Federal prosecutors moved to drop the remaining tax charges against Mobile County License Commissioner Kim Hastie, a decision her defense team characterized as a clear signal that the government’s case had unraveled after a string of courtroom setbacks.
“I think they got their butt whipped, and that’s part of it,” Hastie’s attorney, Neil Hanley, told reporters gathered for a Saturday morning press conference outside the federal courthouse. Hastie and her husband, John, attended the announcement but declined to comment publicly until the dismissal is formally approved by the presiding judge.
The move brings to a close, or near-close, a lengthy public corruption case that had dogged the elected license commissioner for months. The prior month, a jury had acquitted Hastie of all but one of the criminal charges she faced, clearing her of 16 of 17 public corruption counts. Jurors did convict her on a single, lesser count tied to the improper release of a list of individuals who had obtained driver’s licenses through her office. That list later surfaced in a local mayoral campaign, which used it in an effort to identify and target voters.
Hastie was not the only official swept up in the case. Her deputy was tried alongside her on nine related corruption counts and was acquitted on all of them, a result that further undercut prosecutors’ broader theory of coordinated wrongdoing inside the license commissioner’s office.
The tax charges targeted for dismissal stemmed from a separate allegation: that Hastie and her husband had conspired to avoid reporting roughly $58,600 in income to the IRS, tied to land transactions, timber cutting and land-clearing work. That portion of the case had already hit a wall earlier in the year when the presiding federal judge declared a mistrial after jurors could not reach a verdict on the tax fraud counts.
According to Jeff Deen, the attorney representing John Hastie, prosecutors continued weighing whether to retry the tax allegations right up until the eve of the announcement. Deen argued the tax case never fit naturally within the broader corruption indictment in the first place. Cases involving unreported income, he noted, are typically developed and pursued through the Internal Revenue Service rather than folded into a public corruption prosecution. “This case was not run up the flagpole,” Deen said, adding that he believed it should have been handled as a standard IRS matter rather than bundled with the corruption allegations.
The dismissal still requires formal sign-off from the federal judge overseeing the case before it becomes final, but attorneys on both sides of the defense table treated the prosecutors’ decision as effectively ending the legal saga that had consumed much of Hastie’s tenure in county government. For Mobile County residents who had followed the case through trial testimony and repeated courthouse hearings, the announcement marked the likely conclusion of one of the more closely watched local corruption prosecutions in recent memory.
Hastie continued to serve as license commissioner throughout the proceedings, and the case’s resolution is expected to allow her office to move past the legal distraction that had shadowed its operations since the original indictment.