Manafort Revelations Show Trump Team Crime, Legacy Of Injustice

by Andrew Kreig
editor, Justice Integrity Project

Among the remarkable Mueller probe revelations last week was the claim that attorneys for former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort have been sharing confidential information about the special counsel’s investigation with the legal team of “Individual 1,” aka President Trump.

The New York Times broke the main story electronically on Nov. 27 under the headline, Manafort’s Lawyer Is Said to Have Briefed Trump Team on Mueller Talks. Reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman wrote:

A lawyer for Paul Manafort repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

A number prominent legal pundits soon warned that such cooperation was not only rare but could be regarded as criminally illegal and / or unethical, thereby triggering potential liability for President Trump, Manafort and the lawyers involved. Potential problems could include obstruction of justice (under the theory that the actions could have the intent and effect of undermining the special counsel’s investigation). The conduct also could provide grounds for impeachment of Trump and potential bar sanctions against attorneys involved.

More importantly, the controversy illustrates continuing tension between the federal enforcement “community” and the opportunists (or worse) who operate within the justice system or on its fringes. Such conflicts are especially important and outrageous as the Trump administration draws upon some of the very worst Bush administration attorneys.

Among the many such shocking situations, this column focuses on three such officials who have become extremely prominent and otherwise newsworthy, in part because of their ties to President Trump and his team.

• Manafort’s lead defense attorney, Kevin Downing, is a former senior litigator within the Justice Department’s tax fraud section, which missed a series of colossal tax frauds, including by Downing’s future client Manafort. Downing reportedly is also one of the attorneys involved in the liaison with the Trump White House that the New York Times reported last week;
• U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta as U.S. attorney for Miami in the Bush administration was involved both in major tax fraud cover-ups and also in whitewashing the federal-state prosecution of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is a Trump friend and neighbor who is back in the news this week with the beginning of a major defamation trial in West Palm Beach, Florida; and
• Our third Bush-era former Justice Department official is Matthew Whitaker, whom Trump named as acting attorney general after Whitaker tried out for the job by arguing on cable news shows that Mueller’s investigation are excessive and unwarranted. Whitaker’s career includes a stint as a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for southern Iowa, where he vigorously prosecuted one of his political enemies whom a jury acquitted in just two hours.

An Overview

Let’s provide some context before exploring more thoroughly the abusive conduct of these three officials-- and the utter failure of watchdog mechanisms, whether in the Justice Department, courts, Congress or the media, to do much about these problems, at least so far.

The problem of rogue officials using their powers within the U.S. Justice Department for political purposes exploded into the national consciousness in late 2006 and early 2007 with the so-called “U.S. Attorney firing scandal.” Bush administration forced the resignation of nine (by some counts eight) of the nation’s 93 powerful regional U.S. attorneys.

Most of the mainstream media focused on the injustice visited upon that handful of prosecutors who were fired for their failure to bring political cases (often involving prosecuting Democrats on flimsy charges, including “corruption” and “vote fraud”).

Yet the much larger real scandal was the actions by the remaining U.S. attorneys around the nation to keep their jobs despite pressures from Bush White House senior advisor Karl Rove and ambitious political operatives in the Justice Department.

Their goal? Apparently this: To drive prominent Democrats out of office and into prison, often via flimsy “corruption” charges of the kind that framed (there’s no other word for it) former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his state’s most prominent Democrat. 

Siegelman was sentenced to prison for a seven-year term, with significant segments in solitary confinement to punish him for interviews about the gross injustice. The nearly two decades of prosecutions have helped destroy the Alabama Democratic Party aside from the unique circumstance of former Siegelman attorney Doug Jones' victory over accused pedophile Roy Moore for a U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick to become attorney general last year.

Other goals of the politically driven Bush Justice Department included protecting important Republicans and Republican-oriented institutions from prosecution. Another was to lay the groundwork for current voter suppression efforts by hoked-up prosecutions and fear-mongering about the largely non-existent problem of individual voter fraud while ignoring larger scale efforts to rig entire elections, particularly in swing states.

Down With Tyranny was prominent among the news outlets, primarily in the alternative media, that helped expose these problems in the Siegelman case and similar situations. One of dozens of reports that I wrote about this was for the Huffington Post in 2009, “Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows... $300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company.”

Democrats Forgive, Forget?

Sadly, however, the Obama administration took little interest in documented injustices in these kinds of cases throughout the nation.

In many instances, Obama officials sought to ratify in the courts the abusive tactics initiated by the Bush Justice Department. Obama Attorney Gen. Eric Holder and Solicitor Gen. Elena Kagan, for example, opposed Siegelman’s appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court that had been endorsed by unprecedented numbers of law professors and former state attorneys general who underscored the injustice of his prosecution. Holder, after a recent speaking appearance at the Center for American Progress seeking to energize Democratic voters this year, told me in a brief interview that he was not familiar with the Siegelman case. That was a brush-off given the case’s notoriety. Holder had fired a Justice Department whistleblower against the government’s tactics {See “From Justice Dream Job to Nightmare…Tamarah Grimes, Justice Department Paralegal… Why This Whistleblower Was Dissed & Dismissed”, KNOW: The Magazine For Paralegals.} As if that weren’t enough to focus Holder’s attention on Alabama, his late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone, had integrated the University of Alabama in an iconic desegregation advance.

Where's Accountability?

So here we are, December 2018. The public faces large numbers of lingering injustices from the Bush era and large cadres of “law enforcers” from that period who have positioned themselves for higher office in an even more lawless Trump administration.

Let’s look again at Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lead defense attorney. The Manafort prosecution includes, among other charges, jury verdicts and Manafort’s later guilty plea involving Manafort’s receipt of $60 million in income from 2012 to 2016, a period when he reported just $13 million.

Downing left the Justice Department as a senior litigation counsel in mid-2012 for private practice. His representation of Manafort raises questions about "revolving door" justice.

In fairness to Downing, Manafort’s wrongdoing described in the Mueller indictment thus largely fell outside of Downing’s prominent role at the Justice Department’s tax fraud section. It's true also that Downing received an award from Holder for prosecuting fraud by Switzerland-based UBS, one of the world’s most influential financial companies.

However, the whistleblowing former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld portrays Downing in Birkenfeld’s 2016 memoir Lucifer’s Banker as one of the villains in what became one of the leading documented financial fraud investigations in U.S. history.

Birkenfeld asserts that Downing and his Justice Department team reacted with scorn and other hostility when Birkenfeld came to them voluntarily in 2007 with massive evidence revealing the identities of what he called 19,000 U.S. tax cheats who were part of a tax and money laundering fraud that UBS was perpetrating against the U.S. Treasury and public.

Birkenfeld writes that Downing and his team, under pressure for another major investigation that was failing, appeared to be frightened at the prospect of criminally prosecuting the powerful UBS and its ultra-wealthy clients. Instead, Birkenfeld alleges that they made him a convenient scapegoat with the help of the Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta.

Birkenfeld, a fall guy by his account, received a three-year prison term even though he was the one who alerted the federal government to the massive scheme and brought them the documentary evidence. Meanwhile, the Justice Department handled UBS higher-ups and their crooked clients almost entirely via civil actions far less onerous than criminal prosecution. At the same time, Birkenfeld and his attorneys learned in the midst of his ordeal that the Internal Revenue Service was collecting $15 billion in taxes and penalties from the UBS scandal, leading to a $104 million whistleblower award for Birkenfeld.

