Embattled Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley called an “emergency staff and Cabinet meeting” Monday afternoon, State Auditor Jim Zeigler said.
Ziegler did not expand on why the meeting was called by the governor, who faces impeachment hearings over allegations he tapped state resources to facilitate and hide an extramarital affair.
With efforts to impeach Bentley underway, a local prosecutor referred the possibility of criminal charges — recommended by the state Ethics Commission — to Alabama’s acting attorney general in the investigation.
“Please note that this is not a recusal,” Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey said in an email to CNN. “I simply did not want to interfere with an ongoing investigation by the acting AG that has been ongoing for several months.”
In his letter to Ellen Brooks, the acting attorney general in the Bentley investigation, Bailey says he wishes not to duplicate or interfere with her probe.
Jack Sharman, the state House Judiciary Committee’s special counsel, has been investigating the governor for months, and on Friday he submitted to the committee a 130-page document alleging, among other things, that Bentley used state law enforcement officers to intimidate staffers and suppress news of his affair with former political adviser Rebekah Caldwell Mason.
Bentley was desperate to keep news of the affair from spreading beyond the Governor’s Mansion, where it was apparently common knowledge among staffers, the report said. It paints a portrait of a dysfunctional executive branch plagued by the affair of a Nixonian governor whose “loyalty shifted from the State of Alabama to himself.”
