Simpson says her father occasionally met members of the Bush family on business dealings related to oil leases for his accounting clients, and she showed me photos illustrating that she and her son wereinvited to the White House in 2001.
"Karl Rove knows perfectly well what the truth is," says Simpson. An attorney, Simpson points out that a Democratic staffer cut her off during her 2007 House Judiciary Committee closed-door testimony when she started to respond to a question about her political experience by mentioning her family's connections to the Bush family. "It's right there in the transcript," she says, noting the bottom of page seven.
More generally, the Obama administration has resisted reviews of the flimsy evidence against Siegelmanand his codefendant Richard Scrushy. They were sentenced to seven years in prison primarily because Siegelman reappointed Scrushy to a state board in 1999 after Scrushy donated to a non-profit Siegelman advocated. DOJ Solicitor General Elena Kagan, a friend of the president and a leading candidate for his next Supreme Court nomination, has urged the court to deny review.
This is the background as Rove's book tour comes to Birmingham April 27. As reported by Roger Shuler for OpEd News, Rove will face protesters showing a fanciful image of police frog-walking Rove in handcuffs.
But protesters can expect scant impact when Democratic Party leaders distance themselves from Siegelman after years of negative news coverage.
Siegelman told a progressive audience last summer at Netroots Nation that Obama White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett had told him earlier that day that defendants like him must build media and political support for themselves to win White House interest.
But Hollywood filmmaker John McTiernan of Die Hard fame showed last year in The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove the difficulty for political defendants in matching the DOJ's resources, even if courts permitted it. You can watch here for free the documentary portraying the financial ruin imposed on defendants by federal charges.
In response Rove's allegation that she's been motivated by seeking publicity, Simpson says she's received more than 100 requests for TV interviews but has granted only three: To CBS immediately after her closed-door congressional testimony so that public could see something tangible, and to MSNBC five months later on Feb. 25 after CBS sat on the footage until the day before the MSNBC program. The other was to a local reporter who spotted her at a meeting and puta microphone in front of her.This rings true. Last June, she drove from Alabama to Washington to watch a path-breaking conference that I organized at the National Press Club to focus on prosecutorial abuse in political cases. But she declined my invitation to speak to the nationwide audience on C-SPAN.
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