That’s history. What may be ahead is a claim by some legal pundits that Manafort, his attorneys and Trump’s team appear to have illegally colluded by conveying information this fall after Manafort’s plea deal in mid-September, as reported in the New York Times story.

Several experts have said there is no basis for “joint defense agreement” between a defendant who has pleaded guilty and others who are fighting the special counsel. We are reaching out to Downing for comment.

The Epstein Pedophile Scandal

Acosta, a Harvard-educated son of Cuban immigrants, became assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights beginning in 2003. 

The positioning provided the Bush administration with the politically useful, especially in Florida, a public image of a Hispanic professional in a key post. As it turns out, many of the key hiring decisions there were being made by Acosta's aide, Bradley Schlozman, who would be rebuked by the department’s Inspector General for improperly favoring conservatives in hiring decisions. 

Schlozman went on to become U.S. attorney in Kansas City where he became a notorious vote-suppression and "voter fraud" zealot who sought to crucify Democrats and minorities for relatively trivial misconduct in voter registration drives. In one such case, Schlozman and his colleagues threw the book at minimum-wage voter registration canvassers who made up names for voter registration lists but without proving that the fraud involved an effort to compromise actual voting. Yet that prosecution could be touted as "voter fraud" requiring "reforms" best categorized these as the voter suppression increasingly common in many GOP-controlled voting regions.

Acosta’s own most notorious action came when he approved a sweetheart plea deal for the billionaire pervert and investor Jeffrey Epstein after West Palm Beach police documented more than 100 “Jane Doe” complaints of teenage girls whom Epstein allegedly victimized in a ring targeting junior high and high school girls. Epstein used surrogates to recruit the girls to give him "massages" that evolved into sexual encounters at his mansion located in a ritzy area just a mile from the Mar-a-Lago estate Epstein’s friend Donald Trump.

What helped make the case outrageous is that Acosta ended a joint federal-state investigation with a highly unusual plea deal whereby Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution. Under a highly unusual provision of the plea deal, the government agreed not to investigate anyone else, including those who recruited the girls and Epstein’s high-powered friends. They included Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom.

As it turned out, Epstein served just 13 months and was permitted "work release" whereby he could leave a West Palm Beach jail during the day and return at night during his sentence. Acosta did not inform victims and their families of the terms of the sweetheart plea deal. That has prompted years of acrimony, litigation and adverse news commentary, including a major Miami Herald investigation published on Nov. 28 entitled "Perversion of Justice."

Herald reporters led by Julie K. Brown identified 60 victims, among other sources, focusing heavily on Acosta's decision-making more than a decade ago. Their powerful stories included How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.

Trump apparently rewarded Acosta by naming him in February 2017 as nominee to become Secretary of Labor, the federal government’s main post protecting American workers.

Some reporters at that point (including me) promptly highlighted Acosta's role in the Epstein case but senators proved too timid to question him in depth about it before his confirmation.

My colleague Wayne Madsen, editor of the Wayne Madsen Report and a former Navy intelligence officer, last year began reporting that two girls, aged 12 and 13, filed legal papers alleging that Epstein and Trump had raped them in the early 1990s in New York City.

Defendants denied the claims. The girls then withdrew their allegations shortly before the 2016 presidential election, with one accuser “Katie Johnson” (a pseudonym) claiming fear at the time from death threats from unknown persons.

Madsen and I documented the story last January in a series that included the segment underscoring the blackmail / extortion liabilities of such predatory behavior targeting underage girls: Trump’s multiple sex scandals endanger U.S. national security.

The accusations continue to percolate. This is in part because Acosta is reported to be a long-shot to be nominated at the next U.S. Attorney General. Trump has said he wants a loyalist in the position, unlike the now-dismissed Sessions, who recused himself from supervising Mueller because Sessions had been implicated with Russian contacts during the presidential campaign.

Beyond that, a much-delayed civil trial unfolds on Dec. 4 in West Palm Beach to resolve vexatious litigation and defamation claims between Epstein and Bradley J. Edwards and attorneys representing victims. Madsen and I were among the reporters planning to cover the trial.

The Next Mueller Boss

Finally, we revisit the appointment of the current acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, whose appointment by Trump without U.S. Senate confirmation has been widely denounced as unconstitutional tactic to shift supervision of the special counsel’s probe of alleged crime by Trump and his team away from the current supervisor, Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein.

As of this writing, Whitaker is not known to have interfered with the Mueller probe which Whitaker had denounced during his de facto "audition" for the Justice Department's post as a pro-Trump pundit on cable news shows. But that may be only because Whitaker's appointment is under several legal challenges, which are compounded by Whitaker’s remarkably shabby professional qualifications for such a high post.

News reports have indicated that Whitaker helped direct a scam company fined $26 million by the Federal Trade Commission for deceiving customers, for example, and that the company is currently under federal criminal investigation. These dubious achievements are chronicled in our column, updated almost daily, Trump's New Acting AG Is Unfit To Serve.

As indicated by that roundup, Whitaker’s critics have found a trove of unseemly conduct in his past. But perhaps most relevant to this column’s themes is his zealous prosecution beginning in 2007 of Iowa State Sen. Matt McCoy, a gay Democrat with a seemingly bright political future.

In a pattern similar to other Bush political prosecutions across the nation, Whitaker ruthlessly targeted McCoy as corrupt for seeking commissions totaling about $2,000 from a local company. But a federal jury ultimately acquitted McCoy in just two hours, as reported by the Washington Post Nov. 9 in Whitaker’s term as U.S. attorney in Iowa draws scrutiny.

Bottom line: The injustices portrayed above largely focus on the actions of just three prominent Trump-era alumns from the Bush era. We know lots about them now. Looking ahead, one question is whether anyone is going to do much to prevent similar abuses from the Trump administration's ex-Bushie  "law enforcers" that Senate Republicans are trying to confirm en masse into the federal judiciary and Justice Department.

In January 2009, President-elect Obama tried to mollify Republicans and the public by saying that he was "looking forward, not backward" regarding alleged Republican injustices during the Bush administration. That must not happen again with the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

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Justice Integrity Project editor Andrew Kreig is a Washington, DC-based reporter, attorney and author whose non-partisan project has long investigated political prosecutions and other official misconduct, including cover-up. He has extensively covered voter suppression, the Siegelman and Manafort federal corruption cases, and corrupt actions by prominent federal officials.

If Ole Trumpanzee Doesn't Even Have Any Coattails In An Alabama GOP Primary...

The final count in the Republican primary in Alabama was 164,524 (38.87%) for crackpot Roy Moore and 138,971 (32.83%) for Trump and McConnell-backed establishment incumbent Luther Strange. Another crackpot, Rep. Mo Brooks took 83,287 votes (19.68%) and a scattering of 7 vanity candidates split another 30-some-odd thousand votes between them. Moore and Strange will face off in a runoff on September 26, the winner of which will then face Democrat Doug Jones, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, who won his 8-person primary with 109,105 votes (66.12%) on December 12. The only poll out for the GOP runoff shows Moore beating Strange 45-34%. As of August 18, Strange and PACs backing him spent had spent $3.4 million and Team Moore had spent $127,000. Much of Strange's money came from McConnell and Trump.

