Tom Baxter

Nagging Questions About Rove's Involvement In Alabama Politics Could Come Back To Haunt Him

By Tom Baxter
Editor
Southern Political Report

(8/15/07) The news that Karl Rove plans to leave the White House staff at the end of August brought to mind an encounter with the Republican strategist back in 1994, before he became known as Bush’s Brain.

Back then, Rove was better known in Texas circles as someone who could be deadly effective in tough races, but often rubbed his own Republican brethren the wrong way.

I stopped by his Austin office one afternoon to get his take on what was happening in Texas at that moment, as I’d done a time or two in the past. But on this particular day Rove had Alabama on his mind. His shop had just produced an ad for Republican state Supreme Court candidate Perry Hooper, Jr., in his race against the incumbent chief justice, Judge Sonny Harper.

Harper had been accused of soliciting donations for his campaign from lawyers who had cases pending before him. The ad portrayed a Montgomery lawyer calling Harper to inquire about the solicitation, and being told in no uncertain terms that he’d better send a check right away.

Knowing that I hailed from those parts, Rove beamed when I complimented the syrupy, dead-on Montgomery lawyer’s accent. He confided that the faux attorney was really an actor from California.

This was the sort of personally charged, finger-pointing politics Rove relished, and he clearly felt this spot – which got enormous air time in Alabama’s bargain-basement television markets – was a home run.

As it turned out, that state court race would become the template for the rest of Rove’s storied career.

Hooper fell short by a few hundred votes in the initial balloting, but at Rove’s urging he pressed for a recount. His campaign began a drumbeat of accusations which a Hooper staffer would later say was “designed to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral – all of that,” and eventually won the disqualification of enough absentee ballots to turn the tide.

The legal wrangle that ensued drug on even longer than the 2000 presidential election, to which this contest has some obvious similarities. It also was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hooper’s favor, some 10 months after the new state judicial term had begun.

Rove remained close to the Republican legal community in Alabama, for good reason. He was good for them: In the decade after Hooper’s breakthrough, the GOP won control of the state Supreme Court and its appellate branches.

And they were good for him. For a 10-year period ending in 2004, Alabama led the nation in fundraising for Supreme Court candidates, in which he had established a specialty.

But as he prepares to leave Washington, there are nagging questions about Rove’s involvement in Alabama politics after he reached the White House.

Last May, several months after the conviction on bribery and conspiracy charges of former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman and HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, claimed in an affidavit to have listened in on an interesting call.

In a conference call that took place during a crucial period after the 2002 governor’s race, in which Republican Bob Riley was ultimately declared winner over Siegelman, Simpson claims she heard William Canary, a well-known figure in the Alabama GOP and a former executive director of the Republican National Committee, reassure the conferees.

Canary told them “that he already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman," according to Simpson’s affidavit.

Siegelman, convicted after two trials in 2006, was sentenced to seven years in June by a Republican federal judge with whom he had done battle politically, and led from a Montgomery courtroom in handcuffs and shackles. He’s currently at a minimum-security Oakdale, La. But questions about the case have picked up steam as the center of attention has shifted from the Alabama press to the blogosphere.

Rove brushed off questions about Simpson’s claim, and it never got more than a mention in the clamor over the Valery Plame outing and the U.S. attorneys scandal.

But according to Scott Horton, a New York lawyer and former Alabamian who has become a passionate defender of Siegelman in Harper’s Magazine, the White House considered the matter serious enough to fly Gov. Riley to Washington on the day Siegelman was sentenced because it was nervous about Rove’s involvement.

The Rove connection isn’t all that’s interesting about the Siegelman case, enough so that a group of 44 former state attorneys general has petitioned Congress to investigate whether Siegelman’s conviction was politically motivated. (More on this from SPR later.)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has asked U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for information and documents related to Siegelman’s prosecution, and a familiar Washington dance has begun. It would be a culminating irony if the evolving investigation of Rove’s Alabama connections spoils his farewell party.