Not true. Our more than five years of reporting on the case indicates many ways in which Obama and his close advisors have tipped the justice scales against Siegelman. Most obviously, Obama has not used his presidential pardon power under the Constitution, or similar clemency measures.
Among the administration's aggressive tactics have been fighting all of Siegelman's appeals, including well-merited ones to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Obama's close friend Elena Kagan signed a major brief against Siegelman as Solicitor General in late 2009 before she became Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court.
Partisan opposition to Siegelman is longstanding among Alabama's now-powerful GOP judicial and political elite.
The investigation of Siegelman began in 1999 under orders of Alabama's Republican Attorney Gen. William Pryor, now a judge on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that supervises federal appeals from Alabama, Georgia and Florida. This probe was at the beginning of Siegelman's 1999-2003 term when he was Alabama's most popular and otherwise prominent Democrat.
More currently, the roll call of Obama administration opportunists and cover-up artists goes far beyond Kagan, as we show in a much longer version of this column on the Justice Integrity Project site.
The oppressive details of this prosecution are far too many to mention here even in summary.
But new readers should know that we have often reported how the Bush administration created at vast expense a special federal-state task force located at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base purely to investigate and imprison Siegelman.
The task force was led by an Air Force Reserves colonel with a joint appointment to the Justice Department. That helped provide an eerie paramilitary aspect to the prosecution -- particularly its witness interrogations and tight control of relevant law enforcement personnel -- that is almost always omitted from news coverage of the case.
Moreover, Alabama's Chief Middle District U.S. Judge Mark Fuller, trial judge for Siegelman, secretly controlled as by far the largest stockholder an Air Force contractor operating from Maxwell-Gunter and globally. Doss Aviation Inc., which trained Air Force pilots and refueled planes, received $300 million in Bush contracts from 2006-2009 without Siegelman's knowledge until long after trial.
This month, U.S. District Judge Clay D. Land, a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001, denied on Dec. 19 Siegelman's request for release on bond.
The circuit court assigned Land the case because it has temporarily suspended Fuller from his duties following his arrest on a wife-beating charge in August.
Fuller's wife had been his court bailiff during the Siegelman trial, and like Fuller had been married to someone else at the time. Divorce actions from their then-spouses two years ago indicated they had been having an affair, adding yet another irregularity to the proceedings.
In a 31-page decision, Land ruled in essence that Siegelman should remain imprisoned because Fuller and other judges have rejected most of his previous appeals to the Eleventh Circuit. Land reasoned that the defendant thus seems unlikely to prevail on his current arguments, which are scheduled to be heard Jan. 13 in Atlanta by the appellate court.
This is how rubber-stamp justice works.
As an alternative, Land could have allowed Siegelman bond and re-examined the issue, under the extraordinary circumstances, of whether the defendant could start gathering the evidence that the defendants have repeatedly sought as their Constitutional right since before their 2006 trial. On his own motion, a federal judge could demand the government to produce that hidden evidence in a week or two.
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