So how will Trump and McConnell handle the runoff? Trump is already trying to protect his own tarnished image by claiming Strange only did as well as he did because of the Trumpnazee seal of approval. McConnell will spend more millions of dollars.

And while Moore has plenty of detractors in-state who see him as a fringe rabble-rouser, even Strange’s allies admit the race is an uphill battle-- one where heavy attacks from Washington-based outside groups risk backfiring on their candidate in a state where voters detest being told what to do.

“Luther’s liabilities are how he got there and that the McConnell Washington crowd have been so heavy-handed in supporting him,” said one Alabama Republican strategist who supports Strange in the race.

“We’re a state full of folks who like to fight, who are defiant, we don’t like following rules, and that’s why Roy Moore is popular,” said David Azbell, a longtime Alabama GOP strategist. “A lot of folks think he can shoot off a lot of fireworks in D.C. while not doing a lot of harm.”

Alabama voters are also furious over a series of scandals that have rocked statehouse, and that taint got all over Strange with his appointment to the Senate. Strange had been the state attorney general in charge of the investigation into disgraced Gov. Robert Bentley (R)-- until Bentley appointed him to fill Sessions’ seat shortly before Bentley was forced to resign over a sex scandal.

Some saw Bentley’s support as a quid-pro-quo to get Strange out of his business. That’s a problem when paired with the association with McConnell, who has become a bogeyman on the right.

“Any time you’re the incumbent and 70 percent of people voted against you it’s hard to bounce back,” said Alabama GOP strategist Chris Brown, who ran the campaign of the fourth-place finisher, state Sen. Trip Pittman (R), and is neutral in the runoff.

Azbell, who backed Pittman in the primary, dislikes Moore enough that he’s never voted for him, skipping his line on the ballot both times Moore was the GOP nominee and working against him in past primaries. But he’s ready to break with precedent.

“I really don’t want Mitch McConnell and Robert Bentley telling me who my senator is going to be,” he said.

Moore is already looking to jiu jitsu McConnell’s backing, blasting the “silk-stockinged Washington elitists” supporting Strange.

It’s not the first time that’s worked for him: Moore won back his judicial seat by running against, and handily defeating, another Bentley appointee in 2012.

Strange’s allies argue that Moore will struggle to grow his appeal outside of his intense core of loyal followers. But the combination of an off-year primary, voters’ intense dislike of the traditional GOP establishment both in-state and in D.C. create the perfect climate for a Moore insurgency.

“Roy Moore has the intensity,” said GOP strategist Jon Coley, a Strange supporter. “Roy will turn his people out. Luther’s got to turn his people out and find a bunch more.”

The big question is how to do that.

The appointed senator will need to boost his support in a big way in the state’s more urban business communities-- especially in and around Huntsville, Brooks’ base-- and his allies worry that a deeply negative race may just turn off voters and convince them to stay home, leaving Moore with his rabid but limited base of support with the upper hand.

The strategy from the pro-McConnell Senate Leadership Fund of playing for a Strange runoff with Moore by destroying Brooks paid off. And while they’re off TV right now, they offered a glimpse of how they plan to attack Moore going forward, with ads attacking him for taking a $1 million salary from the Christian organization he runs and for flying on private airplanes with the organization’s money. A Washington Republican strategist said the group is now finalizing their strategy for the runoff.

Moore has deep support on the hard right for his repeated stands athwart the tide of social change-- in a state whose official motto is “We dare defend our rights.”

Moore has twice been forced from the state Supreme Court bench for disobeying court orders, first for installing, then refusing to remove, a monument to the Ten Commandments outside his courthouse, then just a few years ago for ordering his state to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide.

And Strange faces another challenge, with one of his best surrogates sidelined and another being notoriously unpredictable.

Sessions is a close ally-- Strange helped on his campaigns and followed him as state attorney general. But Sessions doesn’t plan to have any involvement in the race because of the ethical constraints of his current job.

And while President Trump’s endorsement was a huge boost for Strange in the first round, it’s unclear what he’ll do going forward.

Trump’s tweets and a late robocall backing Strange likely helped boost him to second place and kept alive his hopes of staying in Washington. But Trump hasn’t been unequivocal in his support. The president’s reaction to the runoff result was a pair of tweets congratulating both candidates-- and himself.

“What Trump does from here will be interesting to see. Luther must be holding his breath that Trump doesn’t have another post-Charlottesville and start flip-flopping on this. I’m holding my breath if I’m in his camp that this thing sticks for six weeks,” said the Alabama strategist supporting Strange.

It’s unclear how the next six weeks will shape up. But one thing’s for sure, according to Coley: “It’s going to be nasty.”

So what about the Democrat Doug Jones? A friend of mine active in local Alabama politics told me that "Jones is not the Joe Manchin of Birmingham. Doug Jones is a progressive, and I don't mean 'the most progressive candidate you can hope for from Alabama.' Doug Jones is a progressive in Alabama and he'd be a progressive in Maryland or Oregon or California or anywhere else. Jones was US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Clinton administration. He reopened the dormant case of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and sent two klansman to jail for it. He was on scene at the Birmingham abortion bombing within minutes and brought the indictment against Eric Rudolph for it. Take a look at his issues page. He isn't hedging. He lists as 'priorities' strengthening public schools, paying a living wage, affordable college, affordable child care, combatting climate change, rejoining the Paris Accords, preserving access to contraception and abortion care, funding Planned Parenthood, equal pay for equal work, preserving and expanding ACA, and healthcare as a right. Doug Jones," he continued in an e-mail, "is a quality candidate who can raise money and stands for our values. I'm not being pollyannaish. This is going to be hard. We're still the underdog. But if we organize and direct overwhelming national resources, this can be done and we can take one more vote away from Mitch McConnell."

I tried confirming Jones' progressiveness personally but haven't heard back from him or his campaign yet. Jonathan Lee Krohn, writing for The Intercept, reported that "In the Deep South state of Alabama, Jones isn’t shrinking from a fight against white nationalism. 'Fifteen years ago, I actually went up against the Klan, and we won,' Jones began his victory speech Tuesday night. 'I thought we’d gotten past that, but obviously we haven’t.' All of a sudden, it matters who Doug Jones is."

So who is he? Best known for his work as U.S. attorney here in Alabama, Jones, in 1998, famously re-opened his office’s investigation of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Before he left office in 2001, Jones brought murder charges against two of the surviving Klansmen responsible for the attack, ultimately seeing both men convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Republicans in Washington see Jones as a major threat-- the perfect candidate to take down Moore. The question is whether there’s a state party behind him.

Once upon a time, Democrats controlled Alabama.

As a matter of fact, Democrats controlled state government in Alabama for over 100 years-- from Reconstruction until 2010-- and near the end they seldom agreed with each other on much of anything. But that didn’t seem to matter; they were in charge.

“Alabama’s Democratic Party, it was just an umbrella,” Jones told The Intercept. “You had people standing for civil rights, and at the same time you had people standing in the schoolhouse door.”

