“Of all the interesting odors hovering in the wake of the exiting Bush administration, the most pervasive smell could prove to be the sickly scent of corruption. The reek sank as far south as Mississippi, and will likely take Congress years to clean, if it manages to get its hands on a big enough mop.
Congressional Democrats are repeating a failed 2007 effort to drag former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove to testify on the alleged politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Rep. John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, fired off another subpoena to Rove last month, demanding his presence at a Feb. 2 hearing.

Conyers also wants Rove to address questions on the Justice Department’s firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, an issue that first prompted suspicion about the politicizing of the Justice Department.

A series of DOJ internal e-mails contains a list of targets, rated first to last according to their sense of “loyalty to the President and Attorney General.”
Rove Goes Local

Mississippi U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton was one of the names on a 26-member hit-list, but Lampton held his job after bringing a series of indictments aimed specifically at Democratic judges and a prominent Democratic fundraiser.”

Read the rest here.

The letter closes “. . . justice and fairness demands that a truly independent investigation be undertaken by a special prosecutor with the necessary tools to ensure that the thoughtful objectives of your Committee are accomplished. The public’s confidence that America’s criminal justice system does not in any way tolerate taking political prisoners, Democrat or Republican, and the public’s confidence in the Justice Department’s prosecutive decisions will only be restored when all parties having a role in Paul Minor and other political defendants’ political prosecutions across the country are fully investigated, held accountable and brought to justice.”

You can read the full letter here.

“Alabama Governor Don Siegelman had it all — popularity, a governor’s chair and a seemingly normal politician’s life — until he found himself on the other end of a US Attorney appointed by President George W. Bush.

Siegelman, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2006, was released on bail last April pending appeal after media reports — including those of Raw Story — revealed myriad irregularities surrounding his prosecution.

Among the relevations: the husband of the US Attorney who prosecuted Siegelman was a close associate of former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and worked as campaign manager for one of Siegelman’s gubernatorial opponents. An Alabama Republican whistleblower said that Siegelman was deliberately targeted and fingered Rove, asserting that he’d said he’d push the Justice Department to end Siegelman’s political career.”

Read the full story here.

The report covers abuses that are familiar: secret domestic wire-tapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, and so on. But it also highlights - putting first and foremost - a section called “Politicization of the Justice Department.” It explores in detail the way in which the Bush administration used a department with enormous powers, which is supposed to administer the law impartially, for partisan purposes. 

The report points to the prosecutions of Governor Siegelman, Georgia Thompson, and Cyril Wecht, as well as Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz and Paul Minor and says, “Each of these matters presented at best a questionable exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and they often involved charges that appear to have elevated routine political fund-raising or similarly mundane conduct into aggressive federal criminal charges.”

It is difficult to argue, in light of the extensive, detailed evidence compiled in the report, that the Bush administration was not engaged in political prosecutions. Congress has subpoenaed extensive information in connection with these matters and is still awaiting many answers. The report seems designed to remind people that Congress is still demanding a great deal of information about these prosecutions and that once the new administration comes in, a great deal of that was previously hidden will likely be released.

You can read the full report here.

Mr. Schlozman’s bias was clear. “When a colleague reported that he had been given an office next to a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal affairs group, Mr. Schlozman responded in an e-mail message: ‘Just between you and me, we hired another member of ‘the team’ yesterday. And still another ideological comrade will be starting in one month. So we are making progress.’”

According to the Times: “The report found that Mr. Schlozman had selected conservative lawyers for prime assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division because they were seen as liberals who were opposed to his political agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Mr. Schlozman left. The transfers, the report found, violated federal civil service law and ‘constituted misconduct.’”

When Justice Department officials are chosen for ideological reasons, it should not be surprising if partisan prosecutions result.

Read the entire story here.

Lindsay Beyerstein and Larisa Alexandrovna

The federal judge who denied a prominent Democratic fundraiser’s motion for release pending appeal last week is a former client and protégé of former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. 

On Aug. 15, US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Priscilla Owen (above right) upheld a lower court’s decision to keep Mississippi attorney Paul Minor in jail pending his appeal, adding more controversy to a case already steeped by allegations of both a politically motivated prosecution and conflicts of interest on the part of the US Attorney. 

Minor, a once-prominent trial lawyer, was formerly Mississippi’s largest Democratic donor and made millions from a 1998 settlement with tobacco companies of a lawsuit for costs incurred by Medicare from smoking-related illnesses. The suit kindled resentment among Republicans who had been beneficiaries of the tobacco companies’ largesse.

