisted that pressure, and his resistance cost
him his job. And Wisconsin, where U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic, obviously under
intense pressure from the White House, prosecuted a senior civil servant on
charges tied to the state’s Democratic governor. That case produced a
conviction. An all-Republican panel of Court of Appeals judges then overturned
it with one stinging word: “preposterous.” Hillman and his office were right at
the center of all of these matters.
Hillman
and the Siegelman Case
And
then we come to Alabama, and the prosecution of Governor Siegelman.
Now
we still don’t know all the specifics of Karl Rove’s manipulation of matters in
the Department of Justice. We do know that he was feverishly involved, and that
manifested itself in the decision to sack nine (and perhaps as many as a dozen)
U.S. attorneys who he felt were failing to take instructions with an
appropriate level of party discipline.
It
seems reasonably clear that one of Rove’s key levers at Justice throughout this
period was the Public Integrity Section (PIN). This is both because PIN had
responsibility for prosecuting corrupt politicians and because of its key role
in the elections process. At this point, we have a much more detailed profile
of the misconduct in the Civil Rights Division than the Public Integrity
Section—largely because a significant number of former Civil Rights Division
attorneys have come forward to describe exactly what went on. The evidence for
the political manipulation of PIN is of a different nature, but it is arguably
even more powerful.
The
starting point is a study done by two professors at the University of
Minnesota. They examined the Bush Justice Department’s record of criminal
prosecutions of public officials since 2001—that is, since Noel Hillman came to
head the unit that handled the prosecution of public officials. And they found
that after Mr. Hillman showed up on the scene, seven cases were opened against
Democrats for every one case against a Republican. Professors Shields and Cragan state that
“the current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have
engaged in political profiling.”
The
“Abramoff Prosecutor”
The
place where this profiling occurred and from which it was orchestrated was Noel
Hillman’s PIN.
Hillman
seems to have become deeply involved in Alabama matters from a fairly early
point. He was touted at the time of his nomination as the “Abramoff
prosecutor,” because the investigation of matters relating to Jack Abramoff was
the highest profile single pending case within PIN. The Abramoff investigation
led smack into Alabama at a very early stage, and a platoon of Abramoff
protégés were deeply engaged in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election. And
they were all deeply involved in the effort to oust then-Governor Don
Siegelman. Not only that, it seems that the campaign to defeat Siegelman—run by
current governor Bob Riley—was fueled to a considerable extent by
Abramoff-related money.
Few
figures play quite so critical a role in the entire Abramoff case as Michael
Scanlon; he sits right at the middle of the case, offering the essential links
between Abramoff and Tom DeLay. Yet it seems forgotten that Scanlon’s primary
link—what got him established in GOP circles in Washington—was his service to current
Alabama Governor Bob Riley. His political career was launched as Riley’s
Congressional press secretary. Scanlon left Riley to work for Tom DeLay and
then went to work for Jack Abramoff. He has since pleaded guilty to conspiring
to bribe a member of Congress. A Senate Report prepared under the supervision
of John McCain details how Scanlon and Abramoff funnelled Choctaw funds into
the Alabama gubernatorial race in 2002. They had a simple goal: to sink
Siegelman. And they pursued it by telling their Choctaw clients that
Siegelman’s lottery plans would undercut their casino gambling revenue. The
solution, they argued: pump money into Bob Riley’s campaign to defeat him.
Election
Fraud in Baldwin County
A
second key figure from the Alabama clan of Abramoff associates is Dan Gans, who
served as Riley’s chief of staff both in Washington and Montgomery. He left
Riley to work with Ed Buckham and Christine DeLay at the Alexander Strategy
Group, which has been repeatedly implicated in the Abramoff Scandal. Gans is a
Republican “voting technology expert” who played a mysterious role in the 2002
gubernatorial election—he was in Republican controlled Bay Minette, Alabama,
when 6,000 votes inexplicably shifted from Siegelman’s column to Riley’s due to
a “computer glitch.” Now this is significant for a number of reasons. The
likelihood that this was an innocent “computer glitch” in which only one single
candidate—Don Siegelman—lost votes is approximately zero. “Glitches” do occur
in computer vote processing, but they do not produce a shift in a single,
photo-finish election contest, and not affecting any other race. The only
explanation for this is willful manipulation of the voting equipment, and that
is a very serious crime. Indeed, Auburn University’s Professor James Gundlach
studied the 2002 returns in Baldwin County and found all clues pointing to the
same result:
Someone
is controlling the computer to produce the different results. Once any computer
produces different election results, any results produced by the same equipment
operated by the same people should be considered too suspect to certify without
an independently supervised recount.2
The
irregularities identified by Gundlach are far more severe than those which
occurred in the Ukrainian presidential elections of October 31, 2004, which the
United States Government denounced as fraudulent, forcing a new vote which
overturned the officially certified results of the first round. In reaching
these conclusions, the U.S. Government relied on exactly the sort of sampling
comparisons that Gundlach used in his study. So how did the law enforcement
authorities with responsibility for this issue behave?
Well,
that would be two gentlemen who are now both federal judges. One, then-Alabama
Attorney General William Pryor, intervened in opposition to Siegelman’s
demands for a recount connected with this serious irregularity—essentially
shutting the process down. Indeed, Pryor seems to have done everything within
his power to obscure the matter and to insure that Siegelman was defeated.
Pryor’s partisan interests throughout this process were completely obvious. As
was his interest in avoiding any deep examination of the strange events that
had transpired in GOP-controlled Baldwin County, Alabama.