folo

The Mississippi Supreme Court has a handful of decision lists out since the new members have joined the court, and a number of opinions in these lists are split decisions that might provide some clues about the impact of the change in court personnel (we have three new justices) at the reading-the-runes level of court watching. What we have here is enough evidence to start us scratching our heads, but too small a sample to draw conclusions. This also may just be an artifact about how quickly various judges write. But it’s what we have so far to go on.

I’ve already written about one split decision, arguing that Justices Dickinson and Kitchens got it right in their dissents (where they were joined by Justice Graves) in the Solomon Osborne case. Here’s a story in the Greenwood Commonwealth about the Osborne case, which also notes:

The state Supreme Court is still considering another recommendation, based on an unrelated case, that Osborne be banned for life from the bench. That case involves a then 17-year-old Greenwood female whom Osborne ordered detained in a move the commission claims was the result of “improper, illegal and inappropriate” acts.

There are three more cases with split opinions. I’m not counting a zoning decision written by Justice Randolph to which Justice Graves dissented without written opinion– without an opinion from him, one can’t tell anything about why Justice Graves dissented.

Details about all this below the fold.

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Prominent attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs leaves the federal courthouse in Oxford, Miss., Nov. 28, 2007, after being indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly bribing a judge. His son Zach Scruggs is seen in the background. (File photo/The Clarion-Ledger)

The Clarion Ledger reports:

Dickie Scruggs, once one of the nation’s most powerful trial lawyers, is on his way back to Mississippi from federal prison in Kentucky, prison officials said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Oxford requested the U.S. Marshals Service return the 62-year-old former lawyer in time for a Tuesday hearing, where documents show Scruggs is expected to appear before U.S. District Judge Glen Davidson and plead guilty to corruption charges related to a second judicial bribery scheme.

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In the Jackson Free Press, Adam Lynch reviews Dunn Lampton’s prosecutions of Paul Minor, John Whitfield, Wes Teel, and Oliver Diaz, with an eye to what may happen next under an Eric Holder-led Justice Department.

… Holder is showing more investigative interest in the alleged politicization of the DOJ than his predecessor. The Huffington Post reported that Holder promised senators this week that he would review why career prosecutors in Washington had decided not to prosecute the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division after an inspector general’s report found that former division head Bradley Schlozman lied to lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.

Holder is also in a position to reverse Bush’s order to protect Rove, Miers and Bolten from testifying before Congress.

Minor’s attorney Hiram Eastland said he is encouraged by the new make-up of the Justice Department and the president’s office, and felt Rove’s testimony could have “huge” consequences.

“We think they’re going to find out that Karl Rove was actually involved with the Justice Department and countless cases of political prosecution, and in the creation of nothing less than political prisoners,” Eastland said. “Congress is addressing the U.S. attorneys firing and all, but they’ve yet to get down to the questions that were raised about whether these prosecutions were political. We’re not aware that they’ve gone around and questioned anyone. There’s been very little follow-up after our letters to the Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility. We’re not saying the investigations won’t happen. They may have ultimately planned to get around to them anyway, but this was never meant to be a country where we take political prisoners and we’re encouraging Congress and the Justice Department to get to the bottom of these issues.”

Diaz said he was not confident Rove would be speaking before a House committee anytime soon. …

Maybe not, but time is finally on the side of justice, not Dunn Lampton and Karl Rove.

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Much thanks to duckweedpond for directing my attention to “Greg in TX,” the disgusted former Tom DeLay-constituent who blogs as Anti Corruption Republican. Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are to ACR as Dickie Scruggs and Ed Peters to folo, and lately, ACR’s been focusing on Todd Boulanger and Kevin Ring, the two Abramoff lieutenants whose existences Ann Copland and Thad Cochran now so rue.

Recall that on Friday, Boulanger pled guilty to influence-peddling, a charge brought not by indictment but by information (the document customarily signaling a plea deal), and yep, his attorney quickly announced Boulanger’s full cooperation.

Kevin Ring (AP photo/Susan Walsh)

But Ring (formerly employed by ex-Rep. John Doolittle, R-CA, and shown here taking the Fifth last July) got socked in September with a 46-page, 10-count indictment. ACR at the time pointed out how Ring’s ties to Ed Buckham, DeLay’s former chief of staff, threaten DeLay. Last Thursday, in a post headlined Kevin Ring in the Crosshairs, ACR linked to the Boulanger Information (6-page pdf), whose Overt Acts list — I didn’t realize until now — focuses exclusively on “Staffer E,” Thad Cochran’s aide Ann Copland. Said ACR:

The bottom line is that we know that Mr. Ring was involved in failed plea negotiations. Things have changed since those discussions. It is obvious the Justice Department is going after Mr. Ring with both barrels blazing. And all I have to say is “Fire at Will!”

