As Karl Rove travels to Alabama this week to hawk his memoir Courage and Consequence, his two most prominent Alabama targets are calling him a charlatan and urging authorities to stop ignoring his role changing the nation's political map by bogus federal criminal prosecutions against Democrats.
In exclusive interviews, Democratic former Gov. Don Siegelman and Republican whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson urged the nation's journalists and Congress to grill Rove much more aggressively.
"Rove is a pathological liar," Siegelman wrote me in response to Rove's denial that he helped frame Siegelman on federal corruption charges in 2006. Siegelman, Simpson and others have cited evidence that the White House ruined Siegelman's re-election campaign as part of a nationwide plan to rely on what a DOJ chief of staff in 2005 called "loyal Bushies" as prosecutors.
Siegelman was tough also on watchdog institutions.
"By failing to investigate Karl Rove's subversion of our constitutional rights, abuse of power and the use of the DOJ as a political weapon," he wrote, "Congress and the mainstream media will be held in contempt by history."
Rove denied in Courage that politics motivated either Siegelman's prosecutors at the Bush Justice Department or a Bush-nominated Republican trial judge, Chief Judge Mark Fuller of Montgomery. Rove dismisses Simpson's 2007 testimony implicating him as "an obsession of conspiracists on the left," including the New York Times, CBS and MSNBC.
Further, Rove denied that he or other prominent Republicans have ever met Simpson, who stepped forward in 2007 with sworn statements alleging that authorities had framed Siegelman to prevent his re-election.
In response to Rove's claims, Simpson disclosed for the first time publicly that her late father and sister met both future Bush presidents in Texas beginning three decades ago. She said her sister worked at a Bush-affiliated bank in Texas on investor relations involving the oil business.
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