The talk in the courtroom was of local things — dubious warehouses, a landfill, a lucrative hospital. But as he emerged from court today, Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, tried to paint a bigger picture, saying he was a victim of Karl Rove, the senior political adviser in the White House.

“The origins of this case are political,� Mr. Siegelman said. “There’s no question that Karl Rove’s fingerprints are all over this case, from the inception.�

His words, in turn, have been fueled by an affidavit that seems to link his prosecution to high government circles, which has given the case a serious jolt.

Mr. Siegelman was convicted of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud last year after being accused of persuading Richard M. Scrushy, then the chairman of the HealthSouth Corporation, to pay off $500,000 in debt from a lottery campaign the governor had initiated, in exchange for a seat on a state hospital licensing board. Mr. Scrushy was also convicted.

It was a small part of a voluminous Justice Department bribery-and-racketeering case, most of which — 25 out of 32 counts — was dismissed by the jury. Nonetheless the government is urging a sentence of 30 years and is asking Judge Mark Fuller of Federal District Court to even weigh charges on which Mr. Siegelman was acquitted.

That incomplete government victory, in turn, loomed in the background of the arguments of Mr. Siegelman’s lawyers Tuesday as they urged Mr. Fuller, an appointee of President Bush, to go easy on their client, who was sitting in the dock with Mr. Scrushy.

Supporters, some wearing Siegelman campaign buttons, packed the courtroom for the former governor, an Alabama fixture whose career stretches back a quarter-century here, to the George Wallace era. His start in politics came as George McGovern’s Alabama campaign manager in the 1972 presidential election.

The shakiness of the federal case against Mr. Siegelman had forced prosecutors to “adopt the garbage-can theory of RICO,� said G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and former prosecutor, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. Professor Blakey suggested that the charges against Mr. Siegelman had been indiscriminate from the outset.

The government’s only limited success was very much on the mind of the former governor, once the brightest light in Democratic politics here, after a morning in court. “This conviction is based on a whole arena of things — the government overreaching,� Mr. Siegelman said, hurrying from the courtroom on a break.

Mr. Siegelman repeated his assertion about Mr. Rove’s involvement three times. The evidence is slight, but it has charged the atmosphere of a case that had seemed parochial, for all its partisan, hard-edged Alabama undertones.

In particular, Mr. Siegelman and his backers refer to the affidavit of a Republican lawyer, released this month, that appears to implicate Mr. Rove. The lawyer, Jill Simpson, claims to have heard a top Alabama Republican operative with longstanding links to Mr. Rove boast over the phone in 2002 that Mr. Siegelman’s political career would soon be scuttled.
The operative, Bill Canary, was speaking with the son of Mr. Siegelman’s Republican rival, Bob Riley, now the state’s governor: “William ‘Bill’ Canary told him not to worry, that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman,� Ms. Simpson said in the affidavit.

Earlier, Mr. Canary had reassured the younger Riley, according to Ms. Simpson, that “his girls would take care of� Mr. Siegelman: Mr. Canary was referring to his wife, Leura G. Canary, the United States attorney in Montgomery, and Alice Martin, her counterpart in Birmingham.
The White House, the Canarys, and Ms. Martin have all rejected Ms. Simpson’s assertions, and the assistant United States attorney who handled the case after Ms. Canary recused herself, Louis Franklin, vigorously rejects any assertion that politics played a role in the case.

Politics did not come up in the intricate court calibrations of the defendants’ relative culpability on Tuesday, all with an eye to assessing how long they might spend in jail. Nonetheless, the idea that the government had plunged forward heedlessly with a grab-bag of charges against Mr. Siegelman, and was still trying to convict him of it, fueled his lawyers’ arguments.

“The government is asking that he be penalized for every single thing he was charged with, whether he was acquitted or not,� said Susan James, a Siegelman lawyer. “The government drastically lost the case,� she said. “We strongly object to the court considering acquitted conduct.�
The prosecutors, on the other hand, repeatedly depicted the former governor as the nexus of a web of corruption, the orchestrator of “pay-to-play,� as they called it.

“Siegelman is the one who defrauded the citizens by engaging in this pay-for-play,� said J. B. Perrine, assistant United States attorney. “The underlying offense they are trying to cover up is Don Siegelman’s criminal activity.�

In Mr. Siegelman’s large crew of lawyers, the idea that he did anything criminal is vigorously disputed. Giving Mr. Scrushy a seat on the hospital board was a routine political act, they say, repeated a hundred times over in Washington and state capitals across the country.

“It’s a joke,� Professor Blakey said. “A guy walks in, gives a contribution, and gets an appointment? Until Congress reforms this, this is the system we live under. They are criminalizing this contribution.�

Furthermore, Mr. Blakey derided the prosecutors’ racketeering case against Mr. Siegelman. “It’s the worst-drafted RICO I’ve ever seen,� said the professor, whose career at the Justice Department began in 1960. “You find as much trash as you can, then you dump it in.�

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