Election Fraud & More To Come: Karl Rove & The Gov. Siegelman Set-Up

It now looks increasingly like he was a target of a political vendetta that reached into and involved the Department of Justice in a political prosecution. And, in fact, we had a really astonishing development in this case back in May, when a Republican lawyer, Jill Simpson, who had been involved in the electoral campaign of his Republican opponent, Bob Riley, filed an affidavit, in which she described a conversation she had participated in with a man named William Canary. Now, he's a native New Yorker, actually, referred to frequently by Alabamians as "the carpetbagger," who is a prominent Republican kingmaker in Alabama, the head of the Business Council of Alabama. And he stated in this conversation that he had talked to Karl, and Karl had spoken to the Department of Justice, and they didn't have to worry about Don Siegelman anymore. He was going to be taken care of. And he went on to say, "My girls are going to take care of Siegelman."

Well, in fact, the US attorney who brought the case against Siegelman is Laura Canary, his wife, and the action was also joined in an earlier phase by Alice Martin, the US attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, a woman, by the way, who is currently under investigation for perjury, who also is very, very close to Canary. So this linked the case directly to Karl Rove and to political motivation. We took -- spent a lot of time looking at Simpson's affidavit, her motivation, and found it was really fully corroborated all across the board.

One of the really unusual things here is that the judge handling the case -- by the way, the judge handling the case is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Alabama Republican Party who had an open and notorious grudge involving Governor Siegelman, so how he came to handle the case is another real stunning fact about this case. He denied bail pending appeal, and in these sorts of political cases -- in fact, he directed that Governor Siegelman be placed in manacles and handcuffs and taken before waiting television cameras to be shown on the evening news in Alabama, something that a number of Republican attorneys general I talked with described as "absolutely extraordinary."

The allegation that started all this was a study that was done by two professors at the University of Minnesota. They said there were seven prosecutions by this Justice Department of Democrats for every one by a Republican. And if we look at Alabama, it may be the strongest single example of this phenomenon. The Department of Justice went after prominent Democratic elected officials and disregarded corruption that surrounded Republican officials. And, you know, this is one of the real centers of the Abramoff scandal, with a mass diversion of funds and casino gambling money going into the coffers of the Alabama Republican Party, not investigated, not dealt with, not charged.

MADISON, Wis. - A former state worker whose fraud conviction became a political football in last fall's race for Wisconsin governor won her freedom Thursday when a federal appeals court acquitted her on the spot and ordered her released from prison.

After oral arguments Thursday, the three-judge panel of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago vacated Georgia Thompson's conviction and ordered her immediate release from the Illinois prison she entered in November.

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In arguments Thursday, the appeals judges called the charges against Thompson unfounded.

"It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," Judge Diane Wood told prosecutors. "I'm not sure what your actual theory in this case is."

Acting on the appeals panel's order, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa in Milwaukee - the same judge who refused Thompson's request to remain free pending the outcome of her appeal - ordered her released on her own recognizance and said she could move back to Wisconsin.

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Thompson's lawyer, Stephen Hurley, said prosecutors charged Thompson with conduct that did not constitute a crime.

"It cost Georgia her job, her life savings, her home and her liberty, and it cost Georgia her good name," Hurley said.