Guess who's footing the bill for those fancy lawyers the Stevens Six have hired? We are.
The Justice Department confirmed to TPMmuckraker that the prosecutors -- who are being investigated for criminal contempt in connection to misconduct in the Ted Stevens case -- requested representation under a DOJ provision that applies to employees who run into legal trouble while doing their jobs, and that the request was authorized.
Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman is stepping up his campaign to persuade Attorney General Eric Holder to take another look at his case.
Seventy-five former state attorneys general, including ten Republicans, have sent a letter to Holder saying that Siegelman's defense lawyers have raised "gravely troublesome facts" about whether he got a fair trial, reports the New York Times. The letter cites Holder's recent decision to ask that the charges against Ted Stevens be dropped, thanks to prosecutors' failure to turn over evidence to the defense, as required. It argues that there is evidence of similar misconduct in Siegelman's case, and that the charges should similarly be dropped if that's borne out in an investigation.
The Stevens Six have lawyered up. And what lawyers they are.
Legal Times reports that Nicholas Marsh, one of the public integrity prosecutors, has hired Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, of Patton Boggs.
Are the Ted Stevens prosecutors in line to get a taste of their medicine?
As we've reported, six federal prosecutors from the Stevens case -- members of DOJ's Public Integrity unit, including its head, William Welch -- are now being investigated for knowingly withholding evidence, a potential criminal act.
Prosecutions for this offense -- known as a Brady violation -- are exceedingly rare. But it turns out that in 2006, an Assistant US Attorney was tried on the charge -- and acquitted amid allegations that his prosecution was over-zealous. In fact, the prosecutors who argued the case against the AUSA were with -- you guessed it -- the Public Integrity unit. And for part of that time, they were supervised by Welch himself. (For more on the Stevens Six, go here.)
You can say one thing for Ted Stevens -- he's got cojones.
Court records that were just unsealed show that the former Alaska senator last summer turned down a plea deal with prosecutors that would have resulted in no jail time.
Earlier this week, Judge Emmet Sullivan formally dropped the charges against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, thanks to prosecutorial misconduct. And Sullivan also announced that he's appointed a special prosecutor of his own to investigate contempt charges against the six Justice Department lawyers whose string of missteps -- the most serious of which involved withholding key evidence -- doomed the case. That misconduct is also the subject of an internal DOJ probe.
Since then, there's been a tangle of competing claims from all sides. We've seen some critics of the Bush administration suggesting that Justice intentionally sabotaged the prosecution, in order to let Stevens, a Republican, off the hook. Meanwhile, some of the more paranoid figures on the right are arguing that the entire prosecution was an (ultimately successful) effort by liberal DOJ bureaucrats to use bogus charges to create a cloud of suspicion around Stevens and thereby win another Senate seat for Democrats.
The Ted Stevens pity party continues.
The Associated Press reports:
Alaska lawmakers want the U.S. government to apologize to former Sen. Ted Stevens, whose corruption conviction was dismissed this week by a federal judge....
The Alaska House passed a resolution Wednesday calling for the apology to Stevens.
Buried in the news about charges against Ted Stevens being dropped, there's an additional serious indictment (as if more were needed) of the Bush Justice Department -- and specifically, of Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
Reporting from yesterday's hearing, at which Judge Emmet Sullivan formally announced that the charges would be dropped, the Washington Post notes:
When the judge heard that Stevens's attorneys sent three letters about prosecutorial misconduct to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey but received no response, he called it "shocking -- but not surprising."
In the wake of the charges being dropped agaisnt Ted Stevens, is pressure building on the Justice Department to make a similar decision on behalf of Don Siegelman?
A lawyer for the former Alabama governor -- who last week told TPMmuckraker that the misconduct in his own case "dwarf[s]" that in Stevens' -- sent a letter Friday to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking that Holder review the evidence of "serious and pervasive" prosecutorial misconduct in Siegelman's case.
It looks like Judge Emmet Sullivan didn't just leave things at a few harsh words for those government prosecutors who botched the Ted Stevens case by failing to hand over evidence.
Politico reports that the judge will seek contempt charges against the six-person prosecution team for their misconduct. That team includes William Welch, the head of the Public Integrity Section, Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor in the case, and trial lawyer Nicholas Marsh, all of whom were replaced earlier this year, as a result of the missteps.
Sullivan also appointed a lawyer, Henry Schulke, to investigate the Justice Department in relation to the contempt issue. DOJ has said that its Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting its own probe of the misconduct, but clearly Sullivan wants an independent inquiry.
This could get interesting...
The judge in the Ted Stevens case has granted the government's motion to drop the charges against the former Alaska senator -- but not before slamming the government prosecutors on the case.