At Boulanger’s plea hearing Friday afternoon, prosecutors also referred to “Staffer D” and “Staffer F,” whose probable identities ACR susses-out as Frasier Verrusio, a former staffer for mucked-up Rep. Don Young (R-AK), and Kevin Koonce, now a lobbyist but during Abramoff’s heyday the legislative director for — neither ACR nor I am making this up — the soon-to-be-announced nominee for Commerce Secretary, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH).

Isn’t that interesting? Poor old POTUS just can’t buy a break on these Cabinet picks here lately, can he?

Anyhow, if I knew my way around graphics software, I’d make you a prettier chart of how these squeezes are running (scratched-through names have already pled guilty and are or will be in prison). Note that the more pointers precede a name, the more perps may be able and motivated to spill on it:

ABRAMOFF > Blackann / Hirni >> Blunt / Bond and . . .

> Scanlon / Rudy >> Ring >>> Buckham >>>> DeLay

> Boulanger >> Ring >>> Doolittle and . . .

>>> Feeney

>>> Verrusio >>>> Young

>>> Koonce >>>> Gregg

>>> Copland >>>> Cochran

I know I’m probably leaving somebody out here (will update as memory better serves), but Abramoff’s other Big Losers — penal and/or electoral — include (scratch-throughs same as above):

Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)

J. Steven Griles, Bush Interior Dept. Deputy Secretary (note Gale Norton’s exposure and renewed risk here, though the statute of limitations may save her if Salazar isn’t quick about it)

David Safavian, Bush White House procurement chief

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT)

In other words, Abramoff and his minions’ toxin isn’t diluting with time, so all former objects of their largesse (including, I hope, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) can reasonably feel sick. Anybody spotted Thud around Oxford or Washington lately? How’s his color around the gills?

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Even foloers who paid attention to the Jack Abramoff story while it was front-burner may be surprised by Thad Cochran’s appearance in it now — and readers not previously interested in Abramoff may be even more startled. So let’s review some names we’re apt to be hearing more of soon.

Lobbyist Todd Boulanger is front-and-center at the moment, joining Abramoff, Tony Rudy, and Trevor Blackann among the ranks of the convicted — but watch for more about Boulanger’s conduit to Cochran aide Ann Copland, Kevin Ring. Indicted in September, Ring is the former legislative director for ex-Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA). Likely, those sweating forthcoming indictments include not just Doolittle but ex-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX); my own local favorite, ex-Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL); and quite possibly Blackann’s former bosses, Missouri Republicans Rep. Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond. (Just a few days ago, perhaps hoping to mimic Trent Lott rather than Conrad Burns, Bond announced his retirement.)

From my Feeney link:

… Boulanger’s go-getting spirit was on full display in an email TPMmuckraker obtained last year, where he urged others in the office to pony up for Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), who was a fast friend to the firm’s clients (he’d “never said ‘no’”). …

… Though a number of Boulanger’s former colleagues are either in prison or under investigation, Boulanger himself appears never to have been a focus of the investigation.

The dateline is November 2007 (i.e., with Bush’s DoJ still in charge) and the emphasis is mine. But to appreciate the full irony of the last sentence for Thud — as well as his long, lucrative entanglement with Abramoff — visit the TPMM link:

… “[W]e have been hitting them up for projects almost everyday [sic] the last couple of months,” Abramoff associate Todd Boulanger wrote of Cochran’s office. The Choctaw tribe is one of the largest employers in Mississippi.

Abramoff and his associates had already donated thousands to Cochran’s campaign committee at the time of the email. That was “good,” Boulanger allowed, “but not good enough for the member who keeps the lights turned on here at Greenberg.”

The lights at Abramoff’s law firm Greenberg Traurig were expensive lights to keep on, of course. The Choctaw paid millions per year to retain Abramoff’s services. Abramoff continues to cooperate with prosecutors as part of a sprawling corruption investigation. He’s currently serving a sentence for another crime in a minimum security prison in Maryland. Cochran, unlike Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) and Rep. Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), has never been reported to be a subject of interest to prosecutors.

