Simpson Claims Rove Worked with Public Integrity on Siegelman Case

by emptywheel

According to Jill Simpson's testimony, in January or February of 2005, Karl Rove met with the head of Public Integrity at DOJ and got him to assign resources to the Don Siegelman case.

A And so, anyway, he was telling me all of the things that Alice had done as far as having messed up the deal. And then I -- and that since she had messed it up, he was definitely running, you know what -- I mean -- and then he proceeds to tell me that Bill Canary and Bob Riley had had a conversation with Karl Rove again and that they had this time gone over and seen whoever was the head of the department of -- he called it PIS, which I don't think that
is the correct acronym, but that's what he called it. And I had to say what is that and he said that is the Public Integrity Section.

[snip]

Q Okay. And who -- when you say they had made a decision, who are you thinking of?

A Whoever that head of that Public Integrity -- the PIS was as Rob referred to it. And then whoever -- and Karl Rove.

Q And what -- well, from talking to Rob, this conversation you're describing for me was in late January, early February 2005?

A That is correct.

[snip]

Q Okay. And did Rob give you the name of the person at -- I'm just going to call it Public Integrity -- that he thought he understood Karl Rove had spoken to?

A No, he said it was the head guy there and he said that that guy had agreed to allocate whatever resources, so evidently the guy had the power to allocate resources, you know.

Q To the Siegelman prosecution?

A Yes. And that he'd allocate all resources necessary.

Set aside the Siegelman case for a second. If Simpson's testimony is truthful, it means Karl Rove had significant sway over the Public Integrity Section at DOJ in early 2005. The Abramoff investigation was in full swing. As was the CIA Leak investigation. Both of which Rove was personally implicated in.

At the time, Noel Hillman was head of PIN. Hillman stepped down in January 2006--just weeks after Abramoff's guilty plea on January 3 and a time when the White House was increasingly the focus of the Abramoff investigation--to become a Federal judge. At the time, the move was viewed with a great deal of suspicion.

The administration said that the appointment was routine and that it would not affect the investigation, but Democrats swiftly questioned the timing of the move and called for a special prosecutor.

[snip]

The White House, which announced Mr. Bush's selection of Mr. Hillman for the court in a routine e-mail message on Wednesday that included 15 other nominations to judgeships and federal jobs, dismissed the calls for a special prosecutor.

"It's nothing but pure politics," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. "The Justice Department is holding Mr. Abramoff to account, and the career Justice prosecutors are continuing to fully investigate the matter."

And of course, from external appearances, the investigation veered away from most Congressmen, not to mention the White House, until Alberto Gonzales lost control of his DOJ this spring.

Simpson's allegation is tremendously damning with regards to the Siegelman case. But it is potentially even more damning with regards to a number of other investigations that were floating through PIN at the same time.

Comments

[Gromit]

Pretty damned damning. Damnit. Great work as usual, EW.

[albert fall]

Just a question:

Suppose Bush pardons his entire crime family on the way out the door in 2009.

Can we do a kind of OJ-Simpson-you-beat-the-criminal-rap-but-we'll-get-you-in-a-civil-action kind of thing with some vigorous civil RICO?

[Mad Dogs]

Jeebus! Reading Simpson's testimony makes me wonder just what country Alabama is in.

KKK rallys are just a normal weekend thing there apparently. Jeebus!

I apologize to any of the good folks that I know must live somewhere in Alabama, but Jeebus!

As a matter of fact, the Executive Officer I worked for in the service was from Alabama and he was a great guy, liberal, highly intelligent, mild-mannered, a real gentleman, and nothing at all like I'm reading in this transcript.

More reading of transcript in progress...

[seamus]

EW,
Scott Horton has been following and writing about the Seigelman in Harpers Magazine since June. It is a very good resource on the whos' and whys' of Alabama Republicans' dirty tricks in this case.
http://www.harpers.org/subjects/DonSiegelman/SubjectOf/BlogEntry

[Mad Dogs]

And another place for the ins and outs is The Birmingham News with this article: Lawyer adds to her affidavit on Siegelman

at http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1192005492139550.xml&coll=2&thispage=1

[emptywheel]

seamus

Yup, I've been reading.

[Mad Dogs]

More Simpson transcript goodies:

Q So your statement is that Rob Riley told you that Terry Butts had essentially given Don Siegelman two messages, this business about the Klan rally and the democrat putting up the signs would go away and the threat of prosecution from the justice department would go away?
A Yes.
Q If what, if he conceded?
A If he conceded.

[seamus]

Hope lots of folks are reading, and getting real angry. The way these guys operate deserves a RICO prosecution. Wouldn't that be sweet?

[Kagro X]

Oh jeez...

Public Integrity? Another supposedly elite and untouchable DOJ unit destroyed by Rove.

I don't know who I'd like to see pay more. The Bush junta, or the assclowns that refused to see what was going on.

[orionATL]

KX

we don't have to make a choice, you know. :)

let's demand it all !!

try the the miscreants and the enablers,

and, if guilty,

throw all the bastards in the calaboose.

let god, and charles colsen, sort them out

while they serve.

[texas dem]

Mad Dogs:

Scott Horton at Harper's insists that the Birmingham News is one of the very worst offenders in this case, a GOP mouthpiece from beginning to end. Just thought I'd pass that on.

[orionATL]

if you are going to go to harper's mag

and read scott horton's "no comment column" about alabama politics,

you are obliged to also read horton's essai on re-reading don quixote,

"the dilemmas of the moor's return".

it is a beautiful reflective piece of writing about returning, when older, to something you had read years earlier.

damn, i wish i could think and write like that.

but second best, i can read scott horton.

[Mad Dogs]

Thanks for that "heads-up" texas dem! Didn't know that. In reading both Scott Horton's stuff and The Birmingham News, I get the impression that "Muddy Waters" just ain't a name.

