Indicted Speaker

Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard talks to his wife, Susan Hubbard, during a break in his trial Wednesday, June 1, 2016, in Opelika, Ala. (Todd J. Van Emst/Opelika-Auburn News via AP, Pool)

(Todd J. Van Emst)

The most damning testimony in the trial of Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard this week wasn't from Gov. Robert Bentley, who spent a painless and brief 20 minutes on the stand.

It might not even be from former Alabama Ethics Commission Executive Director Jim Sumner, who told jurors that he and the commission were in the dark about most of the Hubbard's private business dealings, even as Hubbard told others that he had their stamp of approval.

No, the worst testimony for Hubbard this week came from Hubbard himself, or at least through his emails.

With Harbert Management executive Will Brooke on the stand, prosecutors entered the first of what will likely be many, many emails from Hubbard to friends, political allies and business partners. In them is the plaintive wailing of a man on the brink of ruin, even though his family was taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from private business and public payrolls.

"It's ironic that I was the 'architect' of putting a pro-business legislature in place yet businesses seem to want to avoid any personal association with me like the plague!" Hubbard wrote Brooke two years after that same legislature made many such business dealings illegal.

Over time, Hubbard's emails grew more desperate and -- there's just no other way to put it -- whiny. Repeatedly he threatened to quit his job as speaker if he couldn't make ends meet at home, and his martyrdom complex grew worse.

"I have probably been naive in believing that putting a conservative, pro-business legislature in power would be worth the personal sacrifice in the end," he wrote Brooke. "I am beginning to think that perhaps my role was to simply lead us to the point and I now am just supposed to turn it over to someone else and exit public service."

In a reply to that email, Brooke wrote what Hubbard should have been able to figure out on his own.

"I think that folks are afraid to mess up, on either their or your side of the equation," Brooke said in his reply.

On the stand, Brooke testified that he and other members of the Business Council of Alabama considered ways to help Hubbard find a job or clients for Hubbard's businesses.

But there was one thing standing in the way, and they all knew it -- the law.

One thing is clear from the emails: Hubbard never drew a clear line between his public work and his private business interests. To the contrary, he often mingled the two in emails to Brooke, beginning messages with news of his latest legislative achievements before again begging Brooke for help with private affairs. On messages from his Auburn Network Inc. business email account, Hubbard used a signature line with his public title, Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives.

Deputy Attorney General Matt Hart asked Brooke why Hubbard mixed requests for private business favors with news about goings-on on Goat Hill.

"It's his way of selling me to help with his job situation," Brooke said.

That situation didn't mean the $61,500 a year Hubbard made as Alabama House Speaker, a job he said "generates virtually no income."

That didn't include the $163,000 a year his wife made as a professor at Auburn University.

That didn't include the $75,000 of commissions a year he made from the sports media conglomerate IMG.

That didn't include the take-home pay from the Auburn Network, which at one point was $132,000.

Hubbard wanted more, more, more ...

The problem wasn't that Hubbard did't know where the line was; it's that he erased it.

There are more emails to come, including a prescient warning from former Gov. Bob Riley to Hubbard.

"From now on you and I are going to be suspect in everything we do," Riley wrote to Hubbard. "The question now is DO YOU 'WANT' to be Gov. - or - make a lot of money: good thing is you could do either but I am not sure it's possible to do both."

But that didn't stop Hubbard from trying.