Ex-AGs go to bat for ex-governor

It’s hard to make the case that former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman’s dealings with Richard Scrushy weren’t, let us say, unsavory. If ever the “Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas” principle applied, the HealthSouth founder, billion-dollar scammer and Bible-pounding slime monger would serve as one of its most verminous examples.

The question is, and has always been, whether those dealings were criminal.

A federal court decided almost 10 years ago that they were. Some prominent and influential people ever since — including a few with more than casual information about the prosecution — have had serious doubts.

Now, as the 70-year-old Siegelman approaches the end of his seven-year prison sentence, a bipartisan coalition of more than 100 former state attorneys general is asking President Obama to pardon the former Alabama secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor and chief executive.

“Although nine years have passed,” reads the letter from the attorneys general delivered to the White House on Wednesday, “Gov. Siegelman’s unjust conviction continues to eat away at the integrity of the justice system. Many legal scholars as well as the public at large believe that the prosecution of Gov. Siegelman was a perversion of justice.”

The prosecution and conviction were based on charges that the governor traded a seat on a powerful state health regulatory board to Scrushy (who, obviously, had a vested interest in such a post) in exchange for $500,000 to push for the key plank in Siegelman’s gubernatorial platform, a Georgia-style state lottery. This latest plea on Siegelman’s behalf argues that evidence of a quid pro quo agreement between the governor and Scrushy was insufficient at best, and that in any case Siegelman never profited from it.

Even at the time of his conviction, some thought the Siegelman case was itself compelling evidence that there were within the Bush Justice Department some less interested in prosecuting criminals than in prosecuting Democrats. (Some of those concerns were attributed to sources within the department itself.) But that wasn’t a defense likely to win Siegelman a Get Out of Jail Free card.

The timing of the former AGs’ plea is interesting, and perhaps problematic. Though Obama is a second-term president in the last year of his administration and thus in a sense has little to lose, he obviously has items on his agenda he still wants to pursue, such as political battle with Senate Republicans over his Supreme Court nominee.

Given that Siegelman has almost served out his sentence anyway, the president and his political advisers might conclude — especially in an election year, with his own party campaigning to hold the White House and pick up power in Congress — that springing a fellow Democrat from prison by executive fiat, however questionable the circumstances of his conviction, would be fraught with political peril.

In that climate, Siegelman might fall victim to political circumstances. Depending, of course, on whether or not one thinks of him as a “victim” at all.

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Ex-AGs go to bat for ex-governor."