Those Ted Stevens prosecutors are just looking more and more clueless.
The Anchorage Daily News reports that William Welch, the head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, wrote a letter to the judge January 30, admitting that he erred when he said last month that a group of government employees, who were cited in an FBI agent’s publicly-filed complaint, alleging improprieties by government officials, “want their story to be made public.”
In the complaint, the FBI agent, Chad Joy, had accused a fellow agent and prosecutors of violating FBI policy and fair-trial rules. But Welch has now acknowledged that not all of the employees had agreed to have their names released.
This latest screwup comes on the heels of another slip, in which prosecutors have gone back and forth on whether Joy meets the technical definition of a protected government whistleblower.
As the ADN puts it
:
“Initially, when prosecutors sought to keep the complaint secret, they said he was a protected whistle-blower. When they sought to make the complaint public, they said he wasn’t.
The defense has also filed a complaint alleging that a female FBI agent on the case had an improper personal relationship with one of the key witnesses for the prosecution, former oil-services exec Bill Allen.
And even before Stevens, the former Alaska GOP senator, was found guilty in late October of concealing gifts from Allen on his Senate disclosure form — a conviction he is appealing — prosecutors were reprimanded by the judge for not turning over key evidence to the defense.
Stevens’ defense team has already filed a motion that the charges be dismissed, on account of government misconduct. And in a new filing made yesterday, they went further, arguing that the government should be held in contempt.
“The government still does not get it. Over and over again, it has been caught red-handed making false representations to the Court and the defense,” defense attorney Robert Cary wrote.
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