Around the turn of the century, the main dispute was between the white, socially conservative Blue Dogs from up north and the more progressive-minded, largely black representatives from the cities. The salve that kept everyone together was patronage, the party’s deep war chests, a voter turnout machine that bussed thousands of Alabamian Democrats to the polls, and the fact that they just kept on winning.

“[T]he party at the time was really just a confederation of factions that elected whoever they’re going to elect. And the only time it was really important was when a president was elected and there was patronage,” former Jones continued. “You know, U.S. attorneys and judgeships, that sort of thing.”

The bombing case was the only major civil rights case Jones worked on. Since leaving public service in 2001, while Jones has worked on the occasional corporate civil rights case, he’s primarily worked as a defense attorney for businesses and white collar criminals.

That included one particularly high-profile defendant: In 2004, Jones defended former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat, in his first trial regarding bribery charges. Legendary District Court Judge U.W. Clemon dropped the case, saying the allegations against Seigelman were unfounded, but in 2006 the Bush administration’s Department of Justice again began vigorously pursuing Siegelman, claiming he had used the governor’s office to benefit campaign donors.

Siegelman has long claimed his case was the result of a political hit ordered by Karl Rove, who had previously worked as a consultant for the Alabama GOP and was pushing for his conviction in order to help Alabama Republicans. Local politicians in both parties condemned the prosecution, but he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Whatever Rove’s intention, inside Alabama, the fall of Don Siegelman was a major blow to the state’s Democrats, helping contribute to the party’s ultimate collapse in 2010. The GOP picked up eight Senate seats and 18 House seats in 2010, winning a supermajority in both chambers in the national tea party wave.

Once Republicans had taken over, they began doing what they do so much better than Democrats: tilting the rules so they can stay in power. In December 2010, just a month after the Republicans had won both houses of the State Legislature, Gov. Riley called a special session. Immediately, the Republicans introduced legislation making it illegal for professional associations to take money for dues out of state employees’ paychecks. This made it impossible for the Alabama Education Association (AEA) to collect membership dues from teachers’ paychecks.

The ban decimated the AEA and similar organizations that had bankrolled Democrats for decades. Suddenly, the state party was in free fall, with no money to cushion their fall.

Nancy Worley became party chair three years after the cataclysmic events of 2010. “I came into this office in 2013 and we were broke,” she said. “In fact, people were here waiting to turn off our power, that kinda thing.”

After Siegelman’s conviction, Jones continued to fight on on his client’s behalf. In 2007, Jones testified in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that he believed Siegelman’s conviction was “driven by politics” and not by a pursuit of the facts.

“There is no question in my mind,” Jones told the committee, according to a contemporary report in The Nation, “that the Justice Department in Washington was behind the investigation.”

While Siegelman was finally released from prison earlier this year, and has recently begun speaking around the country in support of a documentary about his trial, he has not yet appeared on the campaign trail or publicly endorsed Jones.

After his victory Tuesday night Jones said he wants to let Siegelman take care of himself and revisit with friends and family before concerning him with the rat-race of Alabama politics again.

The last candidate to come close to winning as a statewide Democrat in Alabama was a little-known circuit court judge named Bob Vance, who ran for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2012.

The man he lost to-- by a mere 2 points-- was Judge Roy Moore, the current front-runner in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate... Vance finished the race with 48.2 percent of the vote, unheard of for a Democrat in Alabama these days. But in the end, Mowrey says, the campaign couldn’t overcome the fact that many Alabamians support Moore’s bigotry, his “states rights” stance on gay marriage, and his distaste for federal interference in what he deems religious affairs.

Vance finished the race with 48.2 percent of the vote, unheard of for a Democrat in Alabama these days. But in the end, Mowrey says, the campaign couldn’t overcome the fact that many Alabamians support Moore’s bigotry, his “states rights” stance on gay marriage, and his distaste for federal interference in what he deems religious affairs.

“It’s very hard to communicate that [Moore] puts himself above the law,” he explained, “because there’s this section of the Alabama electorate who says there’s nothing wrong.”

Jones said that moderates like those Vance appealed to voters in the Birmingham suburbs of Shelby and Blount County-- which in 2016 went 72 percent and 89 percent, respectively, for Trump-- are the key to “narrowing the gap.” And while he admits he has no chance of winning most voters in these heavily white, Republican counties, he says he’ll consider his campaign a success if he can simply make inroads.

“I don’t have to win Shelby County or Blount County, I just have to narrow the gap and get people rethinking how they’re gonna vote,” Jones said, his Birmingham drawl getting stronger as he gets excited, “And when you start narrowing that gap in those counties you’re gonna start narrowing the gap on a statewide basis and people are gonna have to take you seriously and they’re gonna have to talk to ya.”

The reason Jones is so optimistic about getting his message out there is that the Republican Party of Alabama has given him a very good reason to be.

The two top contenders, Moore and Strange, are both damaged goods, and are widely reviled across the state. Moore, who says that trans women are just trying to get “special treatment” by identifying as female, has a strong base within the state’s massive evangelical population. But outside of those voters, even within the Republican Party he is seen as a liability. A staffer for a competing campaign compared him to Todd Akin, a former GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri whose odd thoughts on “legitimate rape” cost him the race.

Strange, meanwhile, was appointed to hold this Senate seat in February after Jeff Sessions became Donald Trump’s attorney general until this special election could be held. At the time of his appointment by Gov. Robert Bentley, however, Strange was the attorney general and his office was investigating Bentley for alleged use of state resources to cover up an extramarital affair he’d been having with a senior staffer.

Many Alabamians thought at the time there must have been a quid pro quo between the governor and Strange, but he took the seat anyway. Subsequently, Strange has also come under investigation for alleged campaign finance violations in both his Senate campaign and his prior AG campaigns. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, August 16, the day after the primary.

Both of these candidates would, in an ideal world, be perfect opponents for the squeaky-clean Jones. But, despite being well-liked by every Alabamian I meet, Republican and Democrat, he has one fatal flaw.

“He’s got one big issue,” Strange’s campaign manager, Michael Joffrion, points out. “He’s got a ‘D’ after his name.”

In a state Donald Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, Jones knows victory is a long-shot. On Tuesday night, Moore alone got roughly as many votes as all of the Democrats combined. But the Jones campaign is still ebullient.

“Do not let anybody ever tell you Doug Jones cannot win this special election,” said Jones’ son-in-law, who introduced him Tuesday night. “What you will find if you look at the numbers tomorrow-- this is gon’ be close-- right now in Jefferson County, this county, … right now he has as many votes in this county where you worked as Luther Strange and Roy Moore combined.” (Jefferson County is an urban, solidly Democratic county.)

While Jones won comfortably, his vote total would have only been enough to finish third in the GOP primary. To win, he’ll have to bring new voters to the polls in December, and win votes from Republicans who despise Moore-- which, fortunately for Jones, exist in healthy proportions.

Jones, the former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted two Klansmen responsible for the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing, has begun pushing the issue of Charlottesville onto his Republican opponents. Endorsed by a plethora of national Democratic figures, including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the Congressional Black Caucus, and former Vice President Joe Biden, Jones is attempting to appeal to the heart of a deeply conservative state with his record on civil rights.

...For Jones, though, this campaign began more as an opportunity to spread the Democratic message to the farthest reaches of Alabama than an attempt to turn Alabama blue. “We’ve got to get back into areas where we’ve been traditionally losing races and we’ve got to start narrowing the gap,” he told The Intercept. “For our campaign, our goal is to reach as many people as we can.”

