Siegelman Sentence Delayed As DOJ Hides Conflict Data

[mod mom]

Siegelman Sentence Delayed As DOJ Hides Conflict Data
By Andrew Kreig

The Alabama judge presiding over the notorious Bush prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman postponed the defendant’s re-sentencing last week while prosecutors continue to stonewall defense requests for documents showing whether federal prosecutors violated the defendant's right to an honest, unbiased prosecutor. On Sept. 22, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of Montgomery postponed his re-sentencing of Siegelman and co-defendant Richard Scrushy on corruption charges. Decisions by the Supreme Court and other appellate bodies reduced charges, requiring re-sentencing.

Siegelman, at right, a Democrat, was the state's governor from 1999 to 2003. He claims that authorities for five years have illegally blocked his document requests regarding Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, left, who recused herself from his case according to conventional wisdom. William Canary, her husband, was Siegelman’s longtime political enemy and the 2002 campaign manager for Bob Riley, Siegelman’s Republican opponent in that year's election for governor. Siegelman narrowly lost after election software recorded a 6,000 drop in his totals in Baldwin County after polls closed.

-snip
update commentary: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a scholar, author and former Reagan adminsitrtaion assistnt reasury secretary who investigated the Siegelman case:

As our Justice Integrity Project has found typical in such disgraceful Bush-era prosecutions, the Obama DOJ is continuing to enforce a code of silence amongst authorities, sometimes by ruthless measures and sometimes by lavish rewards. One way, for example, was blackmailing and threatening Nick Bailey, the chief witness against the defendants. Another in 2009 was to fire Tamarah Grimes, a Republican and the DOJ's top paralegal on the Siegelman/Scrushy prosecution. Grimes claimed vast waste and unfairness in the Siegelman prosecution, including Canary’s continued direction of Middle District prosecutors despite her public claim of recusa because of her husband's work. Canary’s husband is William Canary, head of the Business Council of Alabama and campaign manager in 2002 for Siegelman’s successful Republican opponent, Bob Riley, right.

Dana Jill Simpson, a longtime Republican activist and political operative, stepped forward in 2007 to swear that Canary told Republican insiders after Riley’s 2002 election that he was in communication with “Karl” about Siegelman’s political future -- and that Canary’s “girls” would ensure that Siegelman wouldn’t be a future threat. Simpson, who said she assumed from the context that Canary was describing his friend Karl Rove, also swore in testimony to House Judiciary Committee staff that Robert Riley, the governor’s son, claimed in 2005 that Fuller “hated” Siegelman and would be assigned a prosecution targeting the former governor.


-snip

http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=467:siegelman-sentence-delayed-as-doj-hides-conflict-data&catid=44:myblog

worth a full read! :mad:

[OnyxCollie]

1. K&R. nt

[Raksha]

2. K & R - it's disgraceful the way the Obama administration

continues to cover up for the Bush criminals.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. The judge should not even be sitting on the case. He a Rove bot pawn.

From wiki:
"He denied a motion for his recusal in the case that was based on his 43.75% interest in Doss Aviation, Inc. Doss contracted extensively for the Federal Government and those contracts were subject to annual renewal by the government.
Fuller was also criticized for refusing to allow Siegelman to remain free on appeal and the Appeals Court overruled Fuller's decision. Siegelman argued that Fuller "gave the jury false instructions."

Unfortunately, that same wiki article has a fawning paragraph about a reporter for the Republican newspaper who wrote many anti-Siegelman articles.

[mod mom]

8. "The Pork Barrel World of Judge Mark Fuller"

The Pork Barrel World of Judge Mark Fuller
By Scott Horton

For the last week, we’ve been examining the role played by Judge Mark Everett Fuller in the trial, conviction, and sentencing of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. Today, we examine a post-trial motion, filed in April 2007, asking Fuller to recuse himself based on his extensive private business interests, which turn very heavily on contracts with the United States Government, including the Department of Justice.

The recusal motion rested upon details about Fuller’s personal business interests. On February 22, 2007, defense attorneys obtained information that Judge Fuller held a controlling 43.75% interest in government contractor Doss Aviation, Inc. After investigating these claims for over a month, the attorneys filed a motion for Fuller’s recusal on April 18, 2007. The motion stated that Fuller’s total stake in Doss Aviation was worth between $1-5 million, and that Fuller’s income from his stock for 2004 was between $100,001 and $1 million dollars.

