As she prepares to open her defense against federal corruption charges, Mobile County License Commissioner Kim Hastie is expected to lean heavily on a series of Alabama Attorney General opinions that her legal team argues justified her use of public funds.
Prosecutors, however, have asked the presiding judge to prevent jurors from hearing about those opinions unless Hastie herself takes the stand to testify.
Part of the case against Hastie centers on allegations that she improperly used taxpayer money to produce a newsletter promoting her plan to merge her office with the Mobile County Revenue Commission, and that she obscured how the newsletter was financed by pressuring a computer consultant to alter his invoices. Prosecutors further allege she misused money from a fund built from a $1.25 fee tacked onto driver’s license transactions to pay a political consultant who helped draft legislation aimed at accomplishing the merger.
The defense contends the so-called $1.25 fund gives commissioners broad discretion in how the money is spent, so long as it serves a public purpose, and points to four Attorney General opinions issued in 1995, 1997, 2003 and 2007 as support for that reading. While such opinions aren’t legally binding, they can shield public officials from liability if followed in good faith.
Federal prosecutors previously sought to block the defense from introducing those opinions as evidence at all, but a federal judge sided with the defense earlier this year, allowing at least some reference to the opinions during trial.
The more recent dispute centers on whether testimony describing conversations Hastie had with the License Commission’s attorney about those opinions would amount to inadmissible hearsay if offered by a third-party witness rather than Hastie herself. Prosecutors argued that allowing another witness to describe what Hastie said about the legal advice she received would improperly let her position be presented to the jury without her facing cross-examination.
The trial, which also involves Deputy License Commissioner Ramona Yeager as a co-defendant, has drawn significant attention in Mobile County as one of the more prominent public corruption cases to reach federal court in recent years. Both prosecution and defense are expected to continue presenting evidence in the days ahead as the case moves toward its conclusion.