But “narrowing the gap” in Alabama is a big ask.

Since 2014, Democrats have retained control in just eight of the state’s 35 Senate districts. While these districts comprise less than half the state’s population, they include a whopping 94.3 percent of Alabama’s black population and just a quarter of the state’s much large white population.

That means Doug’s gap exists somewhere among that vast majority of white Alabamians who live outside Democratic districts and voted overwhelmingly for Trump last fall. The problem is, these are the very voters Alabama Democrats have done precious little to court in recent years.

The chair of the Alabama Democratic Party, Worley, seems resigned to the party’s fate.

“You need to look at the demographics in North Alabama,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you that there’s a huge racial divide in the state of Alabama, along with the whole south. I mean, LBJ predicted that when he signed the Civil Rights legislation, you know, that he was crossing out the south.”

During the last legislative election cycle in 2014, in Worley’s second year as chair, Democrats lost seven seats in the state legislature, and didn’t even bother to field a candidate against Republican incumbents in another 58 districts.

Instead of attempting to compete, Worley’s strategy has been to stay put. Democrats now only have four legislative districts in North Alabama, for example, where they once had a majority of seats. The Democratic retreat to Birmingham and Black Belt is a microcosm of the national Democratic retrenchment on the coasts and in cities. More than a decade after former DNC Chair Howard Dean launched his 50-state strategy, the party is effectively nonexistent in many parts of the country. That makes capitalizing on an opportunity like the one Moore presents that much more difficult.

One of those remaining North Alabama Democrats is Rep. Craig Ford, the former minority leader in the state House. He has just two words for Worley and her fellow Democratic leaders who have given up on white Alabamians. “Party leadership,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya man, I can’t tell ya enough: Party leadership is everything.”

Craig blames the leadership in the party that “made it all about race” and failed to tailor their message to a changing state. He also blames Worley, by name, for not encouraging Democrats to compete outside Birmingham and the Black Belt.

Doug agrees that the party is in shambles, though he refuses to go after Worley and the leadership. He traces things back to 2010, when the Democrats lost majorities in both houses of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, ushering in seven years of complete Republican control.

“When folks started losing their base, their offices, people didn’t know how to respond,” he said. “They didn’t know how to be a two-party state so instead of gelling around a cohesive party theme-- not that it’s check the box, check the box, check the box, but general themes of Democratic party politics-- they tried to outmaneuver Republicans to the right and you can’t do that. And so they continued to lose races, and then you get demoralized.”

Up until this point, Democrats have “never really had a party,” Jones continued. Instead, it was a coalition of politicians in a one-party state who called themselves Democrats for political necessity.

“I think if we can get those candidates out there, we will end up with a party structure,” Jones concluded, optimistically. “The rest will kind of fall into place.”

Ford is even more optimistic. With the right party leadership and the right candidates, he thinks Alabama’s Senate seat could turn blue.

“A Democrat could win that U.S. Senate seat,” he said, though he clarifies himself with the help of a friend. “Somebody besides a Republican could win that race.”

UPDATE: Sometimes I Get Crazy Email

This one, very badly formatted by someone who is unfamiliar with how to work online, came from Roy Moore's campaign:

"Being within 10 points or less, (Strange's supporters) may pour another $3 million to $5 million into the runoff. There will be a negative onslaught on Roy Moore that he's never seen before."
-- Alabama Veteran Political Analyst Steve Flowers

Howie,

After Tuesday night's first-round victory over Mitch McConnell, all eyes nationwide are focusing in on the battle brewing for U.S. Senate in the upcoming September 26 run-off election.



And Howie, the pundits all seem to agree on one thing -- It’s going to get nasty over the next 6 weeks

Can I count on you to stand with me by chipping in a generous contribution of $1,500, $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $75, $50, $35 or $25 to my campaign’s “Conservatives United” Money Bomb to help me fight back and win?

Howie, the September 26 run-off election is THE ultimate national showdown between the Washington insiders and conservative Republicans who are sick of Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the rest of the establishment in Washington.



Unless conservatives rise up and deliver the final blow to the Washington establishment on September 26, you and I could be staring down the barrel of Mitch McConnell entrenched as Senate Majority Leader.



That means ZERO chance at REPEALING ObamaCare!



 ZERO chance at securing our border and building Trump’s wall.

ZERO chance of cracking down on illegal immigration.



ZERO chance of rebuilding our military.



And ZERO chance of restoring respect for the Constitution and the rule of law in Washington.

You and I must not allow that to happen.


That’s why I’m counting on your immediate financial support to help my campaign finish the job and DEFEAT Mitch McConnell on September 26.

You see, my establishment backed opponent begins the run-off with MILLIONS of dollars in his campaign coffers.



And that doesn’t include the tens of millions of dollars Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove plan to spend viciously attacking me and my campaign.



Friend, the situation is dire.



According to my Finance Team my campaign coffers are exhausted from yesterday’s election.

Based on current budget estimates, the first Phase of our Two-Phase Voter Contact and Outreach Victory Operation will cost roughly $150,000 to execute effectively.



And the bad news is, the deadline to fund this critical program is midnight on August 31.


So won’t you please stand with me in this all-out fight against McConnell and the establishment by chipping in the maximum amount you can afford to donate to my campaign’s "Conservatives United" Money Bomb immediately?

Of course, I understand only a few people are able to afford $2,700 ($5,400 per couple) -- the maximum legal amount under federal law.



If you are such a person, I believe this run-off election is an investment worth making. The future of the U.S. Senate -- and our country -- depends on the outcome.



But I also understand that $250 or $100 may be all many folks can give.



In fact, I know for some, $25 or $35 is a stretch.

And for others -- $10 or $15 can be a major sacrifice.


Whatever amount you can chip in to help out at this time, your contribution is greatly appreciated and will be put to immediate use to fund our Voter Contact and Outreach Victory Mobilization Program.


You and I are on the verge of defeating the establishment and taking our country back.



But Howie, Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove are ruthless.



Rumors are circulating they’re already scheming to pull the same dirty tricks on me that they pulled on Chris McDaniel in the 2014 run-off election for Senate in Mississippi.



This includes spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy Democrat votes in the September REPUBLICAN run-off.



To defeat McConnell and the establishment, I must be able to count on your immediate support.

So please stand with me in this historic fight against Washington by chipping in a generous contribution to my “Conservatives United” Money Bomb.


Thank you in advance for your support!

Sincerely,

Judge Roy Moore

A prediction: Governor Siegelman will be far from the last victim of this "Bush III"-style administration

"As long as we have the same people in charge looking at the question of prosecutorial misconduct, we're going to get the same answers. That's because they're trying to cover their asses."

-- former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, in an

interview with TPM Muckraker (see link below)

by Ken

This is just awful. Shocking, disgraceful. If it isn't promptly repudiated and corrected by the Obama administration, I'm afraid we're going to be . . . well, exactly where we appear to be -- suffering through a presidential administration that qualifies as "moderate" only by the standard of present-day Republicanism, where "moderate" views are so extreme that not so long ago they would have qualified people who held them as mentally incompetent.

