Back in October, a nationally known print journalist told Harpers’ Scott Horton, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Everything I’ve been told by the convicted defendants checks out as the gospel truth. And everything I’m told by federal prosecutors who pushed the case turns out either to be an outrageous lie or at least a very serious distortion. And the local journalists who wrote the most about the case all behave like they’re accessories after the fact in a criminal investigation.”
The journalist was describing the Don Siegelman case in Alabama, and doing a pretty good job of it.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz in recent weeks about the report “60 Minutes” had been preparing on the controversy and, after having seen it, I’m delighted CBS has made it available for embedding. Please take a few minutes, even if you’ve heard the Siegelman story before, to take a look.
We haven’t struggled for examples of the Bush White House and the Republican Machine making a mockery of our justice system and the rule of law, but this is one of those examples that just leaves one shaking one’s head. No one wants to believe GOP corruption on this scale is even possible, and yet, it’s not only possible, it actually happened.
Paul Kiel noted:
60 Minutes’ piece is an excellent distillation of the case. There’s Republican lawyer Jill Simpson’s recollection of a conference call where Karl Rove’s friend William Canary recalled talking to his buddy Karl about sicking the Justice Department on Siegelman, saying that his “girls would take care of him,” referring to U.S. attorney Leura Canary (his wife) and another U.S. attorney in the state. And there’s the Justice Department’s renewal of vigor after the first prosecution against Siegelman fell flat on its face.
But there was more, the most significant revelation being that prosecutors had coached their star witness to the point where he had to write his carefully recollected testimony over and over again to make sure he got it right. Such notes, 60 Minutes reports, should have been turned over to Siegelman’s defense attorneys. They were not.
And here’s the gem to end all gems:
I am now hearing from readers all across Northern Alabama—from Decatur to Huntsville and considerably on down—that a mysterious “service interruption” blocked the broadcast of only the Siegelman segment of 60 Minutes this evening. The broadcaster is Channel 19 WHNT, which serves Northern Alabama and Southern Tennessee. This station was noteworthy for its hostility to Siegelman and support for his Republican adversary. The station ran a trailer stating “We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a techincal problem with CBS out of New York.” I contacted CBS News in New York and was told that “there is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”
The local station is — you guessed it — owned by a family that contributes heavily to the Republican Party.
The mind reels.