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Siegelman's release highlights volatile mix of public corruption and partisan zeal

March 31, 2008 — During the nine months former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman spent in federal prison before he was released last week on bond, the governor of Puerto Rico, the mayor of Detroit and one congressman from each party have been indicted, and the governor of New York has resigned in disgrace, one sock-clad step ahead of criminal prosecution himself.

That’s not a comprehensive enumeration of all the politicians who fell from grace during that period, bur rather an off-the-cuff listing of the high points. It doesn’t even include the Dickie Scruggs case. Stories about public corruption and the private failings of politicians have become a commonplace over the past few years, with a steadily growing lineup of indictees from both parties.

But this short list of notable indictments does call attention to one of the most troubling problems this country faces today: the combustible mix of political corruption and partisan prosecution.

Isolate any one of these cases and you’ll get some debate about the precise mix of vindictive prosecution and crooked practice. Some of Siegelman’s defenders will admit privately, for instance, that he may have been guilty of something, but not the confusing charge that landed him in a federal facility in Louisiana.

What’s troubling, however, is that like the creepy Siths of the Star Wars movies, one element of this volatile combination seldom surfaces these days without the other close behind. When prosecutors go looking for corruption they too often find it, and when their motives are examined they too often are tainted with partisanship.

This is true even when the facts in a case seem as clear-cut as those which caused Elliott Spitzer’s downfall after the revelation he’d been the client of a call-girl ring.  There’s no doubt the former New York governor deserved the infamy he brought on himself.

Yet, within days of Spitzer’s resignation, the story surfaced that the well-known Republican operative Roger Stone, acting through his lawyer, had contacted the FBI with information – including the detail about him wearing socks while having sex – concerning Spitzer’s associations with prostitutes. This was a few months after Spitzer’s father charged he’d received harassing phone calls from a number traced to Stone.

This detail doesn’t make Spitzer any less guilty, but it casts just a shadow of doubt about whether the investigation of his wrongdoing was entirely free of partisan politics.

Stories like this have a corrosive effect. Over time, people come to believe that no politician is entirely innocent, and no prosecution is entirely free of politics.

 The Decatur Daily, editorializing on the Siegelman case over the weekend, said that it was politics when a Republican appointee, Federal Judge Mark Fuller, sent Siegelman off to prison, and politics when two Democratic appointees on the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ordered him released.

Maybe that’s a cynical way of looking at it, but a degree of cynicism is justified in this case.

Whatever happens to Siegelman’s appeal, the appeals court order which released him last week represents a stinging repudiation of the way in which his prosecution was handled, and the highly unusual way in which he was hustled into a prison van immediately after his sentencing and then moved from one federal prison to another, in a manner the Tuscaloosa News found “reminiscent of how trophy prisoners were paraded in ancient Roman triumphs.”

In a column last year, the Louisiana political expert John Maginnis noted how every time federal prosecutors announced new corruption charges in his state, “they tell us it is actually a positive development, a signal to the rest of the country that the state, with the generous assistance of the U.S. Justice Department, is rooting out wrongdoing, addressing its sorry image and thus making this a fine place to do business and raise families.

“The next week, more indictments, more good news.”

That splendid assessment no longer applies just to Louisiana. Government corruption isn’t good news for either party, when both depend on public confidence in the integrity of the system. And selective zeal in the prosecution of wrongdoing will do little in the long run to make the system better.