Show Notes
In 2002, Governor Don Siegelman won re-election. Every major network called it. He went to bed a winner — and by four the next morning, he was told they were trying to steal the election. Over 6,000 of his votes had vanished overnight. In this episode, Siegelman plays his own concession speech from 17 days after the election and walks through, point by point, the evidence behind one of the most brazen instances of election manipulation in modern American history. The ballots and voting equipm...
More from Me & The Gov
Scott Horton, a lawyer and Harper’s Magazine writer, kept the Siegelman case alive in print when almost no national outlet would touch it. Governor Siegelman credits his reporting with helping drive the wave of editorials that followed, and says the New York Times alone ran 17. In this episode, Horton joins Governor Siegelman and host Nick Collado to explain why he called the Governor “America’s most prominent political prisoner.” He says he first learned of the case not from Siegelman, whom ...
Most people picture prosecutorial misconduct as one rogue lawyer hiding one document. Professor Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and author of the treatise Prosecutorial Misconduct, says that when it’s deliberate and coordinated, it looks like what happened to Governor Don Siegelman. In 2014 he called it “one of the most egregiously bad faith prosecutions by the Justice Department ever.” In this episode, Professor Gershman, Governor Siegelman, and host Nick Collado go through ho...
Governor Jim Doyle on the Woman Who Went to Prison Instead of Him | Me and The Gov Episode 10 In 2006, Georgia Thompson — a career Wisconsin civil servant Governor Jim Doyle had never even met — was convicted and sent to federal prison over a $1 million travel contract. No bribe. No kickback. No money ever changed hands. She served four months before a federal appeals court took the almost unheard-of step of ordering her released the same day, live from the bench, calling the case against her...
"I Was Working for the Sith Lords": A Fired U.S. Attorney Tells His Story | Me and The Gov Episode 9 In 2001, David Iglesias was everything the Republican Party said it wanted in a future leader — a Navy JAG officer, an evangelical, a combat veteran, personally sponsored by his own senator. By 2006, he was fired by phone, on a script, the same week as six other U.S. Attorneys across the country. In this episode, Captain David Iglesias joins Governor Don Siegelman and host Nick Collado to go t...
Devil in Disguise | Me and The Gov Episode 8 For the first time in this series, we bring on a guest who isn't Governor Siegelman himself. Tommy Gallion is a lifelong Republican, a senior Montgomery attorney, and one of the most connected political figures in Alabama history — with no track record of helping Siegelman, until now. Gallion reveals, in his own words, that he was personally invited to a meeting where Karl Rove was expected to attend to discuss indicting Governor Siegelman during t...