Letter to Time Magazine
From: Eddie Curran
133 Silverwood
Mobile, AL, 36607
E-mail: eddcurran@aol.com
Cell: 251-454-1911
Attn: Adam Zagorin, former reporter for Time
Amy Sullivan and Richard Zoglin, Time National Editors
C/O: Jill Watanabe
jill_watanabe@timeinc.com
Subject: Reporting by Time and Adam Zagorin on the Don Siegelman case.
Dear Adam, Amy and Richard,
I’m a reporter from Mobile, Ala., soon to complete a book on former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, about whom I reported on extensively when he was governor. (See link to that reporting at bottom.)
I am self-publishing the book and hope to have it for sale by late November or early December.
The book was to end with the trial and sentencing of Gov. Siegelman and his co-defendant, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman Richard Scrushy. However, I have added a final section to address allegations by a north Alabama woman, Dana Jill Simpson; and, more specifically, the coverage of the Siegelman case by certain national media since Ms. Simpson’s May 2007 affidavit.
Primarily, I’m addressing the coverage by “60 Minutes,” the New York Times, Harper’s, and, the reason for this letter, Time and, separately, as I understand he no longer works for the magazine, Adam Zagorin.
I have a number of questions I would like answered. I am presenting some of them here. In the event that Zagorin or someone at Time chooses to respond to these questions, I will present others.
1. Time and the New York Times published, on the same day, the existence of and claims by Dana Jill Simpson as made in a May 2007 affidavit. This affidavit was never filed in court of law.
Will Zagorin/Time reveal who provided Simpson’s affidavit and, apparently along with it, various un-sourced information about Alabama politics within the story?
I assume that Siegelman or someone associated with him provided the affidavit and information about Simpson and others. Am I wrong?
Were Zagorin and/or Time aware that Simpson had, for several months, been communicating with and working on behalf of the Siegelman and Scrushy legal teams, such as by researching the financial background and ordering the credit report of the trial judge?
Did Zagorin and/or Time contact anyone in Alabama, be in politically active Republicans, reporters or do any Internet research, such as Nexis, to try to learn about Simpson prior to airing her allegations?
2. Did Zagorin/Time see Jill Simpson’s February 2008 appearance on, “60 Minutes,” in which she claimed that Karl Rove hired or in some manner engaged her to follow Siegelman and try to take pictures of him having extramarital sex?
In light of those claims – generally considered to be absurd – does Zagorin/Time regret having published the incriminating claims against many people based on her word?
3. Did Time/Zagorin consult or have discussions with Scott Horton about the Siegelman case? If so, can you characterize those discussions?
4. Rather than ask specific questions about Zagorin’s second and third stories (one of which was only published on the Internet), I will present, here, my analysis of those stories as presented in the book. Should Zagorin and/or Time wish to comment, I would add and perhaps re-write this section. It is somewhat long, but I think this is the easiest way to present the questions.
In early October, Team Siegelman closed a major sale to Time magazine.
“Selective Justice in Alabama?” asked the headline of a long piece by Adam Zagorin, who’d written the magazine’s first story, on Jill Simpson’s affidavit. The story, promoted on Time’s cover, was to be cited from then on by Siegelman and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee as air-tight evidence of, well, selective prosecution in Alabama.
The gist of the story: That the same prosecutors who investigated Lanny Young’s payments to Siegelman ignored compelling evidence of potential criminal actions by Bill Pryor and Jeff Sessions, who also received contributions from Lanny and people associated with him.
In an “unusual exercise of prosecutorial discretion, nearly all the payments and donations went uninvestigated,” opined Zagorin.
This failure to investigate the Pryor-Sessions contributions was later disputed by a prosecutor who worked on the case in its early stages. In any event, one hopes that little time was wasted on the matter.
