Significant new information is appearing on the Siegelman case, in the form of the 143-page deposition of Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who previously issued an affidavit describing a telephone conversation in which Karl Rove was described by Alabama’s leading G.O.P. strategist as having intervened with the Justice Department to get the Siegelman case going. The deposition is backed by a mountain of documents which corroborate Simpson’s statements on most critical points.
Scott Horton, who's been following the Siegelman case and who may well be credited with bringing political background of the case to light, writes today about the Judiciary Committee staffers' leak of the contents of the deposition to Time.
Karl Rove’s fingerprints are now well documented, and they are all over the Siegelman case. At the core stand the senior figures of the Alabama G.O.P., many of them Karl Rove’s clients, and the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery—who is the wife of the state’s leading G.O.P. strategist, and a close and long-standing friend of Karl Rove’s.
These allegations also help put a focus on the role played by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section in the case.
The Siegelman prosecution and subsequent cover-up was engineered by a widespread group of Republican sympathizers, from a protege of Michael Chertoff's to a US attorney to the Alabama Republican machine to two major newspapers and to -- of course -- the White House and one of its most notable denizens, Karl Rove. As Adam Zagorin writes in his Time report:
If Simpson's version of events is accurate, it would show direct political involvement by the White House in federal prosecutions — a charge leveled by Administration critics in connection with the U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The White House is bound to fight hard. At the center, of course, are the statements of Republican lawyer, Jill Simpson.
But her account is disputed; those who she alleges told her about Rove's involvement during a G.O.P. campaign conference call claim that no such conversation took place. Rove himself has not responded to Simpson's allegations, which are clearly based on second-hand information, and the White House has refused to comment while Siegelman's case remains on appeal.
More on the Siegelman case can be found here.