I know I'll be accused by many self-professed liberals as one of those self-hating left-wingers who believes in the old circular firing squad. Well, like a lot of other progressives, while voicing a fair amount of disagreement with the strategy and apparent goals of the Obama administration, I've held back, hoping its policymakers might have some grand plan that might not produce the results I would hope for, but that would at least move the country decisively away from the disastrous directions in which it was driven by the evil genies of the Bush regime.

Of course the crooks and clowns of the right wing of the Democratic Party, which Howie usually refers to as "the Republican wing" of the party, are never subjected to such accusations. Never. They are free to attack the administration, and it goes without saying anyone in the party to the left of Holy Joe Lieberman and Clueless Ben Nelson, at any level of vehemence. It goes without saying too that in Congress the Republican-Democrats are free not only to attackthe president's positions (that is, when he takes positions) but to vote with the "Just Say No" Republicans -- you know, the folks sworn to destroying this administration -- as often as they like.

From the White House's point of view, why not? The only Democrats who appear to have the trust of the administration's political point man, Master Rahm Emanuel, are the ones who were card-carrying Republicans until just seconds before they announced their candidacies --true believers that what's good for the giant corporations who show members of Congress with all those megabuck bribes is good for the U.S.A.

Just last week I talked about the missed opportunity of the Obama campaign to educate the country on the destructivness of the fundamental principles, not just the crappy execution, of the Bush regime.

Candidate Barack Obama had a unique opportunity during the campaign to use the international and domestic crises brought on by years of conservative misgovernance as a teaching moment, to try to make Americans understand how the conservative philosophy had failed. The explanation was something about his not wanting to be "negative," because voters don't like that. It seems clear that once in office he and his people were consciously working to avoid the onslaught of a culture war.

The result, however, is that he's got his culture war, and no weapons with which to fight back. In my darker moments what I foresee is the wreckage of this administration being used by the forces of darkness as proof of the failure of progressive ideas -- when nobody tainted with progressive ideas seems to have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Meanwhle, the "centrists" who are responsible for the carnage will as always conclude that they need to hunker ever farther toward the center, which has moved so far right as to be no longer visible to the naked eye.

By the time of the 2008 presidential primaries, and even more by the time of the general election, the Right was well advanced in the process of flushing all trace of that fellow George W. Bush down the memory hole, along with all recollection of how fiercely and violently they once defended every lie he told and every abomination he perpetrated, denouncing even the slightest hint of criticism as "Bush-bashing." By that time, the occasional right-winger who still acknowledged that there might once have been such a person -- never mind that the bum was still squatting in the White House as the duly appointed president of the United States -- explained that this (possibly hypothetical) George W. Bush person wasn't "a real conservative."

Indeed in many ways he wasn't. But "real conservatism" was already beside the point. The policies of the regime were almost down the line those of modern-day Movement Conservatism, which in many ways that isn't "conservative" either. (This contradiction is similarly built into the new initiative of RNC members who fancy themselves "pure" conservatives to purge the Republican Party of impure ones.) For example, there was nothing inherently "conservative" about the idea of invading Iraq, as reflected by the fact that, until the invasion was a reality and the Right rallied around its the spokesdevils Bush and Cheney, the loudest and most persistent voices against an invasion came from the Right. (As I've said repeatedly, the sudden and complete vanishment of those voices is for me one of the amazing feats in modern American political magic.)

Now, most of us undestood that candidate Obama wasn't a "progressive," any more than candidate Hillary Clinton was. Yet candidate Obama made a more successful effort to make us think -- with those occasional eloquent, seemingly visionary speeches, which seemed to have policy implications for what he might wish to do as president -- that he shared some of our major values, like ending the imperial adventurism of our foreign policy and restoring some measure of fairness to the administration of federal justice, which had been so brutally compromised as a matter of explicit Bush regime policy.

I understand how difficulty and risky a business it is to try to educate the electorate rather than play with or, better still, actively manipulate its misunderstandings and prejudices. Nevertheless, with the level of discontent that existed in 2008 as the country awoke to the horror of the Bush regime's disastrous policies, without necessarily understanding why those policies had been so disastrous, the country was primed for a leader who could help them see what had gone wrong, and how the country could benefit from a clean break with those policies and what an alternative vision of government might look like. Given candidate Obama's oratorical skill, his demonstrated ability to bring eloquence and clairty to fundamental aspects of public policy, he certainly seemed like a candidate to rally the American public to a renewed vision of the role government had to play in leading the country in a whole other direction. However, we heard virtually nothing in the campaign about the systemic failures of the outgoing regime, how its failures resulted primarily from a determination to prove its overriding philosophy: that government has no role in improving the lives of Americans.

Polls taken during the campaign certainly seemed to vindicate the Obama campaign's let's-look-forward-not-backward operating philosophy. It seemed that people really didn't want to hear negativity, and especially didn't want to be confronted with having to defend their previous godlike worship of George W. Bush (assuming there had ever been such a person, which seemed increasingly dubious). But sometimes leadership and political courage mean sacrificing easy short-term gains for harder-won longer-term ones.

UNLESS SENATOR OBAMA DIDN'T HAVE BASIC
BELIEF CONFLICTS WITH THE BUSH REGIME . . .

As I've been acknowledging all along, there's another possible explanation for the Obama campaign's kid-gloves treatment of the malfeasances of the Bush regime, one that goes beyond mere questions of strategy: What if his philosophical differences with it are a lot narrower than ours? As I wrote in that same post last week:

It's always dangerous to underestimate the extent to which the president's own views may actually favor the most narrowly corporatist strategy that can safely be gotten away with. A case can be made that artificially resuscitating the financial services industry (a fancy way of saying the banksters and Wall Street) actually is the president's economic program, and never mind that most of the country is still left in depression. By that standard, he and Rahm [Emanuel] and Larry [Summers] and Timmy [Geithner] can all go to bed each night feeling they've had another slammin' day and sleep the sleep of the blessed.

As you may have gathered from the head on this post, and the leading quote from former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, the subject of my current astonishment and outrage at the Obama adminstration has to do with the case of Governor Siegeleman, who seems to me almost certainly to have been railroaded -- out of a return to the governorship and into prison -- in a calculatingly cold-blooded political prosecution orchestrated by Karl Rove.

'Disappointed' Siegelman: Obama Justice Dept. Virtually The Same As Bush DOJ

Justin Elliott | November 25, 2009, 10:42AM

When the Obama Administration argued in a filing earlier this month that the Supreme Court should not consider an appeal by Don Siegelman, the former Alabama governor wasn't surprised, even though the Obama filing maintained the Bush-era stance in Siegelman's controversial corruption case.

"There's really been no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice," Siegelman tells TPMmuckraker in an interview.

Siegelman, a Democrat, served roughly nine months in prison after his 2006 bribery conviction. He was ordered released pending appeal in March 2008. The case, which has been dogged by allegations of politicization and prosecutorial misconduct -- including links to Karl Rove -- centers on what the government called a pay-to-play scheme in which Siegelman appointed a large donor to a state regulatory board.

Siegelman has asked the Supreme Court to consider the definition of bribery, arguing that he merely engaged in routine political transactions. But, in the Nov. 13 filing that raised Siegelman's hackles, Obama's solicitor general argued that "corrupt intent" had been established in the trial.