In other words, Judge Fuller likely made more from his business income, derived from U.S. Government contracts, than as a judge. Fuller is shown on one filing as President of the principal business, Doss Aviation, and his address is shown as One Church Street, Montgomery, Alabama, the address of the Frank M. Johnson Federal Courthouse, in which his chambers are located.


Doss Aviation, Inc. (motto: “Total Quality Service Isn’t Expensive, It’s Priceless”) and its subsidiary, Aureus International, hold contracts with a number of government agencies. Quoting from defense counsel’s motion for recusal (emphasis in the original):

Doss Aviation, Inc. has been awarded numerous federal military contracts from the United States government worth over $258,000,000, including but not limited to: An August 2002 contract with the Air Force for $30,474,875 for Helicopter Maintenance, a November 2003 contract with the Navy for $5,190,960 for aircraft refueling, a February 2006 contract with the Air Force for over $178,000,000 for training pilots and navigators, and a March 2006 contract with the Air Force for $4,990,541.28 for training at the United States Air Force Academy. The February 2006 contract with the Air Force for over $178,000,000 is for 10 ½ years, but is renewable from year to year . . .

An Enterprise Ledger article dated April 3, 2005, states that “FBI agents, military and civilian pilots and medical professionals all over the world wear (Aureus International) products which are cut, sewn, inspected, bagged and shipped from its home in Enterprise.”

-snip
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000762

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. Yay!!! for you. Saving.

People like you who find and post information like that is what makes DU so extra special.


:hi:

[mod mom]

11. Thanks. I wrote Gov Seigelman while he was in prison & I was working

on gathering evidence about the '04 election theft (he believes his election was also stolen). He sent me back a very kind thank you letter and I have promised to keep his story alive & in the spotlight.

:hi:

[L. Coyote]

4. Rethinking Public Integrity Prosecutions

June 29, 12:09 PM, 2010 · No Comment · Previous · Next
Siegelman Conviction Vacated by Supreme Court
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/06/hbc-90007323
By Scott Horton

The Supreme Court has just handed down an order vacating the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman for honest-services fraud and referring the case for review by the Eleventh Circuit in light of its ruling in Skilling v. United States. (PDF) This decision does not necessarily mark the end of Siegelman’s ordeal. The Supreme Court split on the constitutionality of the honest-services fraud statute under which Siegelman was convicted, on evidence subsequently revealed to have been improperly coerced. Three justices felt the entire statute was unconstitutional and should fall. The remaining six attempted to salvage something from it but also expressed concern about the way the Justice Department was interpreting and applying the statute, and insisted that it be considerably narrowed. With this decision, the ball is back in the Justice Department’s court. It should take full measure of the Skilling decision and abandon the case against Siegelman, which is probably the single most abusive use of the honest-services fraud statute yet—surely more abusive than that of the Skilling case itself. But we’re dealing with a Justice Department that never admits a lapse in judgment, much less abuse of prosecutorial discretion—both of which were in ready supply in this highest profile political prosecution in recent American history. So it will be up to the Eleventh Circuit to apply the Skilling ruling, and then perhaps the case will make a return trip to the High Court if it reinstates any aspect of the Siegelman conviction.

=========================
Rethinking Public Integrity Prosecutions
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007870

.... With the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which opened the floodgates of money as political speech, the efforts to criminalize campaign funding abuses seem truly absurd. The Justice Department’s efforts have boomeranged. Rather than demonstrating that the Justice Department is a guardian of the highest standards of conduct, the Department and its prosecutors have grown ever more deeply mired in partisan political muck. The Department’s reputation now stands at a modern low, thanks to the political machinations demonstrated in the U.S. attorney’s scandal, prosecutions like those of Stevens, Siegelman, and Minor, and the validation of torture and abuse and warrantless surveillance in the service of unethical clients.

“Conduct that people think is reprehensible or immoral doesn’t mean it’s criminal,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer observes. Indeed, the solution to much of the public integrity conundrum lies in transparency of process—insuring that the public learns of the foibles and ethics lapses of political leaders and can make appropriate decisions guided by this information. This, however, is not the proper role of the Justice Department, which seems these days almost obsessed with safeguarding its own dark secrets and occasional brushes with criminality from public gaze.

