Why? Because yesterday li’l ol’ folo scored a link at my own favorite blog, Scott Horton’s No Comment (spelling-priss solidarity — W00T!).
As did I, Scott noted of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal coverage:
Whereas the Journal put the focus of the probe on the case before DeLaughter, my sources, though not disagreeing with the Journal, put it in Birmingham, Alabama.
Scruggs was facing trouble on another front. A federal judge in Alabama, William Acker, handed down a very strongly worded ruling in June in which he recommended that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama [Alice Martin] prosecute Scruggs for the violation of a court order in some insurance litigation. The case was drawing a good deal of attention to Scruggs’s litigation tactics, which have widely been seen as pressing the outer boundaries of acceptable zeal, and clearly was troubling to Scruggs. Had Scruggs been seeking Lott’s intervention and help to bail himself out?
One thing is peculiar. Federal judges in the Northern District of Alabama didn’t want to have anything to do with the matter after Scruggs asked them to recuse themselves. And neither did the U.S. Attorney in Birmingham.
Here’s one scenario, which 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 bet is that the investigators are looking very carefully at whether the decision by the U.S. Attorney in Birmingham not to charge Dickie Scruggs had anything to do with intervention by Senator Lott.
Of course, the other point that the Journal failed to pick up on is that Lott had a history of intervening with prosecutors to protect his extremely wealthy brother-in-law. I documented this in connection with the prosecution brought against Paul Minor. No matter how you cut it, Dickie Scruggs comes out smack in the middle of that case, playing a substantial role. Yet he was not charged with anything, and indeed, prosecutors treated him with tremendous deference. The Biloxi Sun Herald quotes Lott as acknowledging having had discussions with the prosecutors about his brother-in-law’s case. Lott quickly corrected his comments as “a mistake.” But the circumstances surrounding the case leave many wondering just how mistaken the remarks might have been. Moreover, when an FBI agent working on the case started questioning why Scruggs had not been charged, the agent found himself quickly reassigned—to Guantánamo—where his expertise as a forensic accountant surely were of good service.
Agreed, Scott: those agents have scope and fodder a-plenty to check out on Trent Lott, and we might feel rather better about the post-Gonzales DoJ if that’s exactly what they’re doing.
