Jill Simpson: She's Still Standing

What's happening with Jill Simpson, the north Alabama attorney and Republican whistleblower whose affidavit regarding the political prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman was released almost one year ago?

How is Simpson holding up under regular attack from nutjobs in the corrupt wing of the Republican Party?

Alabama blogger and newshound Glynn Wilson addresses those questions in an excellent post at his Locust Fork Journal. Wilson tells us that Simpson is doing just fine, thank you very much.

The latest right-wing hatchetman to go after Simpson is John Hinderaker, writing at The Weekly Standard. Hinderaker claims that Simpson has struggled to make a living as an attorney, that she comes from a family of rabid Democrats, that she is moving to Washington, D.C., because she is on the verge of financial collapse in Rainsville, Alabama.

Wilson sets the record straight, showing that Simpson has done quite well as an attorney, her family indeed has a lengthy Republican resume, and she has made several savvy financial moves to facilitate a planned move to the nation's capital. Simpson long ago acknowledged that standing up to corrupt Republicans in Alabama has hurt her law practice. But she hardly is suffering financially, and greener pastures await in the nation's seat of power.

Hinderaker evidently isn't interested in the facts, so Wilson gets down to it:

As a matter of fact, Ms. Simpson held an auction of some of her extensive property holdings in order to buy a house and open a law office in Washington. She sold her burned down house for $57,000, not bad in a depressed market. And she sold her law office and an out building next door, along with the land next to the Rainsville City Hall and a city park, for $300,000. Not exactly a pauper’s return on her investment of about $65,000 a number of years ago. The city wanted the land anyway to fill out it’s growing municipal complex. Her office building may very well be used for the new Dekalb County satellite courthouse.

She rejected the bid on a 38-acre farm she still owns with a $150,000 lake on it. And she is keeping the house in Rainsville where she still lives with her mother and three children. When she is away working in DC, her secretary will still be working full time on her practice in Rainsville.

Yet without ever having met Jill Simpson, Hinderaker goes on to attack her mental health and the work of CBS’s “60 Minutes” on the story, all while defending the disgraced Karl Rove. He repeats the myth perpetrated by the Birmingham News that she has somehow changed her story several times over the past year.

Since I told the whole story based on an on the record interview almost a year ago, I can attest to the fact that the story has never changed. It’s just a complicated story with a host of characters, and different news outlets pick up on different aspects of the story in the retelling.