The Department’s public integrity section is under new leadership—the most highly qualified it has seen in recent decades. It has seized the right moment for an internal reassessment of the approach to prosecuting public corruption. That should entail recognizing that dedication to fair process must take a center seat even if some scoundrels get off the hook as a result. This reassessment must include some introspection about mistakes and abuses of the past as well, because the most serious misjudgments in the public integrity arena relate to active cases in which the Justice Department is defending utterly indefensible positions. In the end, the Justice Department will also have to learn to operate in the harsh sunlight of public attention, disclosing its mistakes and striving to correct them. This is the essential path back to public trust after years spent straying in the wilderness.

[L. Coyote]

5. Siegelman: What Happened to President Obama's Moral Compass?

Siegelman: What Happened to President Obama's Moral Compass?
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Siegelman-What-Happened-t-by-Roger-Shuler-110914-635.html
By Roger Shuler


Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the most high-profile victim of a Bush-era political prosecution, had a strong reaction to recent news that advisors to Barack Obama feared a coup if the administration pursued prosecutions for war crimes.

Obama's team likely also feared reprisals if they pursued accountability on other justice matters, such as political prosecutions and the unlawful firings of U.S. attorneys. That means the White House, under a Democratic president, is more or less saying to Siegelman and others, "The rule of law doesn't apply to you."

Not surprisingly, Siegelman finds such a position abhorrent, and that comes through clearly in his guest editorial at the D.C.-based Justice Integrity Project, led by Andrew Kreig. The Siegelman column is titled "The President Needs to Engage his Moral GPS," and it raises serious questions about Obama's reluctance to lead on issues of profound importance.

.............

========================================
Siegelman: President Needs to Engage His Moral GPS
http://justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=462:don-Siegelman-the-president-needs-to-engage-his-moral-gps&catid=44:myblog


The Justice Integrity Project presents as guest columnist former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (1999-2003). He was his state's leading Democrat until he was convicted in 2006 of corruption charges trumped up by the Bush Justice Department, as we and others have documented in .... (LINKS follow)

By Don Siegelman

People are guided in their actions by their moral compass, by their moral GPS. If you don't have your moral GPS on, or if you don't have your moral compass locked in, then you're going to be swinging wildly from one direction to the other. But if you're guided by your sense of morality, then you will try to do the right thing. That doesn't always mean you'll succeed. But you can try.

With regard to your story about torture, clearly if one's moral compass is locked in, the decision is easy to make that the United States does not tolerate torture as a means of interrogation. The President should have pursued those responsible for implementing torture as a means of interrogation, and could have explained to the country that this is something that we must do, in order for countries throughout the world, and peoples throughout the world, to once again have respect for the United States. He could explain to the people of the United States that his decision to pursue those responsible for torture was going to be unsettling to some high-ranking officials both in the military and those in the former Bush Administration.
If he had done that, if he had laid that predicate to the American people, then it would have been less likely that those who were contemplating retaliating against the President for his investigation of torture would have followed through with their threat. But even if they did then the fight for what is right and just and in the United States' best interest would have been clearly delineated, laid out before the American people, and the American people would have sided with the President in his fight for truth. ...............

[L. Coyote]

6. Alabama Decisions Illustrate Abuse of Judicial Power

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/alabama-decisions-illustr_b_213732.html


The plight of litigants who face a biased judge is illustrated by the track record of a prominent Alabama federal judge, as well by major recent decisions requiring new trials in West Virginia and Georgia courts.

The track record of Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller of Montgomery, Alabama shows that he continues to supervise cases compromised by his personal, financial or political interests despite his promise at his 2002 confirmation hearing to recuse himself from any conflicts. .........

In Alabama, Fuller has declined to recuse himself from the Justice Department's prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a longtime personal and political foe. On May 15, my Huffington Post columndocumented this under the title, "Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge's 'Grudge', Evidence Shows....$300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge's Private Company." Others have published many criticisms of Siegelman's prosecution by the U.S Justice Department, making it the nation's most controversial criminal case of the past decade.

"The conduct in the federal court in Montgomery is an unprecedented disgrace," wrote Harper's columnist and Columbia University Law School professor Scott Horton, for example, in January 2008. .............

