Move over Veco, the seafood industry needs some room in the federal corruption investigation of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).

Until now, only Stevens' son Ben Stevens, a former state Senate President, had been publicly ensnared in the fishing probe targeting earmarks that went to companies simultaneously paying the younger Stevens consulting fees. But this evening, the AP reports the seafood probe includes Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.

Investigators want to know if Stevens deliberately ushered $180 million in earmarks and wrote legislation that would lead to consulting fees and stock options for his son.

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Here's some strange news coming out of the Alaska trial of former state Rep. Vic Kohring. It turns out that when former Veco CEO Bill Allen testified last month in a separate corruption trial about being blackmailed by his own nephew, the strong-arming was related to Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) suspect home renovation.

Allen was defensive on the stand that day, the Anchorage Daily News reported, combating questioning from defense attorneys that he actually threatened to kill his nephew:

Allen said he didn’t make such a threat. “Not me, no. I told them (him?) I’d beat the shit out of him,” Allen said.

Later, he said: “I never did say that I would kill him. No. I wouldn’t have done that … because his mother is my sister.”

Today Allen clarified while under cross-examination that his nephew was blackmailing him over “Ted Stevens’ house.” Just what his nephew was threatening to do (go to the feds?) is unclear.

Allen also testified again today that Veco paid for some of the renovations that doubled Stevens' home, but he didn’t know how much Veco spent.

Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) superstar white collar defense lawyer Brendan Sullivan made Washingtonian's list of most influential DC law and lobbying types.

Sullivan's other famous clients had included Oliver North and several Duke lacrosse players. And what drives this successful lawyer? He's pretty up front:

“By the time somebody comes to me, they are pretty far up the creek,” Sullivan has said. “The good thing is they will pay almost anything.”

Note: the rankings weren't based on discretion.

Maybe the corruption trial of former state legislator Rep. Vic Kohring (R-AK) is really a call for healthcare reform. Kohring learned the age-old HMO lesson (never, ever go out of network) the hard way and ended up begging Veco executives for cash when faced with collection agency calls.

Kohring says a spinal surgery in 2002 at the Mayo Clinic, which wasn't on his health plan's preferred provider list, set him back thousands of dollars. One credit card still had a $17,000 balance in March 2006. With collection agencies harassing him and his house, worth about $100,000, not selling, he approached Veco executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith with an idea. He would lobby other state lawmakers to support a piece of pipeline legislation in exchange for some cash. He never received the $17,000.

Kohring's lawyer has argued prosecutor's nabbed his small fish client when they should have been pursuing the big fish: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and former state Senate President Ben Stevens. The lawyer, Wayne Anthony Ross, wrote in a letter to federal prosecutors: "You dun got the wrong man." Father and son Stevens, who are both under investigation for their connection to Veco, have not been officially accused of wrongdoing (yet), but Kohring is charged with accepting $2,600 in cash and lining up a Veco summer internship for his nephew worth $3,000.

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What's an FBI investigation between friends? Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) buddies in the Senate are standing by him.

And by standing by him, I mean contributing thousands of dollars to his re-election campaign, the AP reports.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch led the way, donating $10,000 from his political action committee and another $4,000 from his campaign fund. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas and Kit Bond of Missouri each added $10,000 from their political action committees, according to campaign reports released Friday....

Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's political action committee donated $5,000 and Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard's campaign chipped in $4,000. In all, the Stevens campaign raised more than $463,000 since July 1, making it one of the senator's most successful fundraising quarters.

Surprising? Probably not, considering a recent report from Marketplace radio that chronicles how two charities with ties to Stevens bring members of Congress to Alaska for lavish fishing tournaments. The trips would normally cost $1,000 a night, but thanks to the generosity of a series of PACs and non-profits backed by lobbyists, lawmakers don't spend a dime. The law also shields Stevens' campaign from having to disclose who attends.

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Marketplace radio's Steve Henn has a new angle to the Veco-Stevens scandal: the two men quietly paired up in 2002 to support the campaign of seven other Republican senators. Politicians often use their political action committees to purchase influence with members of their caucus, but Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) appears to have gone one step further. Veco CEO Bill Allen served in his proxy, echoing Stevens' leadership PAC contributions, buying the senior Republican senator clout on Veco's dime.