Owen’s two-sentence order reads: “Minor has failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence that he is not likely to pose a danger to the community if released.”

Minor was convicted of mail fraud and bribery in 2007. The prosecution has contended that Minor is dangerous because he violated the terms of his pre-trial bond two years ago. The defense countered that Minor’s rule-breaking was trivial, non-violent in nature, and unlikely to recur because Minor has now been successfully treated for his drinking problem.

As reported in Raw Story’s ongoing award-nominated series, The Permanent Republican Majority, many saw the two Minor trials – which included as co-defendants Justices Wes Teel and John Whitfield, who were also found guilty, and Justice Oliver Diaz, who was not – as connected with the politicization of the US Department of Justice and the alleged use of US Attorneys by former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to target political opponents and perceived enemies of the Bush administration. (See links to part 4, 5, 6, and 7 of the series following this article.) 

Both Minor and Diaz allege that they were victims of political prosecution orchestrated by Rove.

It is the alleged involvement of Karl Rove in the prosecutions of Paul Minor – as well as the better-known case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman – that has raised eyebrows among Minor supporters about Owen’s recent ruling.

Keep Reading.

Murray Waas

The Justice Department filed papers in court late Monday asking a federal judge to temporarily set aside his own order directing White House officials to testify before Congress about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

The filing was in response to a July 31 opinion by U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates that the Bush administration’s claims of executive privilege in refusing to allow White House officials to testify about the firings was “unprecedented” and “entirely unsupported by existing case law.”

The Bush administration action indicates that despite recent correspondence to Congress suggesting otherwise, it is still strongly resisting subpoenas of White House officials to testify about the politically sensitive issue of the firings of the U.S. attorneys.

In his decision, Bates said he doubted that if the White House or administration appealed his decision, they would have an even remote possibility of prevailing:

“The aspect of this lawsuit that is unprecedented is the notion that [former White House Counsel Harriett] Miers [one of those subpoenaed] is absolutely immune from compelled testimony.” 

Continue Reading…

Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth

I usually shy away from conspiracy theories.

When the Democrats and their attorneys began claiming last year that the Bush administration was using its prosecutorial might to target opposition candidates and their major financial supporters, I greeted the allegation with a skeptical eye.

I’m not so sure anymore.

This past week’s developments in the four-year-old investigation into the failed Mississippi Beef Processors plant seem timed to help derail Democrat Ronnie Musgrove’s bid to snatch one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats from Republican hands.

Three Georgia businessmen, one by one over the course of four days, entered guilty pleas to federal charges arising out of the Yalobusha County beef plant’s quick and costly demise.

The three, all executives with The Facility Group of Smyrna, Ga., were largely left off the hook on the more serious charges that they had swindled the state out of at least $2 million and had left the plant’s vendors and contractors holding the bag.

Instead, they were allowed in a plea bargain to confess to trying to buy influence with Musgrove by steering $25,000 to the then-governor’s unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2003.

The orchestrated guilty pleas — and the prosecutors’ suggestion that more indictments could be forthcoming — are a boon to the campaign of Republican Roger Wicker, who was appointed to the vacant Senate seat in December but is considered vulnerable. They leave a cloud over Musgrove in voters minds and provide more fodder for negative campaign ads from the GOP camp, even though Musgrove has not been charged with any wrongdoing and there’s nothing in the court records to document he did anything illegal.

Musgrove may have put himself at risk of guilt by association by accepting campaign donations from some scoundrels. That’s a fact. But whose campaign finance reports, including Wicker’s or Gov. Haley Barbour’s, could stand up to the close scrutiny that the federal prosecutors decided to give this one?

Some of what The Facility Group did in helping Musgrove’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign is copied by businesses all the time. Corporations routinely form PACs as a way to skirt the $1,000 contribution limit on corporations, and they give money to candidates in hopes of securing access and favorable treatment. If the feds were to prosecute every political donor who had a state contract, they could fill up all of the federal courtrooms in Mississippi with defendants.

What the Facility Group did that was blatantly illegal, according to the original indictment, was how it got the company employees to pony up for Musgrove. The corporation’s executives allegedly asked employees to write $1,000 personal checks to the Musgrove campaign and then reimbursed them with enough bonus in their paychecks to cover the contribution, thus concealing that the money actually came from The Facility Group.

There’s no evidence, however, that Musgrove was aware of the scheme.