[L. Coyote]

7. Just Desserts? By Scott Horton

Just Desserts?
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002108
By Scott Horton


The story out of the Frank M. Johnson Federal Courthouse in Montgomery never seems to change. It is a chronicle of abusive conduct by a federal judge who treats his judicial duties with the same level of contempt he retains for the concept of justice itself. His name is Mark Everett Fuller, and according to the sworn account of a Republican operative, testifying before Congress, he was handpicked to manage a courtroom drama for the benefit of the Republican Party. His job was to destroy the state’s last Democratic Governor, Don Siegelman, and to send him off to prison, post-haste. And that’s exactly what he did.

Fuller denied without explanation the completely routine motion that Siegelman made to be let free on appeal. When the Court of Appeals directed him to state his reasons, he refused. They then directed him a second time to do so. He waited two months after the second order (and over three months after the original order) before acting, waiting until the Associated Press had published a major article bringing public attention to focus on the gross irregularities which marked his handling of the case and until Siegelman’s lawyers made an emergency motion to the Court of Appeals to act. Then, suddenly, he released a 30-page opinion. That opinion, which I have examined and shared with several of my lawyer and legal academic colleagues, is farcical, ...........

[patrice]

9. K&R

[JPZenger]

12. Its a shame coverup allowed to continue

In Jan. 2009, there was such a great opportunity for a white knight to be appointed as US Attorney to come in and shine a light on this darkness and disinfect the whole thing. Instead, the coverup was allowed to continue.

[Enthusiast]

13. Okay, die hard Obama supporters,

explain this to me. Why is the Obama DOJ supporting the GOP position?

[mod mom]

15. my guess is twofold:

1. addressing this leads to election fraud (I believe neither party wishes to seriously address this issue because the elite of both parties has NO interest in turning over the real vote to the people for fear of loss of power)

2. this opens a huge can of worms to the illegal activity within the military industrial complex (Judge Fuller makes a fortune from defense contracts he received from the * administration) and their workings and how it is ited to the judicial system. I don't believe the Obama Administration has the cojones to take this on. Just look how easily he folded on so many other areas that the GOP backs.

[Enthusiast]

16. Thanks for your explanation. nt

[Freddie Stubbs]

18. Sending a corrupt politician to jail is not the "GOP position"

[mod mom]

21. I hope I am misunderstanding your comment, but if you suggest Gov Seigelman

is a "corrupt politician" perhaps you are unaware of a few facts:

Less than a month after the Justice Department asked a judge to drop the case against former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska because of prosecutorial misconduct, 75 former state attorneys general from both parties have urged Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to conduct a similar investigation of the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, who was convicted nearly three years ago on bribery and corruption charges.

In a letter to Mr. Holder, the attorneys general said Mr. Siegelman’s defense lawyers had raised “gravely troublesome facts” about his prosecution that raise questions about the fairness and due process of the trial.

-snip
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22justice.html

[ck4829]

14. K&R

[amborin]

17. too late to rec, but thanks for posting this!

[librechik]

19. Huge Obama disappointment # one: The DOJ n/t

[Octafish]

20. ...and people wonder why I'm angry all the time.

Kick and Rec and keep on this until Rove, his cronies and the traitors they serve are in the penitentiary where they belong.

[Uncle Joe]

22. I can't help but wonder, what did Siegelman do to piss off so many PTBs in both parties?

I can't help but to view him as a political prisoner here in the good old U.S.

Thanks for the thread, mod mom.

[sabrina 1]

26. I don't know if this was reason, but I remember him being

very outspoken about Stolen Elections right before this political witch hunt began. He was a great Democratic Gov. and uses his voice to demand cleaner elections. The next thing I knew, he was arrested.

[SpiralHawk]

23. Kick - Republicon totalitarian "justice' is no justice at all

Why are the Prosecutors going all Occult (R) on the truth?

They are hiding their skanky Republicon Family Cesspool values and actions...

[sabrina 1]

24. Too late to rec this. One of the most egresgious, corrupt, political

prosecutions in this country and it is shameful that the current DOJ, which reversed the decision on Rep. Stevens due to prosecutorial ethical problems, has refused to end this witch hunt of Siegelman.

And they fired decent Republicans for telling the truth? And Karl Rove continues to be treated with respect and even awe by both parties.

[Ignis]

25. Here's another kick.

:kick: