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Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as you know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where time is an ocean but it ends at the shore.

Today we have a Very Special Holiday Edition of our semi-regular weekly survey. We find ourselves covering only one story, and that's one in Alabama where, thanks to the indomitable folks at Al.com, we find a pretty spectacular political corruption trial unfolding. Three men are charged with allegedly bribing a former state representative named Oliver Robinson, who already has admitted to taking the bribe and copped a plea deal. Two of the men, Joel Gilbert and Steve McKinney, are lawyers. The third defendant is David Roberson, the vice president of the Drummond Company. (Drummond is a coal company, so you can probably guess where this is headed.) The facts of the case are these.

In the city of Tarrant, and in the Inglenook neighborhood of north Birmingham, in what became known as “Toxic City” because of the longterm effects of the steel production that made Birmingham into the “Pittsburgh of the South," some residents got up in arms about the toxic waste in which they were living. Some of that waste came from the Drummond Company’s coke plant. The EPA got called in and declared the neighborhood a SuperFund site. That’s where the mischief began.



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The gist of the charges is that the two lawyers and Roberson allegedly bribed Robinson through gifts to the latter’s charitable foundation in order to impede, obstruct, and otherwise vaporize a move to widen the SuperFund site. (Robinson represented the afflicted area in the state legislature.) Robinson admitted to all the charges, and he took the stand to testify against his former benefactors this week. The machinations alleged by Robinson are pretty stunning. From Al.com:

Robinson, who served as a state representative from 1998 until his resignation in 2016, said that during a lunch with Roberson in the summer of 2014, Roberson talked about the EPA and the Superfund site. Robinson knew "very little" about the matter, and the two men said they would meet again to discuss. They ran into each other that August at a Business Council of Alabama meeting, and briefly talked about how Robinson could help Roberson and Drummond with the issue. Roberson asked Robinson if he knew U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell or then-Birmingham Mayor William Bell and could ask if they could help with Drummond's efforts, Robinson said. He didn't know either of the two well enough to ask that, but he did agree to meet with Roberson at Balch.

That meeting happened in November, Robinson said, at Balch headquarters with Roberson and Gilbert. Gilbert and Roberson asked Robinson if he knew anyone who could run against Birmingham city councilor William Parker, because Parker was supporting the EPA's efforts. “[Parker] and I had a great relationship," Robinson said during his testimony, so he told the men he didn't know anyone who could oppose Parker. He did tell them, however, that he could probably pull together some people to help with their efforts. Gilbert and Roberson asked Robinson "what it would take to get me involved," Robinson said. They asked him to submit a consulting proposal, which he did later that month. In his proposal, which was discussed last week in court, Robinson requested $10,000 a month to go into the north Birmingham communities and Tarrant to speak with leaders and "do things that would be in line with what Balch & Bingham and Drummond needed done in that area," he said.

They allegedly wanted Robinson to help torpedo a friend of his who was arrayed against their interests, and the interests of his constituency? This is some serious Gilded Age operating going on here.

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And Balch and Bingham is the kind of law firm with which state politicians are more than usually familiar. There’s one or two in every state. They are octopi, with tentacles reaching into politics and business and tangling the two up until they are not distinguishable from one another; as Curtis Wilkie demonstrates in his excellent book, The Fall of the House of Zeus, the collapse of mega-lawyer Dickie Scruggs’s career sent tremors through every corner of that state’s establishment. Balch and Bingham is like that in Alabama.

Kyle Whitmire of Al.com has dogged the ramifications of the Robinson trial through every corner of the Alabama elite, and up the food chain to some interesting places.

According to court documents introduced into evidence this week, Robinson was working as the agent of one of Alabama's most influential law firms, Balch & Bingham, and paid through that firm by a major coal company, Drummond Co., whose political influence in Alabama, overt and covert, goes back generations. Those letters Robinson wrote to the Alabama Environmental Management Commission? Balch partner Joel Gilbert wrote it for him, with the help of other staff at Balch and a consultant, Trey Glenn (who now serves as President Donald Trump's southeastern regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency).

According to Balch billing records introduced in court, Gilbert also wrote a joint resolution for the Alabama Legislature. That resolution opposed the same EPA projects in north Birmingham that Oliver Robinson was paid to fight. State Sen. Jabo Waggoner put his name on that resolution, but it wasn't really his, and the Alabama Legislature passed it, even though they weren't voting on it for your best interests. We've seen this sort of thing over and over again. Similar to Robinson's letters, former Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange sent letters to the EPA opposing their cleanup plans in north Birmingham. But Strange made a mistake when he sent the letters to the EPA on his letterhead. He forgot to erase the document tracking numbers at the bottoms of those pages — numbers used by Balch & Bingham to keep track of its work product. Strange sent two letters to the EPA. Less than a week before he sent the first, Drummond Co. contributed $25,000 to his 2014 reelection campaign. About a month after the second letter in January 2015, Drummond contributed another $25,000 to Strange's campaign, even though it was after the election and Strange didn't need the money to pay off campaign debt.

(Big Luther, you may recall, was appointed to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III in the U.S. Senate by corrupt former Alabama governor Robert Bentley. He then lost a Republican primary to Roy Moore, the Gadsden Mall Creeper. This paved the way for Democratic candidate Doug Jones to win the seat last fall.)

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Further, Whitmire points out, the trial should serve as a signifying event to the state’s other oligarchs.

But regardless of what side of the Line the defendants stood on, there are many more who should be taking stock of their surroundings. Thompson Tractor CEO Mike Thompson is one. He served on the board of the Alliance for Jobs and Economy, a non-profit prosecutors say solicited money from major businesses to pay Oliver Robinson. The company's headquarters are in Tarrant, where the EPA considered expanding a Superfund site.

Thompson served as secretary of the AJE and was involved it in from the beginning, but according to his testimony in court, he never knew the Oliver Robinson Foundation had been contracted to conduct community outreach in north Birmingham neighborhoods. However, on cross examination, defense lawyers showed him that invoices emailed to him included an invoice from the Oliver Robinson Foundation. Thompson said he never saw that.

American Cast Iron Pipe Company President and CEO Van Richey said on the stand that his company joined the AJE, too, and paid dues into it, but he had no idea who the AJE was paying to carry big industries' message into north Birmingham and Tarrant. Stephen Messier, the environmental manager of Nucor Steel, told a similar story about his company, which paid dues into the AJE until John Archibald and I reported Robinson's relationship with that organization last year .

Only the venue for this kind of back-scratching corruption changes. This is why we have run this feature ever since the shebeen opened in 2011. The notion that state and local government can be trusted more than the federal government, because it is “closer to the people” and, thus, more likely to have their general interest at heart, while a staple of conservative politics, is known to be a wagonload of manure by any reporter who’s spent 20 minutes in a state capitol.

Remember, at the heart of what’s going on in Alabama is that people have been living on land that was poisoned because the people who poisoned it didn’t care if the people in the neighborhood sickened and died. ‘Twas ever thus.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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