And as far as The Facility Group winning the $3.5 million contract in 2003 to manage the design and construction of the troubled plant, the indictment hints that Musgrove may have steered away another interested bidder, but it is thin on proof.

The Facility Group was awarded the contract by the state’s Land, Water and Timber Resources Board, not by Musgrove. The governor personally didn’t have a vote on that decision, although his economic development director, Bob Rohrlack, was co-chairman and did. However, also among the nine board members who voted unanimously to hire The Facility Group was the other co-chairman, Agriculture Commissioner Lester Spell. Spell, it should be remembered, avoided political demise from the beef plant debacle by conveniently converting to the Republican Party.

The point is, there are a lot of folks who share responsibility for what went wrong with Mississippi Beef Processors and the $55 million it cost taxpayers. The project was ill-conceived from the start. One crook, Richard Hall Jr., was recruited to own and run the plant. Another crook, Sean Carothers, was hired to build it. And then a team of crooks , The Facility Group , was paid to try to salvage it.

Musgrove, though, was at most a minor player in the mess.

Yet the efforts to link him publicly to the corruption scandal, using the combined power of the federal prosecutors and a Republican state auditor , have intensified since Musgrove announced his intentions to challenge Wicker for the Senate seat.

The conspiracy theorists see a pattern. They cite the unrelated bribery convictions of Democratic former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and Mississippi trial lawyer Paul Minor, a major donor to Democratic candidates, as earlier proof that political affiliation is determining who gets investigated and prosecuted by the Justice Department. That allegation is being looked at by congressional panels even while both convictions are on appeal.

As with most conspiracy theories, events don’t always fit the pattern perfectly. Richard Scruggs, Mississippi’s most famous and wealthiest trial lawyer, is now in federal prison following a separate bribery probe. Scruggs may have given more money over the years to Democrats than Republicans, but the brother-in-law of Trent Lott was also well-connected in the GOP.

Still, the federal government’s help in slandering Musgrove less than 90 days before the election has a suspicious feel to it.

Why have prominent Democrats in the Deep South been the victims of apparent political prosecutions under the Bush Justice Department?

The prosecutions of Paul Minor in Mississippi and Don Siegelman in Alabama can be traced to legal and political battles over tobacco and gambling, according to a compelling new article by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane at Jackson Free Press.

Why are trial attorney Paul Minor and former Mississippi state judges Wes Teel and John Whitfield currently in federal prison? Alexandrovna and Kane point to Minor’s courtroom victories over tobacco companies in the 1990s. Teel and Whitfield appear to have been “collateral damage” in an effort to shut down Minor’s financial support of Democratic causes.

Minor represented plaintiffs in a case that wound up with the four largest American tobacco companies paying $246 billion to states in the largest civil settlement in history.

The tobacco companies–R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, and Philip Morris–were not happy to see Minor make millions from the deal and then become a generous contributor to Democratic candidates and campaigns.

Republican supporters of the tobacco companies were even less pleased. GOP bitterness over the tobacco settlement led to a tort-reform movement, designed to give corporations the upper hand in legal battles with consumers. At the center of this movement was Karl Rove, who had served as a consultant for tobacco giant Philip Morris.

Rove helped Republicans take control of state courts in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. And when George W. Bush became president in 2000, it appears that Rove launched a plan to investigate and prosecute prominent progressives in the Deep South. Two of those progressives were Paul Minor in Mississippi and Don Siegelman in Alabama.

Alexandrovna and Kane show how the two states at the Heart of Dixie were entertwined in the GOP strategy. Siegelman’s plan for an education lottery in Alabama was considered a threat to gambling interests in Mississippi. So disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff led a campaign to raise money to defeat Siegelman’s plan and protect the gaming interests of Mississippi Choctaws, an Abramoff client.

Meanwhile, a plan was afoot in Mississippi for Republicans to take over the governorship for only the second time since Reconstruction. Paul Minor, a major Democratic donor and a leading opponent of tort reform, was under federal investigation, and word of that probe leaked at the height of the governor’s race.

That helped ensure that Haley Barbour would defeat Democrat Ronnie Musgrove in the governor’s race.

And what about Barbour’s background? He’s a former lobbyist for Philip Morris and Big Tobacco.

Since taking office in 2004, Barbour has called a special legislative session to ban class-action lawsuits and cap damages in most tort cases. He also won a lengthy court battle to withdraw funding from a program that had been successful in reducing smoking among middle- and high-school students.