“I know it’s pricey,” Boulanger concluded, “but nobody comes even close (except for Doolittle, maybe) to doing as much for our main clients as Senator Cochran.” …

After the email, which called for contributions from Abramoff’s team members and clients, they contributed thousands of dollars to Cochran’s leadership political committee, The Senate Victory Fund.

“Oh, but ol’ Thad has taxpayers’ interest at heart,” you say? Read on:

Cochran was a valuable ally for Abramoff. In 2001, for instance, Cochran helped to set aside $16.3 million in federal funds for the Mississippi Choctaw to build a jail. The Justice Department objected to the appropriation, arguing that the Choctaw, a very wealthy tribe, didn’t need the funds. Only appoximately $9 million would be released. Abramoff panicked, fearing that he’d lose one of his rainmaking clients: “We MUST stop this. This would be SUCH a HUGE embarrassment,” he wrote in a March 2001 email. That November, shortly after one of Abramoff’s colleagues wrote in an email about the need for a statement on the Senate floor reiterating that the jail project should be fully-funded, Cochran made such a statement. It was merely one part of an aggressive lobbying effort by Abramoff that also targeted White House officials Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove. Eventually, Abramoff got his way and all of the funds were released.

It was just another example of Cochran pulling strings for the Choctaw for Abramoff — some acts more significant than others. In 1997, Peter Stone reports in his book Heist, Abramoff lobbied Cochran to insert “a sentence of nineteen words into a mammoth appropriations bill that exempted the tribe from regulatory scrutiny by the National Indian Gaming Commission. Cochran’s legislative maneuver also allowed the Mississippi tribe to avoid the fees that the gaming body levied on other tribes, which saved the Choctaws about $180,000 a year.” …

So while taxpayers in the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians may have reason to thank Thud, for the rest of us, another thought is more satisfying . . .

(h/t UnheardNoMore! and duckweedpond)

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Before y’all bring yours, here’s what I’ve found so far:

As the Israelis briefly eased up on air-strikes a bit, NYT describes Egypt’s (especially) and Jordan’s freak-outs that, with the Gaza war so endangering the hope of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, they may end up again “pressed to absorb” the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. If you’ve paid any attention to Hosni Mubarak-as-national-manager, you know what further disaster that’s apt to produce. And a former Jordanian official warns, “This kind of formula means a Palestinian loss of their land and a Jordanian loss of their identity.” Or as Ben Cole would say, “Trouble brewing.”

As for trouble-already-brewed, WaPo ledes “President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in [seven] decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges.” The chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers may believe “It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter … ,” but all other interviewees (the single non-Republican among them not quoted here) say things like “It was all Band-Aids,” “we really went nowhere for almost ten years,” and “It’s almost a lost economic decade.”

Bush’s DoJ has made such a habit of foisting off its immigration-crime cases on overwhelmed border-state and -county court systems, the whole thing’s become a clusterf*ck

while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group’s statistics. Drug prosecutions — the enforcement priority of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations — have declined by 20 percent since 2003.

“I have seen a national abdication by the Justice Department,” said Attorney General Terry Goddard of Arizona.

Egad, if only it were mere abdication. But back in Mississippi . . .

“Some of those involved,” reports the C-L, “say the heated relationship between the Jackson City Council and Mayor Frank Melton’s administration has reached an all-time low” — mostly because Council members can’t question city department-heads directly but have to submit all questions in writing to the chief administrator instead. And of course they get nothing until some C-L FOIA request pulls it out of Melton’s minions. Frank Bluntson’s bleat that everybody should be sweeter to Melton while he’s sick and indicted is worth the price of admission here.

According to the AP,

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety is willing to pay about $250,000 a year to hire a new medical examiner at the state Crime Lab, but the money lawmakers approved to help cover the salary isn’t guaranteed long-term. …

Though DPS head Steve Simpson wants to make the funding permanent, budget-crunched counter-arguments may prevail. Meanwhile,

The state has signed a contract with Forensic Medical Inc. of Nashville to conduct autopsies in Jackson, and so far there’s been no backlog.

“The changes that we made after Dr. Hayne was no longer performing services have worked well,” Simpson said.

So if everything’s that peachy now, what’s your excuse, MS Lege?

Aberdeen’s school board president got arrested on animal cruelty charges after a Nettleton alderman found on the guy’s property the chained-up corpse of a mare he’d taken there for breeding. While he went to call 911, Alderman Brandon says, the horse’s body was moved and property owner Jackson disappeared. The DJournal adds, “Brandon had attempted to have Jackson charged with a felony death of an animal charge, but he said the value of the animal could be disputed in court.”

