After Main Justice broke the news last month that the White House was vetting an obscure Capitol Hill staffer for U.S. Attorney in Alabama’s Southern District, Rep. Artur Davis diplomatically declined to comment.
Artur Davis (gov)
The White House’s elevation of House ethics committee staffer Kenyen Brown for the post was a diss to Davis. The Harvard-educated African-American pol is trying to modernize Alabama and move beyond its polarizing racial politics. As he gears up to run for governor next year, aiming to break his own racial barrier in the Deep South state, Davis has also tried to professionalize the U.S. Attorney selection process, moving away from the rank partisan politics that defined it during the Bush administration.
Toward that end, Rep. Davis formed a highly credentialed search committee, and ultimately recommended Vicki Davis (no relation), an African-American Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District as his first choice for the Southern District; and a white former magistrate judge named Patrick Sims, now in private practice at at Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner, Dumas & O’Neal in Mobile, as his second choice.
But after Davis ran into vetting problems (click here for our previous report), the White House completely skipped over Sims. It’s our information that Sims wasn’t even called to Washington for an interview. The view of many in the Alabama legal community is that Sims was simply the wrong color. Alabama’s other two prosecuting districts are slated to be filled by whites (Joyce Vance in the Northern District and Joe Van Heest in the Middle District). The White House, it appears, was bound and determined to have at least one black U.S. Attorney in Alabama. And the 39-year-0ld Kenyen Brown – although he has few ties to the Alabama establishment – fit that bill: He is African-American.
Nothing againt Kenyen Brown, who by all accounts is a fine fellow.
But now, the Mobile-Press Register reports that Artur Davis has broken his silence. In an interview with the newpaper’s Sean Reilly, Davis came out publicly swinging for Vicki Davis, saying:
“There is certainly nothing that has surfaced that in any way suggests that Vicki Davis is not qualified to be the U.S. Attorney or has anything other than the highest level of character and integrity.”
Moveover, Mobile attorney Tom Haas wrote in a letter to Obama yesterday that the 50 members Mobile Area Democratic Association support Vicki Davis.
“Her credentials are so outstanding that we cannot believe that there is any individual more qualified,” he wrote in the letter obtained by The Press-Register.
Haas told the Press-Register that his group doesn’t have any hard feelings towards Brown. They just don’t know much about him, he said. Brown worked for the Senate Ethics Committee from 2000 until last year, when he took a job with the House ethics panel, officially known as the Committee on Standards on Official Conduct. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District and a prosecutor in the Montgomery County district attorney’s office before coming to Washington.
The irony here is great. The country’s first African-American president, who hardly talked about racial issues in his campaign, is now undermining the fellow African-American Democrat on a racial issue, even though Davis headed up the Obama campaign in Alabama. What’s more, Attorney General Eric Holder’s own sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, played a storied role in Alabama’s civil rights struggles. Jones, who is now deceased, was one of two of the first African Americans to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, only to be blocked by then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
Is the White House’s thinking here that Alabama will never vote for a Democrat for president, so it’s okay to treat Davis like this? Politics sure ain’t for the faint-hearted. Artur Davis told The Press-Register that the White House will likely nominate a U.S. Attorney in the next few weeks to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Deborah Rhodes in April.
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Capitol Hill staffer Kenyen Brown, a lawyer for the House ethics committee, is being vetted by the White House for the Southern District of Alabama U.S. Attorney position, according to people familiar with the process.
In a brief telephone interview Friday, Brown, 39, confirmed to Main Justice that he is under consideration for the job. He is a 1991 graduate of the University of Alabama and received his law degree from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Brown was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District from 1996 to 1999 and a prosecutor in the Montgomery County district attorney’s office from 1995 to 1996. He worked for the Senate Ethics Committee from 2000 until last year, when he took a job with the House ethics panel, officially known as the Committee on Standards on Official Conduct. His position advising House members and staff on ethics compliance isn’t a partisan appointment.
Artur Davis (gov)
It isn’t clear who promoted Brown for the post. He emerged as the leading candidate after the White House apparently rejected the first choice of Rep. Artur Davis, the senior Democrat in the Alabama congressional delegation, and passed over – at least for now — Davis’s second choice.
It’s a somewhat strange way for the nation’s first African-American president to treat a prominent African-American politician from the Deep South. Like President Obama, Davis is aiming to break a racial barrier: He is running next year to be the first African-American governor of Alabama. And Davis had headed the Obama campaign in Alabama, calling the Illinois Democrat’s election a “remarkable inspiration” that “crossed a psychological threshold.” But the politics in the Alabama U.S. Attorney selections are complicated — with racial issues playing out in ways both predictable and unexpected.
Jeff Sessions (gov)
Looming over it all is Alabama Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III – the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and a key player in Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Sessions was also the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District from 1981 to 1993, and his tenure was marked by accusations of racial insensitivity and bias.
We don’t claim to understand all the nuances, so please send any insights you might have to tips@mainjustice.com.
With that disclaimer, here’s what we know of the backstory:
Rep. Davis in January announced that he’d recommended Vicki Davis (no relation), an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District, to be nominated to head the office. Davis’s second choice was former federal magistrate judge Patrick Sims, now in private practice at Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner, Dumas & O’Neal in Mobile. Read Davis’s news release announcing his recommendations here.
But Vicki Davis appeared to run into myriad problems – including her political relationship with a circuit court judge charged with sexually abusing young men who appeared before his court, and with the family of long-time bitter foes of Jeff Sessions.
Sims, on the other hand, appears to have suffered from being the wrong race (white) and wrong gender (male.) Vicky Davis, by contrast, is African-American and female. The need to find a black prosecutor to head up the Southern District became more urgent, because the leading candidates for Alabama’s other two prosecuting districts are also white. They are Joyce Vance, who’s been nominated to head the Northern District; and Joe Van Heest, who appears to be the frontrunner now for the Middle District.
Reached by phone on Friday, Vicki Davis declined to comment. A spokesman for Rep. Davis, Alex Goepfert, directed questions to the White House. The White House spokesman for judicial and U.S. Attorney appointments, Ben LaBolt, was traveling Friday and unavailable for comment. Melissa Schwartz, a spokewoman for the Justice Department, said she could not comment on candidates whom the White House hasn’t formally announced.
But Davis’s problems with the White House appeared to stem in part from her political relationship with a Mobile circuit court judge named Herman Thomas, said people familiar with Alabama legal politics. Thomas was arrested in March and charged with sexually abusing young men who came before his court. This story in an Alabama alternative magazine, Lagniappe, described allegations the judge took his victims into a special room assigned to him in the courthouse and paddled their bare bottoms while he masturbated. The publication said Thomas had been a mentor to Vicki Davis and managed a campaign she ran for a state judgeship.
A Web-based publication, the Mobile Bay Times, published this blog item speculating that Davis also faced problems over a lenient sentencing recommendation she gave for the son of state senator Vivian Figures. The son, Akil Figures, was charged with a drug offense and had also been one of Judge Thomas’s alleged victims. Vivian Figures’s campaign committee had donated $500 to Vicki Davis’s 2000 campaign for the state judgeship. And Figures ran for Senate against Sessions last year.
There’s more. Bear with me. Vivian Figures is the sister-in-law of Thomas Figures, a black former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District who helped sink Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986.
Thomas Figures told the Senate Judiciary Committee that during a 1981 murder investigation involving Ku Klux Klan members, Sessions was overheard telling colleagues that he “used to think” the Klan was “okay” until he discovered some of them smoked pot. Figures also said Sessions called him “boy” and that he’d called the NAACP “un-American.” Sessions admitted to making some of the remarks but said they had been in jest. As for Thomas Figures – he was charged in 1992 with trying to bribe a drug dealer to help a client of his. Black Alabama Democrats claimed the charge’s against Figures were payback for his sinking of Sessions for the federal judgeship.
Upshot: It’s clear why Vicki Davis didn’t make it through the vetting process. What’s less clear, though, is how much weight the White House is giving Sessions’s views – or whether the Alabama Republican has weighed in. There is no doubt, though, that the White House wouldn’t want to antagonize Sessions at this critical juncture, with the Sotomayor nomination pending and other judicial appointments to come. Still, we wonder if Sessions promoted Brown for the post? The senator is known to remain keenly interested in what goes on in his old office down in Mobile.
As for Artur Davis, he seemed stoic about the turn of events in this interview published last month in Lagniappe:
L: Back in January, you headed a committee that made recommendations to Obama’s transition team for the next U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama – Vicki Davis and Patrick Sims. What’s the latest on that and are you sticking with those recommendations?
AD: I’ve submitted my recommendations for all three districts to the White House. The White House and the Justice Department have been vetting candidates and it’s always been their choice. No one should have ever had any illusion the choice was going to rest with anybody other than the Attorney General of the United States and the President of the United States, in conjunction with the White House counsel. I believe there will be announcements soon about U.S. attorneys in the state of Alabama and I think we’ll have a good crop of U.S. attorneys. I put my list forward. Obviously it’s up to people here in Washington to decide who they want.
