Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman shouldn’t get away with his latest attempt to finagle exoneration for long-ago crimes.
Siegelman, whose term from 1999-2003 made him the last Democrat to serve as Alabama’s chief executive, has been trying for years to get his 2006 federal corruption conviction overturned. Now, he is trying, somewhat bizarrely, to piggyback on the case of former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as yet another way to find his own vindication. How absurd!
A Friday press release from Siegelman began like this: “The U.S. Attorney General dropping federal charges against Michael Flynn has now raised questions of the political prosecution of Don Siegelman … who was poised to enter national politics when he landed in the crosshairs of a politicized Bush-era Department of Justice.”
The rest of the release immediately abandons the Flynn analogy while repeating a host of familiar, bogus complaints about the supposed unfairness of Siegelman’s own case. There’s good reason he pivots from Flynn: The comparison is ludicrous. There is no parallel to Siegelman’s case.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr wants to drop charges against Flynn because prosecutors appear to have abused procedural norms and because Flynn’s single conviction of lying to the FBI appears to be immaterial to any underlying investigation, and thus not actually a crime.
Siegelman’s complaints have little to do with such considerations. Instead, the former governor said federal statutes were misapplied to his circumstances. Siegelman was charged not for lying or perjury, but for charges akin to bribery and mail fraud. The only similarity between Siegelman’s case and Flynn’s is that both allege their prosecutions were politically motivated. “Political motivation” isn’t a legally cognizable reason to overturn convictions.
The facts are simple. Siegelman was convicted of giving government favors in return for campaign contributions. He served time, filed appeals, was released from prison for years while on appeals, but lost his appeals not just once but twice, as he was denied by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009 and again by a lower court and the 11th Circuit in 2014. The circuit court determined both times that the conviction was not unjust.
Throughout this 14-year saga, Siegelman has peddled one conspiracy theory after another, like throwing spaghetti on a wall to see what sticks. One of his favorite gambits, completely divorced from reality, was to accuse former George W. Bush aide Karl Rove of having engineered Siegelman’s prosecution. This is balderdash. Most of Siegelman’s case was driven by excellent investigative journalism by Alabama reporters, including my former Mobile Register colleague Eddie Curran, personally a liberal, who wrote an entire book on the sleaze endemic in Siegelman’s administration.
Yet Siegelman’s latest release again blames “the Bush-era Department of Justice political machine, helmed by Karl Rove.” This is crazy. At the very time Siegelman says Rove was directing a Justice Department political machine, the Justice Department was investigating Rove himself and came within a day of filing an indictment against Rove until definitive exculpatory evidence emerged. Rove no more controlled the Justice Department than Donald Trump controls Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives that impeached him.
Siegelman also claims he “was poised to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004” until Rove targeted him. Not even close. In 2004, he was a has-been who had just lost his gubernatorial reelection bid. If he had even floated his name for president then, he would have been a laughingstock.
Siegelman’s term in the federal pen ended in 2017, and his supervised probation ended last June. He’s lucky to be a free man now, and he should let sleeping dogs lie.
