Today’s Wall Street Journal confirms what folo noted Scott Horton reporting ten weeks ago (see also here, here, and here):
Federal agents are investigating whether former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott knowingly played a role in an alleged conspiracy in 2006 to influence a Mississippi judge presiding over a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against famed plaintiff attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, according to people familiar with the situation. …
Mr. Lott, who is a brother-in-law to Mr. Scruggs, unexpectedly announced his resignation from the Senate two days before Mr. Scruggs was indicted last November. Since then, Mr. Lott has been interviewed by federal agents at least once, according to a person familiar with the case.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Oxford, Miss., which is leading the investigation, is also examining whether several associates of Mr. Scruggs induced a different Mississippi jurist, Hinds County Judge Robert Delaughter [sic], to rule in favor of Mr. Scruggs in a separate lawsuit by promising that Mr. Lott would recommend Judge Delaughter for a seat on the federal bench.
Now, back on December 11, you may recall, we were watching Horton nose-out some slightly-different Lott spoor:
Well, here comes Horton with the sort of inkling that
two senior law enforcement figures in Mississippi told me was "more than simply plausible. " The FBI had secured warrants to monitor Scruggs’s phone calls early in the course of the case, during the summer or early fall. In some of those conversations Dickie Scruggs asked for his brother-in-law’s help in fighting off Judge Acker’s attempts to have him prosecuted. Trent Lott picked up the phone and spoke with a few friends in the Justice Department … or perhaps even directly with a U.S. Attorney or two in Alabama, or a senator from Alabama … and asked them to lay off his misbehaving brother-in-law. My examination of prosecutions in Alabama over the last two years … of which the Siegelman case is the most notable … show that in few places in the country are the federal prosecutors’ offices so politically charged and motivated as in Alabama.
If the FBI was listening in, and it gathered information that Lott had tried to influence the situation to help bail out his brother-in-law, that would raise major issues. Politicians should not try to influence the course of specific criminal cases. Such interventions are not normally grist for a criminal investigation. Most likely they would evolve into an ethics investigation inside of Congress. Was Trent Lott facing this prospect when he decided to step down? …
But the jists of Horton’s old post and WSJ’s new story are hardly mutually-exclusive — rather they’re, if anything, mutually-supportive (which, by my reckoning, also tends to support that Washington rumor we were mulling around here yesterday). But since WSJ has to spend so much ink bringing non-foloers up to speed on part of what we know, the only news of value for us (except for the fact that WSJ reporters can’t spell “DeLaughter”) is that the gentry have now been alerted to what-went-with-Trent Lott.
Speaking of Scott Horton and Alabama, though, Scott reported yesterday that at longest last:
I am advised by CBS News that their long-awaited feature dealing with the trial of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman will air on the next 60 Minutes program, on Sunday, February 24. I am told by people who have seen it that this is one of the best pieces of domestic exposé journalism the 60 Minutes team has put together in the last several years. Mark your calendar and if you’re out, this is the time to master the Tivo or the VCR record function.
Ha, good one, Scott — I’ll be not only in but moved to turn on a teevy for the first time in 2008! So McThuselah’s tomcatting better not co-opt this report again (not that I’d squawk about a two-fer — or, heck, even a three-fer, should all this inspire Sen. Wide Stance to wax horny again).
