If you want to get up to speed on the Ala Gov. Siegelman/US attorney scandal, this would be a good place to start....
The Remarkable “Recusal” of Leura Canaryhttp://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001209By: Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine
September 14, 2007
Alabama media continue to report uncritically just about any statement that emanates from the office of Leura Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, who is currently in the crosshairs of the Siegelman investigation. One of the most often repeated, and still unexamined, contentions to emanate from her office is the claim that Leura Canary recused herself from the prosecution of Governor Don Siegelman, and that the case was handled from that point forward by the head of her criminal department, Louis V. Franklin. As we will shortly see in an examination of that question forthcoming in a major legal periodical, Franklin’s claim that he ran the case collapses completely under close inspection. He did handle the trial, which is important, but the key aspects of tactical and case management decision-making were retained by political appointees in Washington—to an extent that was quite extraordinary. Yet it seems that no reporter in Alabama ever worked up the gumption to ask any questions or do any research about it; they all just reported what Louis Franklin said, and they didn’t put any follow up questions to him, either.
But one of the oddest claims has consistently been the simple suggestion that Leura Canary ‘recused’ herself from the case. When I first heard this, I put down on my check list: collect Canary recusal papers from court docket. My researcher went off looking for them, and reported back: there are no Canary recusal papers. How could that be? I sent him back again. Same result. I started asking counsel and clerks at the court. Well, it seems, no one else had ever seen the recusal papers. So that leaves it open in my mind: did Leura Canary actually recuse herself? I’m skeptical of that claim. Moreover, the matter’s extremely important since Mrs. Canary went to great lengths to create a public appearance that she had withdrawn. But there’s a lot to suggest that in fact she never relinquished complete control over the case; that her ‘recusal’ is a sham. Let’s take a deeper look, shall we?
In mid-2001, Leura Canary commenced an investigation into “certain state employees” on corruption allegations. It soon became apparent that the principal target of this investigation was Governor Siegelman. The investigation had been initiated at the request of William Pryor, then Attorney General of Alabama. Various representatives of Mrs. Canary’s office have given conflicting false explanations of the source of the complaint initiating the investigation, by the way. Usually they attribute it to a newspaper reporter from Mobile, in an effort to obscure the actual and highly partisan political source. This is important because, as we will see, William Pryor and Leura Canary share a common partner. And his name is William Canary.
-snip-
Mr. Canary served as chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, as chief of staff to the 2000 G.O.P. Convention chairman and former Bush chief of staff, Andy Card, and as National Field Director for the Bush-Quayle campaign in 1992. I am told by senior Republican figures that Canary secured these various roles largely on the strength of his close personal friendship with Karl Rove and with Rove’s express endorsement. In 1994, Mr. Canary and his friend and mentor Karl Rove put together a grand strategy to turnaround the court system in Alabama, putting the G.O.P.’s handpicked candidates in control of key Alabama appellate court races. This process was chronicled by Joshua Green in a major article on Rove’s remaking of the judicial politics of Alabama published in The Atlantic. In a 1995 article, Time Magazine’s Michael Kramer called Bill Canary a “legend in Republican circles” and in the same article, former RNC Chairman Rich Bond described Bill Canary as an “expert political paratrooper” and “someone you dropped into a state where something needed fixing and it got fixed.” Mr. Canary was the architect of a special relationship between the Alabama G.O.P. and the Business Council of Alabama that proved the finance lifeline for many Alabama G.O.P. election campaigns. He was widely described as the G.O.P.’s Alabama “kingpin.”
--MUCH more on the link, here-
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001209
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