Scott Horton: Siegelman Accuser Released

The nation’s highest profile political prosecution just got a little smellier–as if that were possible. U.S. Attorney Leura Canary and her chief prosecutor, Louis Franklin, built their case against Siegelman largely off the testimony of businessman Lanny Young. As Time magazine’s Adam Zagorin recounts, Young came in to the discussions with the Justice Department telling them he had dynamite information linking Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and then-Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to corruption. He also had something quite trivial relating to Governor Siegelman.

But it turns out that the prosecutors didn’t want to hear a word about the big-name Republicans. They only cared about Siegelman. In retrospect, of course, this turns out not to be remotely surprising. Leura Canary’s husband, Bill Canary, was advising both Pryor and Sessions. Indeed, Karl Rove was also involved in the Pryor campaigns. But to eliminate any possibility of things going off the tracks, Ms. Canary assigned her First Assistant U.S. Attorney to handle the plea bargain negotiations. That was Julia Weller, the wife of Christopher Weller, Pryor’s attorney, and a figure close to Senator Sessions as well. Weller signed the plea bargain agreement.

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Canary and her team decided to reward Young by seeking no further jail time for him, and were reportedly shocked when Judge Mark Fuller—whom Republican operative lawyer Jill Simpson fingers in sworn testimony to Congress as a loyal Republican activist hand-picked to run the Siegelman show trial—handed out a 2-year sentence.

A figure close to the prosecution told me at the time that “this is purely for show. They’re very upset about all the media interest in this. If they just let Lanny go, it would look terrible. But Lanny Young will be let out before the year’s end. It’s already understood. He’s being rewarded for helping to take down Siegelman.” Though I was never quite sure who “they” were, I was somewhat skeptical about the claim that Young would be sentenced and then promptly set free by the judge who sentenced him. After all, federal judges and prosecutors are not in the habit of doing wink-and-nod deals and then conducting hearings designed to mislead a troubled public. But then, this is Montgomery, where a pecularily partisan form of “justice” is dispensed. And indeed, the forecast I was given has proven right on the money.

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Lanny Young, is the key witness for the prosecutors. He changed his account of the facts repeatedly after being offered a plea bargain arrangement by prosecutors who were keen to fabricate a case against Siegelman. Young was released on December 11, more than a year before his scheduled release. All the dealings between the prosecutors and Judge Fuller surrounding this matter were conducted in secret.

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