Reply #77: SCOTT HORTON: Siegelman Sentenced; Riley Rushes to Washington = 2007.07.28

[L. Coyote]

Siegelman Sentenced; Riley Rushes to Washington
Scott Horton - June 28, 2007 - http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000402

........

Alabama Republican Governor Bob Riley, whose election campaign against Siegelman precipitated the criminal investigation and prosecution of Siegelman, was summoned urgently to Washington, DC. He was to have addressed a dinner ... Riley told disappointed organizers ... he will meet with Bush Administration officials to discuss damage control relating to the Siegelman case. “The sentence will come down today, and they’re very concerned about all the questions about the role Karl Rove played in this prosecution,” the source said.

But why the worry? Aren’t all these concerns paranoid delusions?

Hardly. In fact, the White House has given strict instructions to avoid all questioning ... Louis Franklin, the man supposedly in charge of the case, makes aggressive statements about Rove’s non-involvement – covering matters as to which he obviously has no personal knowledge – whereas Rove himself and the White House maintain an increasingly nervous silence? Telling facts, I’d say.

And consider further the White House’s invocation of Executive Privilege in a desperate last-step measure to block production of documents to Congressional oversight committees which might well have shed more light on the White House’s dealings with federal prosecutors in Alabama concerning the Siegelman prosecution. Instead, White House counsel Fred Fielding delivered a response to Congress today to which he appended a memorandum from Paul Clement (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/fielding-exec-priv/?resultpage=5&), the Solicitor General, supporting the White House in its efforts to stonewall Congress. But the Clement memo disclosed for the first time that the White House indeed is withholding a large volume of documents which establish exactly what the White House has, up to this point, feverishly denied: that Karl Rove and others directed a scheme to fire a large group of U.S. attorneys who had been handling criminal cases against Republicans, or who had refused to bring cases against Democrats, and to replace them with political lackeys. ......