Legal News

Breaking News: The Stevens Show Will Go On

By Ashby Jones

This just in: Turns out, Brendan Sullivan and Co. didn’t get their wish in the corruption trial of Ted Stevens. The federal judge overseeing the trial blasted prosecutors Thursday for belated disclosures of evidence that could bolster the senator’s defense, but he refused to dismiss the government’s case or declare a mistrial, according to a report from Dow Jones Newswires (link not available). Click here and here for LB background from today (or, come to think of it, just scroll down a couple posts).

Late Wednesday night, prosecutors gave Stevens’ lawyers portions of an unredacted FBI report that detailed an agent’s conversation with the government’s star witness, Bill Allen, the former chief executive of Veco Corp., an oil-services company that allegedly gave Stevens more than $250,000 in gifts.

The report addressed a key issue in the case: Veco’s extensive work on renovations at Stevens’s Alaska home, and whether the senator paid for it. According the report, Allen believed Stevens would have paid Veco for the work if he had been billed for it.

Stevens’s lawyers said the report’s contents were the exact opposite of what the government had told them previously. Prosecutors apologized repeatedly for the late disclosure, calling it an honest mistake. But they said the information was not new and did not conflict with what they had told Stevens’ lawyers previously. Brenda Morris, one of the DOJ prosecutors, said they had self-reported to the Office of Professional Responsibility for the Brady violation.

Stevens’ lead lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, was none too pleased.

“The integrity of this process has been breached,” the lawyer said, adding, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).