While Solicitor General Elena Kagan was appointed by Obama, Siegelman says the DOJ staffers who are giving advice and making decisions on his case are the same people who were at the department under Bush. "The people who have been writing the briefs for the government are the same people who were involved in the prosecution," he says.

The filing by the DOJ is a sign that the Obama Administration intends to stay the course in the case, despite entreaties to review it, including a letter from 75 former state attorneys general.

If the Supreme Court declines to hear his appeal, or rules against him, the consequences could be grave, Siegelman says.

"We've got a bunch of people in this country -- including President Obama and mayors and members of Congress -- who will be in jeopardy because any rogue prosecutor who wants to target a politician or a donor will be able to do it."

He expects the court to decide whether to consider his appeal by early next year. A separate request for a new trial in Alabama will probably not be decided before the Supreme Court decision, he says.

Another piece of unfinished business in the Siegelman saga is an inquiry by the DOJ's internal watchdog -- the Office of Professional Responsibility -- into the allegations of politicized prosecution. Bill Canary, the husband of Leura Canary, the US Attorney on the case, was a state GOP operative who had run the campaign of Siegelman's gubernatorial opponent, and was a close associate of Karl Rove. Canary allegedly said he'd get his "girls" -- including his wife -- on Siegelman.

OPR said fully 11 months ago that the results of its investigation would be released "in the near future," but the report is nowhere to be seen. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in September sent a letter (.pdf) to Attorney General Eric Holder urging an impartial OPR review of the case.

Siegelman, though, isn't holding his breath. "My guess is that whatever OPR comes out with will be another whitewash designed to sweep all of this under somebody's rug," he tells us. "As long as we have the same people in charge looking at the question of prosecutorial misconduct, we're going to get the same answers. That's because they're trying to cover their asses."

[All boldface emphasis added.]

We've become used to the Obama Justice Department providing defenses of repellent laws under challenge before the Supreme Court. The finest legal minds in the progressive community have stoutly reassured us that such defenses are required under U.S. legal "tradition." (Can "tradition" really require action of any kind?) And so it was suggested that we shut our traps when, for example, the DoJ issued a shocking and loathsome defense of the repugnant Defense of Marriage Act, which even Bill Clinton now expresses remorse for having been cornered into signing. Never mind that the Supreme Court justices who read the DoJ argument could be forgiven for thinking that the Obama administration was providing a ringing endorsement for DOMA.)

But now that principle has apparently been applied to endorsing the cover-up of the first gross malfeasances of the Bush regime DoJ to come under challenge before the Supreme Court: the frame job that not only thwarted Siegelman's return to the Alabama governorship but locked him safely away in prison. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. After all, every time the question of looking into potentially criminal conduct of the Bush regimistas has arisen, hasn't President Obama always spouted the same rhetoric about not wanting to look backwards but only forward?

Did the U.S. government as a matter of official policy promote torture, in violation of both U.S. and international law? We mustn't look backwards. Did the Bush regime break U.S. law in instituting and reauthorizing its massive system of telephone surveillance, or whatever the hell it was that was so secret, we still can't be told what it was? (You remember, the whatever-it-was that brought then-White House counsel Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales storming into the intensive-care hospital room of a semiconscious Attorney General John Ashcroft, to the considerable terror of Mrs. Ashcroft, hoping to bully him into overriding the judgment of Deputy AG Jim Comey that the whatever-it-was was illegal.)

As a lot us have screamed every time President Obama has issued another of his "free passes" for Bush regime malefactors, without some basic principle of accountability, the rule of law basically disappears from U.S. government, and with it the illusion of a functioning democracy. Now the Obama administration is giving signals -- well, in the case of Governor Siegelman, more than giving signals, actually taking a position, that the Bush regime's rigorous cover-ups of its misconduct is official Obama administration policy.

We're incidentally forced to confront again the shocking number of Bush holdovers still serving, and apparently making policy, in the Obama DoJ. This is inexcusable. Presumably it was that same lofty goal of "bipartisanship" that caused the new administration to refrain from the traditional practice of requesting resignations from all the U.S. attorneys. After all, Republicans always whine indignantly when a Democratic president does it, though not when they do it. And in this case, as candidate Obama seemed to understand, the gross politicization of the DoJ was going to be one of his most immediate problems.

It's true that it would have been a nightmare getting Senate approval for all the new U.S. attorneys who would then have had to be appointed, in addition to the large number of upper-tier department managers who weren't immediately replaced, but remember, at that point no one knew it was going to be Republican strategy to oppose every single initiative and appointment of his in order to bring as much destruction and hardship to the country as they possibly could, for their own hoped future electoral benefit.

Incredibly, vast numbers of Bush regime holdovers were left in place, and in fact may still be in place, not just in the DoJ but throughout the executive branch, and it appears that many of them are formulating policy in just the same way they did during the Bush regime. It isn't clear whether their work is even being overseen by the relatively small cadre of senior-level Obama appointees who have actually been both appointed and confirmed.

I find this situation 100 percent intolerable at Justice, and feel pretty foolish for having strongly defended the appointment of Eric Holder as attorney general. At that, however, Holder is turning out to be a prototype for a lot of the Obama cabinet appointments: a qualified enough appointee, but one whose zealousness is readily accommodated to the degree desired by the administration, which seems to be "low." We're now hearing more stories from individuals with some inside knowledge of the procedure followed in the staffing of other executive-branch agencies: no hotheads wanted. So while they may not be the same people who would have been appointed to their positions under the previous administration, they're also not boat-rockers, not the kind of folks who go looking for trouble, no matter how much trouble they may have inherited in their bailiwicks.

To the extent that the policy was designed to forestall opposition attacks, it's laughable. Now that the Republicans have officially renounced any obligation to truth, not only will they oppose everything President Obama says or does, they will do so as if each of their manufactured accusations means life or death for the future of the American republic. The resulting irony is cruel: As the current administration takes over responsibility for immunizing Karl Rove from accountability for his eight years of rampaging criminal misconduct in office, the self-same Karl Rove, posing as a TV "analyst," trashes that administration at every opportunity.

If candidate Obama had announced straight-out during the campaign that it would be his policy to disregard all issues of official misconduct, including possible criminal behavior, in the Bush regime, and to maintain the basic status quo, with only some light housecleaning, in the management and even to a large extent the staffing of the executive branch, I ask myself whether I would have voted for him. With the alternative of a McCranky administration? (No, I'm not going to resort to mention of who the Republican vice president would have been. After all, Young Johnny held her in such little regard that she surely would have had no policy role in his administration. In fact, she might have wound up making as much trouble as she has tried to make for the Obama administration.) More to the point, I'm appalled even to be pondering the question of how much worse, or rather how not-so-much-worse, a McCranky adminstration would have been.

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Governor Siegelman suggests it's time to clear the Rovian trash out of the Justice Department

In July 2008, several months after being freed from prison on an appeal bond, Don Siegelman attended the online activists' annual convention NetRoots Nation in Austin, where he observed to TPM-TV's David Kurtz, "We don't know who's covering up for whom at the DoJ." Earlier this month Siegelman found a lot of support at NetRoots Nation in Pittsburgh, where he appeared on the panel "Reporting DoJ Misconduct Scandals -- Why the Netroots is the Last Hope for Justice."