More than halfway into the story Zagorin acknowledged, albeit briefly, a rather compelling reason why prosecutors exploring corruption in the Siegelman administration didn’t race off to open a new probe into Pryor and Sessions. “Certainly in Young’s statements about Sessions and Pryor, he did not allege a quid pro quo for his money laundering of their campaigns,” he wrote.
Imagine the strength of cases accusing Sessions and Pryor of accepting campaign donations from Young and friends of Young at a time when Lanny wasn’t known as crooked, and without any evidence of a single act by Pryor or Sessions on his behalf. The idea is laughable, yet Time presented the failure to investigate these non-crimes in making its case for “selective prosecution in Alabama.”
The investigation into Young, G.H. Construction and the administration began two days after our story proving theft from the state of Alabama. Campaign donations became a part of the case, but were never the primary element and certainly not the originating factor.
Several lines from the Time piece jumped off the page and bopped me in the head, none more than this one: “But what Young had to say about Sessions, Pryor and other high profile Alabama Republicans was even more remarkable for the simple fact that much of it had never before come to light.” To which Zagorin added that Young “openly offered details (to the FBI) about what he said were donations totaling between $12,000 and $15,000 to Pryor’s campaign for state attorney general” from him and associates who he says he reimbursed.
The only thing remarkable was Zagorin’s statement. Of our many G.H. stories in May 2001, one was about, and only about, the donations that Time claimed had “never before come to light.”
That story, “Pryor got boost from Young,” (a link to which is at the bottom of this letter) reported the amounts and types of donations to Pryor’s 1998 campaign from Lanny and his landfill partners, Joey Tillman and Randy Baker, and made the connections between the three. Readers were told that Young provided travel valued at $365 to the Pryor campaign; that Tillman gave travel valued at $1,534 and donated $4,303 in advertising; and that Baker provided the campaign with travel services valued at $6,055.
I was able to report the donations in the above-described detail because they’d been meticulously disclosed by the Pryor campaign to the secretary of state’s office and in a timely fashion. They were not a secret when Zagorin wrote about them nor had they ever been.
During the 1998 campaign Pryor had asked Richard Allen, his top assistant, to review his donations. Allen’s task was to flag contributions from anyone under investigation by the attorney general’s office so they could be returned. When I interviewed Allen for the 2001 story he said that when the donations were made, G.H. Construction was two years from being formed. Young was just another successful businessman, much like donors in most campaigns who provide large contributions or help candidates with travel.
Even if Pryor were so inclined, there would have been no motive to conceal donations made in 1997 and 1998 from Young or his partners.
According to Time, Lanny told the FBI he’d had others donate thousands of dollars to Sessions then reimbursed them in violation of federal election laws. However, none of those individuals named by Lanny showed up on Session’s reports.
All Zagorin found was a single $1,000 donation from Lanny. It was possible, he wrote, that Young never made some of the donations he’d reported to the FBI and was “merely boasting.” That was fair of Zagorin to acknowledge, but to keep the crime alive the reporter ventured deep into the land of ifs and maybes.
“But it would also mean that (Young) had lied to federal agents, which is a felony, and Young was never charged with that crime. If he had lied, that would also have diminished Young’s credibility as a key government witness against Siegelman.”
Diminish Young’s credibility?
Had Zagorin been remotely familiar with the case he’d have known that Young had lied often to investigators and prosecutors, primarily to protect Hamrick and, I’m sure, Waste Management. At trial defense lawyers battered him with those lies. The Lanny Young presented to jurors – by prosecutors as well as defense lawyers -- was a serial briber, a thief, and a fellow with a loose attachment to the truth. That’s why almost every payment or favor testified to by Young was supported with records or testimony from others.
There was no need for prosecutors to add perjury as a new charge to a witness who was already pleading guilty to far worse. Yet Zagorin suggested that the failure to charge Young with perjury was a prejudicial act, and as such, additional proof of “selective prosecution” in Alabama.