Sorry, but I just find it amusing that the DJ asked Ole Miss’s vice-chancellor for university relations, a professor of communicative disorders, to comment on Khayat.

Finally, making up a Saddy Animals tardy, I proffer the Sun Herald‘s WWII farce The war dogs of Cat Island.

Nu?

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The Mississippi Supreme Court has a handful of decision lists out since the new members have joined the court, and a number of opinions in these lists are split decisions that  might provide some clues about the impact of the change in court personnel (we have three new justices) at the reading-the-runes level of court watching.  What we have here is enough evidence to start us scratching our heads, but too small a sample to draw conclusions.  This also may just be an artifact about how quickly various judges write.  But it’s what we have so far to go on.

I’ve already written about one split decision, arguing that Justices Dickinson and Kitchens got it right in their dissents (where they were joined by Justice Graves) in the Solomon Osborne case.  Here’s a story in the Greenwood Commonwealth about the Osborne case, which also notes:

The state Supreme Court is still considering another recommendation, based on an unrelated case, that Osborne be banned for life from the bench. That case involves a then 17-year-old Greenwood female whom Osborne ordered detained n a move the commission claims was the result of “improper, illegal and inappropriate” acts.

There are three more cases with slit opinions.  I’m not counting a zoning decision written by Justice Randolph to which Justice Graves dissented without written opinion– without an opinion from him one can’t tell anything about why Justice Graves dissented.

Details about all this below the fold.

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Except that the Obamas are making their way to Washington this weekend and we have only 15 more days of Bush to endure, the news is right crappy.

NYT suspects that Israel’s ground attack on Gaza is — notwithstanding Israeli claims to the contrary — all about ending Hamas’ rule there. Recall who, four years ago, found it so all-fired necessary for Gaza to hold that election in which Hamas unexpectedly — only if you were Dubya, Dick, or Condi — trounced Bush-friendlier, roaringly-corrupt, ineffectual Fatah. These days, according to the Jerusalem Post (not exactly an unbiased source), Hamas is into more violent Fatah-trouncing: putting under house arrest, kneecapping, breaking the hands of, or executing dozens of Fatah men in Gaza on grounds that they’re collaborating with Israel. (Nor would it surprise me if Fatah guys have called in some airstrikes, civilian-heedless treachery being par in the Middle East.)

Former Iraqi puppet president Iyad Allawi, whom Bush called a man of “leadership” and “courage” and a “friend,” has been chatting with Reuters.

“Yes, Bush’s policies failed utterly,” said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. “Utter failure. Failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy.”

“His insistence on names like ‘democracy’ and ‘open elections’, without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt, and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush’s policy,” he said.

Think what it is to be called an utter failure by someone described (h/t Danp at WaMo) by a former classmate as follows:

Any physician who graduated from Baghdad Medical School between the years 1962 and 1970 will remember this big, husky man. The Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorizing the medical students, was a poor student and chose to spend his time standing in the school courtyard or chasing female students to their homes.

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Bill Minor has been covering Mississippi politics since the early 50s.  In his latest column, he goes back decades in describing why Mississippi is number seven in public corruption convictions per capita, according to the Justice Department (Illinois is number 22nd, but I think that’s because the areas outside metropolitan Chicago just don’t hold up their end).

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The WSJ Law Blog reports that Gov. Blagojevich has hired Chicago law firm Genson & Gillespie to supplement his prior lawyer Sorosky. Terrence Genson (unsuccessfully) represented Conrad Black.

Partners Edward N. Genson and Terrence Gillespie have played high-profile roles as attorneys for decades in some of the most well-known corruption cases in the state. Genson, for instance, repped Conrad Black, the fallen media baron, as well as clients in the federal government’s investigation of the secretary of state’s office under since-convicted former Gov. George Ryan. …

Sorosky has closer ties to the governor than Genson and Gillespie; Blagojevich was once an associate at Kaplan Sorosky. Both Sorosky and Jim Kaplan attended the governor’s wedding. “He was our associate and our friend,” Kaplan told the Law Blog last week.

The Journal has documented Blagojevich’s problems with legal bills here. It’s unclear how he’ll pay his new lawyers, let alone Sorosky. As of last week a fee agreement had not been reached between the governor and Sorosky, Kaplan said. He didn’t return calls today.

Presumably the answer to the question “how will he pay his new lawyers” will be “with an advance cash retainer.”

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