A Reporter Sighting in Alabama?

This might come as a shock, but there are signs that an Alabama-based journalist (aside from bloggers) is actually doing some reporting.

Reporters at small papers in south Alabama have done some good work in the past year on the rampant Republican sleaze in our state. But I can't think of a non-blogging journalist in the northern half of the state who has done squat.

That might be changing, thanks to Bob Gambacurta, who is turning out some serious stuff on the John W. Goff case in Montgomery. Gambacurta is a veteran of the Alabama journalism and political scene, and he reports for the Montgomery Independent on the nastiness between Goff and Alabama Governor Bob Riley.

Goff filed a lawsuit, claiming that Riley and others had conspired to ruin one of Goff's insurance company. In apparent retaliation pushed by Riley, the GOP-led U.S. attorney's office in Montgomery initiated what appears to be a flimsy criminal investigation of Goff.

Gambacurta reports that U.S. Justice Department officials have informed Goff's attorneys that Main Justice in Washington will oversee the federal grand-jury investigation into insurance fraud allegations against Goff.

David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general in Washington, does not remove assistants in the Montgomery office from the case. He says supervision of the case will remain with Montgomery prosecutor Louis Franklin, but oversight will come from Washington.

Sounds like that's only so-so news for Goff.

In a column earlier this week, Gambacurta lays out a series of questions raised by the Goff case. A sampler:

* Why did federal prosecutors launch a grand jury investigation of Goff just months after Goff filed suit against Gov. Riley?

* Why are federal prosecutors using a 3-4 year old complaint which deals with litigation that has long since been resolved, as the basis for the Goff investigation?

* Why did U.S. Attorney Leura Canary recuse herself from the Goff investigation and not recuse the assistant U.S. attorneys who work for her?

* Why does Mrs. Canary refuse to make public her recusal documents?

And here's an interesting one:

* Why, after interviewing Goff's CPA, who staunchly defended Goff and refuted all the charges against him, are federal prosecutors not bringing the accountant before the grand jury to testify?

"These and many other questions will be answered when and if Goff's suit comes to trial," Gambacurta reports.

It seems clear that Riley and his GOP henchpeople are doing everything they can to ensure that does not happen.

But I get the sense that Gambacurta smells the stench of Alabama Republicans. Let's hope he continues to follow the smelly trail.

Did Bob Riley Try to Corruptly Influence the Alabama Supreme Court?

Governor Bob Riley recently tried to interfere with the Alabama Supreme Court in a gambling-related case, according to a report in the Montgomery Independent.

The story might raise again questions about Riley's ties to Mississippi gaming interests and disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In a story published online yesterday, the Independent reports that Riley contacted one or more members of the Alabama Supreme Court in an effort to overturn a recent decision by Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb in a case involving bingo at White Hall in Lowndes County. Reports the Independent:

The matter involved a judge assignment in a case brought by the governor and his task force on gambling against a bingo operation at White Hall in Lowndes County. The operation uses electronic machines for customers to play bingo permitted under a special constitutional amendment for White Hall.

Cobb, a Democrat who defeated Riley appointee Drayton Nabers in 2006, assigned the case to Jefferson County Circuit Judge Robert Vance, who already was hearing a similar case in Walker County. Vance, a Democrat, was appointed to his current position by former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
The Independent reports that Riley went "ballistic" upon learning of Cobb's decision and vowed to overturn it. He might have stepped over a number of ethical boundaries in his efforts, the Independent reports:

Last week this newspaper received information that on or about July 29, 2009, the governor, a party to the lawsuit, placed a telephone call to one or more of the justices, urging them to overrule Cobb and remove Vance from the case. The information we received was that the phone call was while the governor was in Washington and that one of the lawyers hired to advise his gambling task force, may have been with the governor at the time. A communication with a judge in a case by a party or a lawyer for one side without the lawyers representing other parties being present violates all kinds of judicial ethics rules and laws.

The Independent apparently smells a potentially explosive story:

We have not seen the governor's telephone logs, but we do know that the governor was in Washington on July 29 because of his Twitter messages. For example at 6:51 a.m. on July 29, he twitted the following message: "Headed to Washington to discuss Water Wars strategy with the congressional delegation."

Since neither the governor nor his office has returned our call, we do not know who, if anyone, was with him in Washington, but we will be watching for the next post of those traveling on state planes.

Several justices denied receiving such a call or refused to answer questions about it. They voted 9-0 to uphold Cobb's appointment of Vance. But the Independent is urging an investigation:

If there was any attempt to improperly influence the court, the vote demonstrates such was rejected by the justices and that is to their credit.

However, we believe this is not a trivial matter and urge the Judicial Inquiry Commission, Attorney General Troy King or Montgomery DA Ellen Brooks to obtain the phone records and determine whether or not the governor made these calls and, if so, were any laws or ethics rules violated?

This is not the first report about Riley's possible attempts to interfere with the justice system. Scott Horton, of Harper's, reported that Riley urged U.S. Attorney Leura Canary to bring a prosecution against insurance executive John Goff--after Goff had filed a lawsuit against Riley and several Republican operatives. Canary did, in fact, bring a case against Goff in a matter that already had been settled in an administrative-law court.

