A list of 107 former state attorneys general supporting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for president includes two who were convicted of federal crimes, with one spending several years in prison.
On the list of top state enforcement officers released Friday by Biden’s campaign are Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas, and Don Siegelman of Alabama. The pair of Democrats faced waves of unflattering media coverage in the 1990s and early 2000s after coming into the sights of federal prosecutors.
Tucker, a Harvard graduate, was Arkansas’s attorney general from 1973-77. As the state’s lieutenant governor in 1992, he moved up to governor when Bill Clinton was elected president.
But Tucker’s political career soon collapsed as he became embroiled in the Whitewater controversy. In May 1996, a federal jury found Tucker, Jim McDougal, and McDougal’s former wife, Susan, guilty of arranging nearly $3 million in fraudulent loans between 1985 and 1987 through Capital Management Services, a small business development company in Little Rock, Arkansas, run by former municipal court Judge David Hale.
Tucker received a four-year suspended sentence in August 1996 following testimony by a transplant surgeon who said Tucker would likely die of liver disease if sent to prison.
Siegelman was at the center of a long-running corruption saga in Alabama that stirred charges of prosecutorial misconduct but sent the onetime rising Democratic star to federal prison for nearly five years.
Siegelman was Alabama’s attorney general from 1987-91 and ascended to the governorship eight years later as part of a political revival for Democrats in the region after years of Republican success.
But once in office, prosecutors accused Siegelman of soliciting $500,000 from then-CEO Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth in exchange for a seat on the state’s Certificate of Need board, which oversees hospital improvements and expansions. Prosecutors said the money, which went to Siegelman’s 1999 campaign for an education lottery, amounted to a bribe.
Siegelman was convicted in 2006 on charges of bribery and obstruction of justice. After avoiding prison for years while out on bond, he was forced to report for time behind bars in 2012.
Siegelman maintained his innocence and claimed he was targeted for political reasons, a contention the legal arguments from both sides agreed with but was later rejected by a federal appeals court.
[Read more: Former GOP attorney general of Indiana, a Pence ally, backs Biden for president]
