The hope for ethics in Alabama’s state government died on Monday.
To be fair, it had been on life support for quite some time, having taken on several near-fatal blows over the last few years. But on Monday, after months of trying, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall finally took ethics out back, like Ol’ Yeller, and shot it dead.
Marshall’s firing of prosecutor Matt Hart, head of the AG’s special prosecution unit, was the death knell. The final straw. The five-finger death punch that snuffed out any small, lingering flame of hope.
That’s basically all Matt Hart was at this point — one small ray of hope in an otherwise hopelessly corrupt state.
Hart was one guy hellbent on making Democrats and Republicans alike respect the rule of law and stop profiting from their public positions.
That’s all he wanted. And if he believed you had skirted the laws or accepted shady cash in order to benefit yourself, God bless you.
Larry Langford tried him. Robert Bentley tried him. Mike Hubbard threw everything and the prison sink at him.
Matt Hart beat ‘em all. And laughed at ‘em later.
God, they hated him, these people who want to use government as their own little tools for personal financial growth. Because Hart knew their games. He knew how they set up innocent-looking schemes that enriched only a handful of their friends or their friends’ businesses. He knew how they masked their sins with words like “business friendly” and “economic development.”
Matt Hart just kept beating them at their own games. So, they had to get rid of him.
Enter: Steve Marshall.
For more than a year now, APR has written story after story, column after column detailing the many, many ways in which Marshall has proven to be completely devoid of basic ethics and willing to do anything to get and keep the job of AG.
Consider this: In a state filled with crooked, spit-on-their-own-mothers-to-get-ahead politicians, Marshall was the only person willing to accept a quid pro quo deal to get the AG gig. Bentley, as APR reported, shopped the deal around, offering the AG’s job to anyone who would agree to investigate Hart and his team.
Marshall was the only one to take it.
And that was just Marshall’s start. Once the campaign for AG heated up, and real challengers entered the race, the panic in Marshall knew no bounds.
The guy took campaign contributions from Hubbard’s lawyers and a guy who bribed Hubbard. While a grand jury in Lee County was still considering charges against the briber. And while a state appeals court was considering Hubbard’s appeal.
Take a moment and think about that.
But Marshall wasn’t nearly done.
When the going got tough in the Republican primary, Marshall accepted more than $700,000 in campaign donations from the Republican Attorneys General Association. He knew the money was illegal, because RAGA allowed its funds to be transferred PAC-to-PAC — a method used to obscure the original source of the funds.
Such transfers are illegal in Alabama, as Marshall knew well. Just before accepting the donations, he had submitted a brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that challenged Alabama’s PAC-to-PAC ban. Marshall argued that the ban was a protection for the people and the only thing preventing a quid pro quo government.
He was right.
But it didn’t matter. Giving back the contributions, as Luther Strange had done a few years earlier, wasn’t an option. Marshall had to win. And he was willing to do anything.
And so, here we are.
This is what it looks like when your AG has been compromised. When he owes his political life to specialized interests of top donors.
Sometimes, those donors want you to turn a blind eye to corruption. Sometimes, they want you to lay back as another entity usurps your power. Sometimes, they want you to change the ethics laws so the dadgum things aren’t so tough. Sometimes, they want you to intervene in a major public corruption investigation.
And sometimes, they want you to fire that pesky prosecutor who keeps treating the written law like the damn words have meanings.