It raises anew questions about Riley's ties to the gaming industry in Mississippi and disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It also is another example of Riley's stunning hypocrisy on gambling.

A U.S. Senate committee reported that Riley was elected governor in 2002 with the help of $13 million in Mississippi Choctaw funds, laundered through Abramoff. Throughout his term as governor, Riley has opposed gambling initiatives in Alabama, in an apparent effort to protect the interests of his Mississippi gaming supporters.

Have Riley's efforts to protect the Choctaws' business interests finally caused him to step in some serious ethical doo-doo?

The Montgomery Independent apparently intends to find out.

Scalia Gets It, How About Obama?

What prompted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to voice concerns earlier this week about abusive prosecutions under the federal honest-services fraud statute?

Scott Horton, legal-affairs contributor at Harper's Magazine, suspects Scalia might have gotten a whiff of the foul odor emanating from the outrageous Sue Schmitz case in Alabama.

Schmitz, a Democratic representative in the Alabama Legislature, was convicted earlier this week on charges that she underperformed in her community-relations job with a state program for at-risk youth. The prosecution was driven by Bush-appointed prosecutor Alice Martin, and the conviction ensures that Schmitz will give up her seat in the legislature. This dovetails nicely with announced Alabama Republican Party plans to take over the Democratic-controlled legislature in 2010.

Even Scalia, one of the nation's foremost conservative "thinkers," apparently smells a rat with this one. Writes Horton:

When Justice Antonin Scalia argued for the Supreme Court to visit the legality of the rampant and plainly abusive prosecution of “honest services fraud” cases earlier this week, he posited an example of the utterly preposterous sort of construction that a misbehaving prosecutor might put on the statute. Imagine, he said, a prosecution brought against a government employee for absenteeism. Historically that would be handled under employment law with bad evaluations, fines, and possibly even dismissals. But, Scalia posited, under the ridiculous abuse of the “honest services fraud” statute a prosecutor might actually attempt to charge the absentee employee with criminal fraud.

Was Scalia really just speculating? I don’t think so. I suspect that he had learned about the Sue Schmitz case in Alabama.

We now have indications that an arch-conservative on the nation's highest court has concerns about abusive prosecutions by the Bush Justice Department. But what about our Democratic president?

Barack Obama has been president for a little more than a month, and in that time, two people in Alabama have been convicted in federal cases that dripped of politics.

The convictions of Sue Schmitz and insurance executive John W. Goff indicate that the political prosecutions started under the George W. Bush administration are continuing apace under Obama.

If anything, the ugliness in the U.S. Justice Department has picked up steam since Obama took office. Heck, we've had two innocent people convicted in Alabama--and that's just in February, our shortest month. What do we have to look forward to in March? Four convictions? Six? Eight?

To be sure, Obama barely has gotten his feet wet as president. And God only knows, he and his team have a ton of stuff on their plate. But last time I checked, justice issues were supposed to be kind of important in America. We have a Democrat in the White House, and people's lives are still being ruined by a justice system run amok.

Is anyone in the Obama administration even aware of it? Do they care about it?

Couldn't Obama or Eric Holder--or somebody--at least make a public statement, voicing concern that people are still being prosecuted and convicted simply because they are Democrats or have tried to stand up to corrupt Republicans?

Couldn't Obama or Eric Holder--or somebody--at least state unequivocally that they intend to get to the bottom of corruption in the DOJ and hold the appropriate people accountable?

What has Obama done related to justice issues so far? Not a whole heckuva lot, other than seeking extensions in a lawsuit involving expansive claims of executive privilege by the Bush administration.

Investigative journalist Larisa Alexandrovna, for one, is tired of it. She takes Obama to the woodshed for dithering on matters of justice:

The Constitution guarantees liberties and provides protection for the "people" against tyranny. The abuses of power that have taken place are such heinous violations of those rights and liberties that it boggles the mind that any negotiations are even being considered. Moreover, these abuses were carried out by people who had the trust of the public to act as an honest enforcer of the law, not a as a branch of political police.

Has Mr. Obama failed us? Yes. He has failed the most important task he was given, to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. Clearly, protecting the Bush administration from prosecution is far more important to this president. This saddens me, but it does not surprise me at all.

Alexandrovna is right on target. And here is a little prediction from your friendly neighborhood Schnauzer. If Obama does not get justice issues right, his presidency will fail. If he does not show a spine of steel--and he had better do it quickly--Republicans will smell blood in the water and will destroy any chance he has of bringing our country out of free fall.

One of Bill Clinton's biggest mistakes was, in the early months of his presidency, letting Republicans off the hook for wrongdoing during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years.

That mistake nearly brought the Clinton presidency to its knees. And it greatly restricted what Clinton was able to accomplish. Worst of all, it set the stage for the disastrous eight years of George W. Bush.

Obama, like Clinton, appears to be a smart man. But he seems to be heading down the same slippery slope that tripped up Clinton.

And this is not just about Obama. His party's reputation is at stake. If a Democratic president cannot take a firm stand on matters of justice, the party likely will drift toward the precipice of irrelevance.

So, Mr. Obama, Antonin Scalia seems to get it. How about you?