Don Siegelmann, Burning Houses and Censoreship

Many might remember the case of Don Siegelmann, the former Democratic Governor of Alabama who was prosecuted and subsequently jailed on corruption charges in 2006. He had been Governor from 1999 to 2003, when he was defeated by the Republican candidate Bob Riley by a margin of only 3,000 votes, a controversial result as a voting machine malfunction in a single county produced the votes needed to give Riley the election.

In June 2007, a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Alabama, signed a sworn statement that that Karl Rove was preparing to politically neutralize Siegelman with an investigation headed by the U.S. Department of Justice as far back as 2002. According to Simpson's statement, she was on a Republican campaign conference call in 2002 when she heard Bill Canary tell other campaign workers not to worry about Siegelman because Canary's "girls" and "Karl" would make sure the Justice Department pursued the Democrat so he was not a political threat in the future.

In September 2007, Simpson gave sworn testimony to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary regarding this issue including stating that Rove asked Simpson to attempt to take sexually compromising photographs of Siegelmann, which she was not able to do. The fact was, that the White House was directly involved in influencing the political outcomes of gubernatorial elections and showed direct White House involvement in federal prosecutions.

Dana Jill Simpson's house mysteriously caught fire after her congressional deposition.

CBS then started an investigation which was to produce a show on 60 minutes about the Don Siegelmann controversy. Allegedly CBS was told by the White House to back down and its journalists attacked in a widespread campaign on the web. CBS went ahead and finished filming the program. It aired last night but was mysteriously blacked out in parts of Alabama.
The local station blamed CBS and issued a press statement to that effect, but CBS denied having any transmission problems. The show aired flawlessly across the rest of the country. CBS maintains that the problem was with the local station WHNT-TV.

Who is WHNT-TV? The Raw Story tells us:

WHNT in Huntsville Alabama was purchased by Oak Hill Capital Partners from the New York Times Company early last year. Oak Hill is owned by the Bass brothers, Bush fundraisers at the "Pioneer" level – raising over $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in both 2000 and 2004. Lee Bass is perhaps the best known member of the Bass family for his role in George W. Bush’s failed energy venture called Spectrum 7 and later for his bailing out of Harken Energy.