On a warm afternoon in May, near the beginning of a long white-collar trial, Richard Scrushy’s lead attorney, Art Leach, began probing the nature of the government’s investigation, as it related to the man who was on the stand, the prosecution’s star-witness, Nick Bailey. White collar cases can be tedious because there is no dramatic moment where the murder weapon is produced, there is no riveting testimony from the clever guys in the crime lab, where it is shown how physical evidence is linked to the defendants. The facts in a white collar case are centered around documentary evidence, conflicting vantage points and the reliability of stories told by eye witnesses.
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The marketing of Nick Bailey hasn’t gone so well for the DOJ’s Middle District of Alabama, so now the First Amendment is breaking out all over the place, and it is galling the prosecutors in Montgomery. The recent furtive actions of the DOJ prosecutors show that they are desperately racing against time to sell this crumbling case to the general public. Besides the integrity of the Justice Department and implications that run all the way back to Washington, imbedded in the heightened rhetoric, other ripple-effect concerns may be held in the balance, including the careers of the prosecutors and the reputation of a newspaper in Mobile. He’s the son of a County Democratic Party Chairman, he has a degree in finance, he was once the driver for Don Siegelman and later became his aide and advisor. And now, Nick Bailey has become a hot commodity, a figure who needs to be marketed and sold in order to justify a case that has even ardent skeptics and political opponents murmuring about the fairness and propriety of the seven year crusade to put a former governor in prison. To the dismay of the prosecutors, conviction and prison was not the ending, the closure they had hoped it would be, but only the beginning. And now that the case is reverberating all the way back to Washington DC, with the White House taking steps to ensure that damage control measures are in place to contain the Alabama situation, and amidst the usual statements that oscillate between denying there was anything improper about DOJ’s handling of the case and affirming the integrity of the people involved, there is a dug-in Attorney General and an administration that has been quick to deny any suggestion of political motives behind the Siegelman prosecution but not as quick to supply documents or any other proof in support of their denials. |
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