Here at TPMmuckraker we've painted the Alaska tale as a series of various cash-for-political favors incidents. But Henn describes a more complicated -- and telling -- relationship between Allen and Stevens. He noticed that in the summer of 2002, Veco executives poured $70,000 into seven Republican Senate challengers' campaign funds. The donations "closely mirrored cash gifts" from Steven's PAC.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) are two good examples.

Working in concert, Ted Stevens, Bill Allen and VECO executives used half a dozen political committees to raise about $25,000 for Coleman's 2002 campaign, and $50,000 for Sununu's. Both Coleman and Sununu are running for reelection this year.

Here's a breakdown of the Veco-Stevens donations to Sununu, including a $25,000 donation from Veco to Stevens' PAC, which then made its way straight into the Sununua Victory Fund.

Stevens brought Sununu and Coleman even closer into his sphere of influence by inviting them up to Alaska for his annual salmon-habitat fundraiser and influence-swapping event, the Kenai River Classic, co-hosted by Bob Penney.

CBS news highlighted some of Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) greatest pork hits this weekend-- including $1 million to promote salmon baby food and $500,000 to paint a jet like a flying fish.

The airplane project was sponsored by the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, a non-profit set up by Stevens and originally run by his son and former aide. The board hands out tens of millions in grants to promote the Alaska seafood industry.

Unsurprisingly, Stevens wasn't happy with the story. A spokesman told an Alaska CBS affiliate that they "in some cases actually distorted" facts:

Stevens' press secretary, Aaron Saunders, tells KTVA-CBS 11 News the senator is, "dismayed CBS ignored the facts."

" ...we never said the salmon baby food project was designed to promote Alaska salmon. Furthermore, we emphasized that these funds were not allocated for the development of salmon-flavored baby foods, as it appeared in the story. It was to be used to explore the many health benefits of omega 3s, which certainly could help children across America, not just in Alaska," [Saunders said].

Stevens' office apparently had no comment on the half million for the Alaska Airlines salmon paint job.

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), who's made a hobby of denouncing the corruption among Republicans in her state, recently told Newsweek it's time for her state to "grow up" in a feature on the nine women governors holding office across the country.

Palin, elected on an anti-corruption platform, has worked on tackling the "cozy relationship between the state's political elite and the energy industry that provides 85 percent of Alaska's tax revenues," Newsweek writes.

Some of her decisions, including canceling funding for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, has created an intra-party rift between her office and the all-Republican federal delegation. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) recently called relations between the two Alaskans "frosty" (knowing Stevens, we'll assume the pun wasn't intended) after Palin stood in the way of the bridge.

Palin has also gone after Ted's son, former state Sen. Ben Stevens (R), saying she wants him out of his seat as Alaska national Republican committe chairman. Palin said she'd heard enough when Veco CEO Bill Allen testified to bribing him while he was in the state Senate.

It looks like Veco plays favorites. Since 1993 the oil services company tangled in several of the Alaska corruption investigations has given Rep. Don Young (R-AK) more than two and a half times what it's donated to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), the AP reports.

Young's raked in $180,630, while Stevens has only pocketed $70,500 (but that presumably doesn't include other perks like Veco employees remodeling his house or parking cars at his fundraisers.) Young and Stevens are both under federal investigation for their ties to the corporation. The FBI is particularly interested in the annual pig roast former Veco CEO Bill Allen would host for Young.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski has only pulled in a pittance ($41,250), but she's only been in Congress since late 2002, when her father bequeathed his seat to her to become governor of Alaska.

Former Alaska Senate president and son of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), Ben Stevens, hasn't said much publicly since his legislative office was raided last year by federal agents. But this weekend an Anchorage talk radio show host said something about Uncle Ted that angered Stevens enough to call in. (I guess dialing up talk radio shows when you're facing legal and ethical troubles is just what you do in Alaska...)

On air, Stevens volunteered that he is under investigation by the FBI, the IRS and the the National Marine Fisheries Service, but maintained his innocence and called this whole investigation a "feeding frenzy" and a "blood bath." The show's host, Dan Fagan asked him about the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, where Stevens and his father's former top legislative aide, Trevor McCabe, served together while simultaneously accepting consulting fees from the very companies they awarded federal grants. The grants themselves, of course, came from Ben's dad.

"I didn't receive anything [while on the board]," Stevens told Fagan. "I've got a 30-year relationship with the fishing business. I've been working for many companies and many entities and some of that overlapped, but it didn't have anything to do with what happened on that board."

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