"The people who did the dirty work are still on the job right now because only a handful of the appointees have been replaced: just five of the 93 [U.S. attorneys] Bush put in place. That means Rove's clones are still calling the shots! They are a cancer on our system of justice and must be removed before our democracy can be healed."

-- Governor Siegelman, in a DailyKos

diary yesterday, "Fire Rove's Prosecutors"

by Ken

Well, with regard to the head I've put on this post, no, the governor didn't actually refer to the staggering number of Bush regime holdovers in the Obama Department of Justice as "Rovian trash." He referred to them as, simply, "Rove's prosecutors." (Same thing, no?)

But then, he would. The thing that always strikes me about Governor Siegelman is how poised and reasonable he seems, when by all rights he should be a raging inferno after all that's been done to him -- you know, being railroaded out of what looked to be a triumphant return to the governorship and into indictment, conviction, and prison by the squad of partisan enforcement goons that was the Bush DoJ. But no. While you always get that he's angry about what was done to him, he always seems to state his case calmly and respectfully.

Example: In March, when he got word that the appeal of his conviction on something like 7 of the 34 counts in his indictment (everyone seems to have slightly different numbers) had mostly been rejected (two counts of mail fraud were thrown out, and the case was accordingly returned to District Court for resentencing), he was reported in the head on his DailyKos diary to be "disappointed."

Disappointed by Today's Appeals Court Ruling
by Don Siegelman

Fri Mar 06, 2009 at 12:32:33 PM PDT

The three judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled. While they threw out two counts of my politically-motivated prosecution and conviction, they upheld several others and have sent the case back to the district court for re-sentencing.

Thanks to TPM and Firedoglake for blogging about this.

I am disappointed, but not discouraged. The fight will continue.

If you have a chance, I hope you'll consider contributing to my legal defense fund so we can keep up the fight.

My family and I are deeply appreciative of the outpouring of support and prayers, especially here on DailyKos and throughout the netroots community. Your words and actions keep our spirits lifted and our resolve strong. We will get through this, and we will win.

-- Don

Yesterday, in the wake of his appearance at this year's NetRoots Nation, the governor published the DailyKos diary from which the quote at the top is taken. In it he stresses the shocking fact that only 5 of the 93 U.S. attorneys are Obama appointees. (Some of the other Bush holdovers have left their jobs, voluntarily, but the assistants left behind to run the shop are of course other Bush holdovers.)

Fire Rove's Prosecutors
by Don Siegelman

Thu Aug 27, 2009 at 10:31:28 AM PDT

Earlier this month, I was fortunate to join many friends from here and all around the country at Netroots Nation and discuss some of the victories we have achieved together. Specifically, I mentioned the success we had seen in urging the House Committee on the Judiciary to force Karl Rove to testify and admit his role in the firing of U.S. Attorneys while issuing "non-denial-denials" about his role in my prosecution.

That's something we never could have achieved without the support of the netroots and the Daily Kos community. I can't thank you enough for your steadfast support. But, this fight is not over; not for me, not for Karl Rove, and not for our democracy.

That's why, at my Netroots Nation panel, I launched a new campaign, www.FireRovesProsecutors.com dedicated to seeing those Rove-vetted U.S. Attorneys and appointees still poisoning the Department of Justice removed from their positions — ending their ability to threaten our democracy.

Since then, more than 5,000 people have sent messages to the White House demanding these individuals be removed from power. I hope you'll join me by contacting the President's Senior Adviser, Valerie Jarrett, today.

This issue is anything but dead. The people who did the dirty work are still on the job right now because only a handful of the appointees have been replaced: just five of the 93 Bush put in place. That means Rove's clones are still calling the shots! They are a cancer on our system of justice and must be removed before our democracy can be healed.

To be clear, removing the previous President's appointees has been, until now, a simple matter of process. George W. Bush fired Bill Clinton's U.S. Attorneys the day after he took office. But even now, seven months after President Obama took office, my prosecution is still being led by the same Rove/Bush prosecutors at the Department of Justice and the same U.S. Attorney, who is married to one of Rove's closest political allies.

This is clearly personal for me, but my case is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Every day Rove's attack dogs remain in place is another day our nation fails to move past the crimes perpetrated under the Bush Administration. The time is well past due to remove them and move forward.

Visit FireRovesProsecutors.com to send a message to Valerie Jarrett now — and encourage her to tell the President it's time to remove Rove's clones from the Department of Justice!

As I told my friends at my panel in Pittsburgh, none of what we accomplished could have happened without you. That's why I'm asking you to stand with me again as we continue this fight for justice.

HAS THE GOP TAKEN EFFECTIVE CONTROL
OF THE STAFFING OF THE OBAMA DOJ?

Believe it or not, there is actually, as of yesterday, one (out of three) duly sworn-in U.S. attorney appointed by President Obama on the job in Alabama. AG Eric Holder traveled to Birmingham for the swearing in of Joyce White Vance (right), from the administration's initial group of five U.S.A. nominees, in the Northern District of Alabama. Until her resignation in June, famously vicious Bush hack Alice Martin, one of the U.S.A.s who participated in the Siegelman railroading, remained on the job.

Earlier this month the administration got around to naming congressional staffer Kenyen Brown to be U.S.A. for the Southern District of Alabama, a position that has been vacant since the resignation of Deborah Rhodes in mid-April.

Incredibly, the U.S.A. for the Middle District of Alabama is still none other than the infamous Leura Canary, who with her husband William Canary, a prominent Republican activist and longtime Rove crony, is generally assumed to have been at the center of the Bush administration's conspiracy against Governor Siegelman. Canary eventually recused herself from the Siegelman case, but it's her staff that continued to prosecute it. Astonishingly, after the 11th Circuit threw out two of the counts against the governor, the prosecutors petitioned to have his prison sentence increased. (The AP reported that one of his attorneys, Susan James, "said prosecutors based their request for a tougher sentence partially on charges that Siegelman was acquitted of in his trial and on the two mail fraud counts thrown out by the appellate court.")

With all the screaming the "We Lie Because We're" Republicans have done all these years over the incoming Clinton administration's quite normal and proper request for the resignations of all the G.W.H. Bush U.S.A.s, did they intimidate the Obama judicial brain trust into not doing so? Is it credible that an overwhelming majority of the U.S. attorney's office are still being run by G.W. Bush appointees -- with, of course, G.W.B.-appointed assistants?

Here I was thinking that cleaning out the rot of the Bush DoJ would have been among the new attorney general's first priorities. I don't suppose he was helped by the exercise in obstruction performed by the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee with regard to his own appointment. Still, the White House has been awfully slow in filling DoJ positions, and the Senate Democratic leadership if anything slower in seeking confirmation of the trickle of appointees, apparently afraid of being unable to break the Republican filibuster threat that has become the controlling reality in the conduct of Senate business.

Clearly the White House has had other things on its mind, like the economy. But the Executive Branch is supposed to be able to move on multiple fronts at once. (One has to hope it can!) Of course the DoJ command is itself only partially staffed with Obama appointees. An awful lot of the dirt on the political prosecution of Don Siegelman -- not to mention the ensuing cover-up -- is floating around the various compartments of the DoJ where the Bush regime was investigating itself.

It's time to do something about this whole mess.

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