Are Fred Thompson and Joe Biden ready for their cameos?

This website moved Sunday, Feb. 10, to a new address - http://www.folo.us. Please go to http://www.folo.us to enter your comment! Thanks. 

UPDATED BELOW

Late yesterday came the suggestion that Trent Lott is sufficiently worried about the Scruggs investigation to have retained a “well-regarded local criminal lawyer.” Since I think we’ve already met most if not all of Oxford’s contingent of those, could “local,” from Scott Horton’s vantage-point in New York, take in more of Mississippi’s Bar than just the up-state members? Perhaps we’ll have that answer soon enough, but in any case, Trent Lott is no longer the only current or former U.S. Senator whose name has surfaced in Scruggsiana. And wouldn’t you know, the two new guys are both running for President!

Yes, my brother and sister Scruggsians, let’s give a warm Southern welcome to the phlegmatic Republican and motormouth Dem — ladies and gentlemen, I give you Fred Thompson and Joe Biden! [Red and Blue groans fill the hall]

I meant to mention this a couple of days ago and got distracted by larger news, but: On Monday in WSJ’s Law Blog, Peter Lattman reported that Tim Balducci and Steve Patterson have put their money on the horse I’ve always called Bidenteefies. No, not even they were doofus enough to be thinking “President Teefies” — rather, they expected (”according to two people familiar with their thinking”) that Joe “would become Secretary of State under a Hillary Clinton administration.” Accordingly,

In August, Balducci, Patterson, [former MS Gov. Bill] Allain, [Dickie] Scruggs, and two others hosted a Oxford fundraising event for Biden. Employees of Patterson Balducci have contributed about $26,000 to the Biden campaign, according to fundraising records. (Click here for an invitation to the fundraiser and here, here, and here for info on the Biden contributions; and here for info on Scruggs contributions.)

The Law Blog has asked the Biden campaign several times for comment on his connection to Patterson Balducci but has not heard back.

Any of y’all locals know who these “two others” were? (No big, I’m just nosey.) Maybe one was Joey Langston? Hmmm . . . was Billy Quin the other? Anyhoo, see Teefies hit the silk and return some checks, huh? But now, it may be that ol’ Fred Thompson is at least as uncomfortable as Joe Biden, or soon will be, in the glare of Scruggs publicity, though explaining why takes a little more doing.

Following this link or that from recent folo posts, you may have encountered the name of P.L. Blake. Apparently notorious in contemporary Mississippi, he’d stayed beneath my radar until just the last few days, and I didn’t want to start talking about him here in that much ignorance. Now, with a little help from my friends, I can get by.

Maybe you recall this paragraph in Nelson D. Schwartz’s Sunday New York Times story?

Working the political and legal machinery in Mississippi isn’t new to Mr. Scruggs. In his deposition with Mr. Merkel in 2004, he discussed some $10 million in payments he made to P. L. Blake, a onetime college football star in Mississippi. After running into financial troubles, Mr. Blake became a political consultant for Mr. Scruggs, helping his boss navigate the back rooms of state politics and tobacco litigation.

Okay, on Monday, David Rossmiller picked it up there:

Here is a paragraph I quoted from the Michael Orey book, Assuming the Risk, last week:

“There were [some] people who had political connections, that I’m not even at liberty to tell you who they are, that had to be touched, that had to be talked to, that had to be given a stake in [the litigation],” Scruggs says. He retained two or three of these mystery consultants to run political interference. “These guys have lots of friends and connections with the legislature,” he explains. “These are people who are lobbyists, but they’re not really registered lobbyists. It’s really sort of the dark side of the force.” Over the course of the litigation, Scruggs says, he paid these individuals well over $500,000.

Now, the book says $500,000, the Times story says $10 million paid to Blake, but look in the transcript around pages 511-514 (the page numbers are half cut off in the transcript, so you have to decipher them just a bit)  – the actual amount Scruggs agreed to pay to “the dark side of the force,” as Scruggs himself put it, appears to be about $50 million to influence legislation.  Not $500,000, not $10 million, but $50 million. This is a matter of public record. Look for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Then he supplies a boatload of pdf links to Dickie’s August 2004 deposition and June 2005 trial testimony in Luckey v. Scruggs (another fee-splitting dispute, this one arising from the tobacco litigation). Over the last couple of days, between interruptions, I’ve been reading away at part of the final pdf Rossmiller supplied, of the Luckey trial, specifically pp 465-550 of the transcript/pp 43-66 of the pdf.