[Jodi]

There you go again, beating up on poor Karl Rove.

Don't you remember the last time you had him cornered and were ready to string him up on the Plame-Wilson tree?

Some people are slow learners.

[radiofreewill]

Do we know if PIN handled the demotion and removal of Prosecutor Frederick Black in Guam? If so, we could connect Rove's undue influence with PIN to an adverse action by them that directly benefitted Super Crook Jack Abramoff.

[smoke]

The Nation, 2/2/2006

"Sources confirm that in early November 2002 Black contacted the Public Integrity Section, the unit currently heading the department's Abramoff task force, and asked for assistance in investigating Abramoff's lobbying activities. . . Justice forwarded the information to the Deputy Attorney General's office and the Office of Legal Policy (OLP), which generally handles such concerns.

". . . Sources close to the probe say the information was likely passed on to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who worked closely with Justice on such matters. "Those heads of OLP who are pretty well connected deal directly with the White House counsel," says Lee Casey, a former OLP aide under Reagan and Bush I...

"Despite Justice's refusal to help him, Black convened a grand jury, which subpoenaed the Abramoff contract with the Superior Court on November 18, 2002. The next day the Bush Administration announced that Black would be replaced as US Attorney and demoted him to Assistant US Attorney, after twelve years on the job. His replacement was Guam's Assistant Attorney General, Leonardo Rapadas. "Fred was removed because he asked to indict Abramoff," says one of Black's colleagues at Justice. "I don't believe it was a coincidence."

"Rapadas's conduit to the White House, veteran Washington lobbyist Fred Radewagen, "had access all the way up to Karl Rove," says David Sablan, former head of the Guam Republican Party. At the time of Black's demotion, former Abramoff aide Susan Ralston was working as a top assistant to Rove, a post she still holds."

TPM summary of events surrounding Black's demotion

[KevinNYC]

The Harper's website has become a daily visit for me because of Scott Horton. It's worth your time to go back and read all his posts on the Siegelman case. By the way, Jodi, Karl Rove has deep ties to Alabama politics.

The Siegelman case is going blow wide, wide open. Probably starting tomorrow. There's too much wrongdoing involved in it and once folks cast the tiniest glance at it, they can see how bad it looks. The whole political establishment in Alabama is going to get caught on this. The newspapers too. Some folks think it was the reason Rove resigned when he did.

I love this quote about the case:

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” remarked a nationally known print journalist in a conversation three weeks ago. “Everything I’ve been told by the convicted defendants checks out as the gospel truth. And everything I’m told by federal prosecutors who pushed the case turns out either to be an outrageous lie or at least a very serious distortion. And the local journalists who wrote the most about the case all behave like they’re accessories after the fact in a criminal investigation.”

[jackie]

I think things are going to get really interesting really soon. So many scandals/threads coming together. It's interesting to watch who else is lawyering up, when they did and 'who' got busted just before that time..
I don't believe they can stop the train that is running them down. I think they are starting to prepare 'personal defense of action statements' . So, how long before we hear
'I didn't want do it, but they had phones records and pictures and it would have hurt so many people. They made me do it'. ;)

Completely OT, but scary when you think just whom is 'In Control'.

Kurt Nimmo
TruthNews
October 11, 2007

Last September, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne indicated the military would use “nonlethal weapons” against “fellow citizens” before they use them in “a wartime situation.”
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=245

Kurt Nimmo
TruthNews
October 11, 2007

Last September, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne indicated the military would use “nonlethal weapons” against “fellow citizens” before they use them in “a wartime situation.”
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=245

[jackie]

Opps, sorry about the double thingy. Fingers stuttered...

[Cit92]

Rove and the White House ALWAYS had their hand on the DOJ scale.

Remember back when Abramoff first broke and it took AG John Ashcroft three months to recuse himself from getting DAILY updates on the case.

And remember how the number of acceptable DOJ-White House points of contact jumped from 4 (Clinton) to 400 (Bush)?

Not a coincedence.

[radiofreewill]

Thank you, smoke!

So, the implication of EW's article is:

If we take the Siegelman and Guam Cases as just two exemplars (among many) that are getting increasingly clearer - moving towards "easy for the Man on the Street to understand" storylines - as examples of BushCo's nefarious activities, then it seems that Rove and Gonzo left when they got 'rolled-up' in a Massive Corruption Probe that Can Only Keep Rolling Right Up to Bush.

It seems more obvious now - Rove couldn't have forced favorable 'Resource Allocations' in PIN.

Only Bush could have done that...

[P J Evans]

Remember that Shrub, when he was AWOL from TANG, was campaigning for someone in Alabama. Maybe there's some kind of long-term debt involved.

[AJ]

Don't you love the irony of Jodi talking about anyone else being a slow learner?

Wiping up the coffee recently sprayed all over my keyboard...

[radiofreewill]

Who did Domenici 'go to' when he wanted to 'get rid' of that pesky Rule of Law guy, Iglesias?

Rove followed by Bush, with AG Gonzo and His Band of DoJ Loyalists winking-and-nodding.

Iglesias gone.

[hauksdottir]

You realize that if the South had won the Civil War... Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest would all be rotting in their own puddle of corruption and filth without affecting the rest of us Americans.

How much influence do Mexico or Canada have upon our politics? Precious little. They make the occasional speech, but don't drag us into wars, drain our coffers, or involve us in torture and spying and mercenaries run amuck.

Good ol' boys.

Texas mafia?

:ptui!:

If the black sheep of the family get written out of the Bible, perhaps these states could get written out of the Constitution? When they're willing to be civilized and follow the Rule of Law, they can petition to be allowed back.

After a hundred year probationary period.