Our 2001 story reported that Pryor’s connection to Lanny was Claire Austin. Claire, too, was the connection to Sessions, having worked for him before she worked for Pryor. While a member of the Republican Party, she was also, like Hamrick and Lanny, a member of the Partying Party. She had befriended Hamrick and Lanny and of course become a lobbying partner of Young’s.
By the time the FBI started talking to Lanny he’d split with Claire and suspected, correctly, that she was my source on the warehouse deal. For this he despised her, and I believe that in his interviews with the FBI he was doing everything in his power to drag her down with him, such as by attempting to dirty up Pryor and Sessions.
The story – the second of four by Zagorin on the Siegelman case -- managed to encapsulate many of the elements of the story line promoted by Horton and Team Siegelman. There was, for example, the contextual placement of Siegelman as the ever-striving underdog Democrat valiantly challenging the GOP power structure. Alabama was “as red a state as the clay in its earth.” From this red earth hell Siegelman “emerged as one of the few Democratic stars.”
Prosecutors brought charges against the little battler “just as he was preparing to run for governor again;” and the trial overlapped with the Democratic primary “in which Siegelman had initially been a heavy favorite.” Cited to support this fable was – perhaps you guessed it -- the 2003 poll cherished by Horton. Either Zagorin didn’t do his own research and took what Horton and the team handed him or he was familiar with the later polls and hid this evidence from his readers.
In the Judiciary Committee hearing later that month, Artur Davis referred to the Time story to support his claim that the Bush Justice Department was guilty of selective prosecution. The committee’s April 2008 report did the same.
The pattern had repeated itself: Team Siegelman made the pitch; one or more prominent national publications bought the goods; Horton and others touted the story as fact; and everything became official with the handoff to the Judiciary Committee.
“Of course, readers of No Comment are familiar with much of the Lanny Young accusations,” Horton wrote in celebrating the Time story and himself. The disclosures “that Adam Zagorin recently made” showed that Young had provided prosecutors with “whopping evidence” against Sessions and Pryor.
Zagorin’s second piece in a week – “Rove linked to Alabama case” -- informed readers that Time had “obtained a copy of Simpson’s 143-page sworn statement.” Either Zagorin didn’t read the transcript, read it and believed Simpson, or worse, made a decision to conceal from readers her obvious falsehoods and fantasies.
He reported that the “Republican lawyer” had “provided new details in a lengthy sworn statement” to the Judiciary Committee. The story presented some of the greatest hits from her testimony, foremost being Fuller’s plan to “hang Don Siegelman.”
Zagorin’s stabs at fairness were limited to the requisite denials from the Republican villains. Nowhere does one find the credibility- impugning statements from the horse’s mouth. Nothing about Simpson researching Fuller’s finances, ordering a credit report on the judge or working with the defendants and their lawyers on the recusal motion and affidavit. Zero on the remarkable advances in her descriptions of upper level Justice Department and White House involvement made months after the May affidavit. And of course no mention of Simpson’s debunked stories that Siegelman conceded the 2002 election after the Riley campaign pledged to deep-six the KKK pictures and put the kibosh on the kibosh the investigation.
I also have a number of questions about a story written by Zagorin and published Nov. 14, 2008, on Time’s web-site. It was called, “More Allegations of Misconduct in Alabama Governor Case.”
I will here ask just one: Was Zagorin/Time aware that Martin Adams, the lawyer for “whistleblower” Tamara Grimes is Richard Scrushy’s son-in-law, and was a lawyer of record for Scrushy in the Siegelman/Scrushy case?
Finally, does Zagorin/Time stand by the accuracy and fairness in the four Siegelman stories?
I look forward to your response. Should you wish to do a telephone interview, please provide me with a phone number and suggest a good time for me to call.
Sincerely,
Eddie Curran
Link to stories on Siegelman while he was governor:
http://www.al.com/specialreport/mobileregister/index.ssf?contracts.html
Link to May 2001 story about donations by Lanny Young and his business partners to Bill Pryor:
http://www.al.com/specialreport/mobileregister/index.ssf?contract/goathill13.html