At pdf page 50, Dickie Scruggs testifies:

… P.L. Blake was a sort of a political operative in terms of being involved in state and national political affairs. One of these guys that’s sort of always behind the scenes, but has his ear to the ground. He was our sort of response from 1994 on, maybe even late ‘93, when we first started thinking about this, to what the tobacco industry was doing. They had a network that was far more extensive than that, and we wanted to be alerted to political attacks before they actually hit us in the nose. For example, Gov. Fordice filing suit to shut the whole litigation down in ‘95 or ‘96. Things like that. We needed to know things like that before they happened so we could head them off, and Blake had a network throughout the state and really throughout the country that would give us that heads-up information.

At p 53, Dickie talks about his huge loans to Blake while the latter was bankrupt and had no collateral:

Q: Did he did he [sic] give you any collateral?

A: Other than his enormous network of political connections in the state and otherwise, no, he didn’t have any — he didn’t give me any collateral for it, no, but he did sign a note every month.

That’s intriguing as hell as a glimpse of the huge river of money and influence flowing far above our lives (and guess where the Biden name crops up again), but it still didn’t tell me who this to-Dickie-worth-every-penny-of-$50-million P.L. Blake dude is. Finally this morning, Rossmiller (who else?) fills in some gaps — and hauls the lump known as Fred Thompson onstage to boot. “I have had many requests to talk more about P.L. Blake,” David writes, “who he is and what he did. We can only begin that task today, but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

Blake was involved in controversy in the early 1980s over his PLB grain company. Below is a paragraph from a decision of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Blake v. Gannett, 529 So.2d 595 (198 that explains:

PLB Grain owned one of the largest, if not the largest, grain storage facilities in the United States. It had contracted with the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) to store 21.5 million bushels of grain. In order to receive the contract, PLB had indicated to the CCC that it had a net worth of at least $5 million. The surplus grain stored for the government by PLB under the CCC contract became a national story on October 18, 1983. The controversy involved the quantity and quality of the grain stored by PLB Grain. Texas officials charged that the quality of the grain had deteriorated substantially. USDA officials claimed that it had not deteriorated. Later, in 1984, CCC determined that there were quality and quantity problems with the grain stored in PLB’s elevators. State FmHA officials knew that Blake had an interest in a Texas grain storage facility, but did not know the exact nature of that interest. Information concerning PLB Grain was never included in FmHA loan applications.

Click here to see a copy of Blake v. Gannett and read for yourself. The paragraph quoted is at 529 So.2d 599 — for those not familiar with how to read case law, look for the purple numbers embedded in the text, they show you the page of the case reporter. When you read this case, look just below the headnotes for the names of the attorneys — you will note that Blake’s attorney was Fred D. Thompson, of Thompson & Bussart, Nashville, Tenn., of Senate Watergate counsel, movies and TV and presidential candidate fame. The case involved allegations that the Clarion-Ledger, owned by the Gannett corporation, had libeled Blake in investigative stories. The newspaper was exonerated. [emph. mine]

Then Rossmiller reprints a 1984 Washington Post story that shows Fred Thompson was Blake’s lawyer for years. “True,” Rossmiller observes, “just because you are someone’s lawyer doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But then again, maybe it does.”

Well, as we await the next big jar to fall off the shelf in Oxford — and we just know, can just feel, that one’s fixing to — let’s amuse ourselves imagining the looks on Fred Thompson’s and Joe Biden’s faces these days. Boo, boys!

lotus

UPDATE: Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Scott Horton’s media appearances tomorrow don’t nip over the state line from Alabama into Mississippi, so here’s where/when to find them:

Harper’s legal affairs contributor Scott Horton and Alabama Congressman Artur Davis will discuss the politically motivated prosecution and conviction of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman on MSNBC’s “Live with Dan Abrams” tomorrow, Thursday, December 13 at 9:00 Eastern, 8:00 Central, 6:00 Pacific time, as segment four of the series “Bush League Justice.” Get information on the program here.

Scott will also be appearing tomorrow on Air America’s Thom Hartmann Program at 2:00 Eastern, 1:00 Central, 11:00 Pacific time, again to discuss the Siegelman case. A downloadable podcast can be heard after the program, and a list of participating stations can be found here.