"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said at a hearing on the government's motion, reports the Associated Press.
The charges against Ted Stevens may be about to be dropped -- but the fallout isn't over.
The judge in the case yesterday ordered the Justice Department to hand over documents relating to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in the case, reports the Washington Post.
It was because of this misconduct that Attorney General Eric Holder last week decided to ask the judge, Emmet Sullivan, drop the charges against Stevens.
Looks like Sarah Palin agrees with the Alaska GOP:
The Anchorage Daily News reports:
Gov. Sarah Palin and the head of the Alaska Republican Party said Thursday that Sen. Mark Begich should give his Senate seat up to a special election now that prosecutors have abandoned their case against Ted Stevens. "Alaskans deserve to have a fair election not tainted by some announcement that one of the candidates was convicted fairly of seven felonies, when in fact it wasn't a fair conviction," Palin said in a Thursday interview with the Daily News.
We told you how the Alaska Republican party earlier today reacted to the news that the Justice Department is dropping the charges against Ted Stevens by absurdly calling for the resignation of Sen. Mark Begich, the Democrat who beat Stevens last fall.
Well, now Begich has put out a statement in response:
Here's the logical (read: nuts) conclusion to the fast-growing Poor-Ted-Stevens movement:
Via Think Progress, a press release from the Alaska GOP:
We told you yesterday about Chris Matthews' flub on the Ted Stevens news -- telling viewers that the decision by Justice to drop the charges, thanks to prosecutorial misconduct, means that "the charges should never have been brought."
But it looks like Matthews was just the tip of the iceberg. Since yesterday morning, the self-appointed guardians of the Beltway discourse, in Congress and the press, have been lining up to express their sympathy for Stevens and lament the way the case has unfairly "besmirched" his sterling reputation.
Please.
For Don Siegelman, DOJ's decision on Ted Stevens just adds insult to injury.
"There seems to be substantial evidence of prosecutorial and other misconduct in my case, that would dwarf the allegations in the Stevens case," the former Alabama governor told TPMmuckraker in an interview moments ago.
Chris Matthews says a lot of things. So it's to be expected that sometimes they're smart and insightful, and sometimes they're embarrassingly wrong.
Just now, the MSNBC anchor, opining on the news that DOJ is dropping the charges in the Ted Stevens case, declared that the decision means "the charges should never have been brought, there should never have been a prosecution."
It sounds like the decision to drop the charges against Ted Stevens was prompted by a new example of prosecutorial misconduct, which only came to light recently.
Here's the key excerpt from the Justice Department's motion:
The Government recently discovered that a witness interview of Bill Allen took place on April 15, 2008. While no memorandum of interview or agent notes exist for this interview, notes taken by two prosecutors who participated in the April 15 interview reflect that Bill Allen was asked about a note dated October 6, 2002, that was sent from the defendant to Bill Allen. The note was introduced at trial as Government Exhibit 495 and was referred to as the "Torricelli note." The notes of the April 15 interview indicate that Bill Allen said, among other things, in substance and in part, that he (Bill Allen) did not recall talking to Bob Persons regarding giving a bill to the defendant. This statement by Allen during the April 15 interview was inconsistent with Allen's recollection at trial, where he described a conversation with Persons about the Torricelli note. In addition, the April 15 interview notes indicate that Allen estimated that if his workers had performed efficiently, the fair market value of the work his corporation performed on defendant's Girdwood chalet would have been $80,000. Upon the discovery of the interview notes last week, the Government immediately provided a copy to defense counsel.Defendant Stevens was not informed prior to or during trial of the statements by Bill Allen on April 15, 2008. This information could have been used by the defendant to cross- examine Bill Allen and in arguments to the jury. The Government also acknowledges that the Government's Opposition to Defendant's Motion for a New Trial provided an account of the Government's interviews of Bill Allen that is inaccurate.
Here's the Justice Department's undated motion to dismiss the case, which lays out the rationale in detail, and was presumably filed yesterday or this morning.
So which of the many well-documented prosecutorial missteps was most important in leading to the Justice Department's decision to drop the case against Ted Stevens?
The initial read, based on DOJ's statement, is that it was prosecutors' withholding of evidence from the defense.
Holder:
After careful review, I have concluded that certain information should have been provided to the defense for use at trial. In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial.
We'll have more on the details of this soon.
The Justice Department has released a statement on the decision to drop the Ted Stevens case:
STATEMENT OF ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER REGARDING UNITED STATES V. THEODORE F. STEVENS
NPR:
The Justice Department will drop all charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, NPR has learned.
It added that Attorney General Eric Holder decided the conviction could not be defended thanks to problems with the prosecution.
The news of the case being dropped has now been confirmed independently by the AP and CNN.
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