By Josh Moon
Alabama Political Reporter
The end for Robert Bentley came several times in his final 48 hours as Governor.
Sources close to the Governor, including two who were present for portions of the negotiations that ultimately led to his resignation, said Bentley backed away from agreements to resign twice between mid-afternoon Saturday and early Monday morning. And those were in addition to stepping away from a near-resignation for health reasons two weeks earlier.
“It was painful to watch,” one source said of Bentley’s slow recognition that he was out of options.
That realization was aided by a steady stream of Bentley’s longtime friends making personal pleas to the Governor to make a deal and end the show. That included most of his current and former attorneys and House Speaker Mac McCutcheon.
When Bentley decided to move forward with a deal, as APR’s Bill Britt reported on Thursday, it was his personal attorneys, Chuck Maloney and Cooper Shattuck, who began negotiations with acting AG Ellen Brooks and prosecutor Matt Hart.
To be fair to Maloney and Shattuck, Hart and Brooks held all of the cards. The former Governor was at that point facing four felony counts referred by the Ethics Commission, a state-led investigation and was the subject of public scorn following the release of the House Judiciary Committee’s investigative report.
Without some form of a deal, Bentley was staring at a future court date in which he faced at least four felony charges – with each charge carrying the potential of 20 years in prison – and having his fate decided by a jury selected from people who had read the details of the charges along with steamy text messages between Bentley and his mistress.
On the other hand, the charges referred by the Ethics Commission against Bentley were flimsy, particularly the campaign contribution violations. While Bentley technically broke the law by failing to follow some campaign finance reporting rules, he would hardly be the first. In fact, you could find dozens of similar violations in the last campaign cycle.
So, whittling the charges down from felonies to misdemeanors wasn’t an arduous task, especially if Bentley agreed to make certain other concessions. The biggest of those, of course, was a resignation. But also important to the AG’s office was Bentley agreeing to never seek public office again and turning over all of his campaign funds.
It took awhile to get there.
Negotiations over the deal went on most of the day Sunday, and as Britt reported, the two sides finally reached a tentative deal at 3 a.m. Everyone went home to sleep and wait on the courts to open at 8 a.m. to make the whole thing official.
But then: “At 6:45 this morning, the governor balked – he had a change of heart and couldn’t go through with it,” a source said.
Bentley awoke with fresh doubt and was considering the advice of his top criminal counsel, Bill Athanas, who believed the charges the governor was facing were slim. After a win on a temporary restraining order on Friday in a Montgomery Circuit Court, Athanas and co-counsel Lewis Gillis had grown more confident that Bentley could beat the charges against him.
The problem, of course, was future charges and the physical toll the battle would take on Bentley. Bentley also had concerns, a source said, about the fate of his mistress, Rebekah Mason. Numerous stories leaked out last Friday that Bentley was demanding Mason receive full immunity as part of any deal he made.
However, sources familiar with the negotiations said the talks concerning immunity deals for others were not serious. That was mainly because Bentley was assured that Mason and others likely wouldn’t face charges regardless of any deals he made. That proved to be true when Mason was cleared by the Ethics Commission on Thursday.
By lunch on Monday, with House Judiciary Committee counsel Jack Sharman beginning to detail the more sordid details of the Bentley scandal, the two sides reached a final deal. It would require Bentley to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and be booked, including fingerprints and photo.
It also included, to Bentley’s surprise, a hearing before a judge to approve and finalize the deal on the record. Bentley learned of that step only at central booking in the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. He was not happy.
Nevertheless, the Governor of Alabama, on his final day in office, stood flanked by two criminal attorneys, told a judge that he had broken the law and walked out of court with his head down.
