Last November, Sullivan revealed that the special prosecutor he had appointed, Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III, did not recommend criminal charges against any of the federal prosecutors despite finding widespread misconduct, at least some of it intentional. In an order yesterday, Sullivan formally said he is accepting Schuelke’s conclusions, as had been expected since November.
Stevens was the longest-serving Republican in the Senate when a jury convicted him in 2008 of lying on financial disclosure documents to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations and gifts from wealthy friends, including a massage chair, a stained-glass window, and an expensive sculpture. A few days later, Stevens lost reelection to the Alaska seat he had held for 40 years.
Sullivan dismissed the conviction after the Justice Department admitted misconduct in the case, including withholding from the defense evidence favorable to Stevens. That evidence included notes from an interview with the star prosecution witness.
The witness was Bill Allen, the millionaire founder of a major Alaska company that supported oil producers called VECO Corp. During the trial, Allen testified that he oversaw extensive renovations at Stevens’s home and sent his employees to work on it. In posttrial court proceedings, the notes of the interviews have been described as more favorable to Stevens’s position.
“The government’s ill-gotten verdict in the case not only cost that public official his bid for reelection, the results of that election tipped the balance of power in the United States Senate,’’ Sullivan wrote. “That the government later moved to dismiss the indictment with prejudice and vacate the verdict months after the trial does not eradicate the misconduct, nor should it serve to shroud that misconduct in secrecy.’’
Sullivan ordered the criminal investigation into the six Justice Department attorneys who tried the senator as he dismissed the conviction, saying at the time that he’d never seen such misconduct in 25 years on the bench.
Sullivan wrote in his order that he received motions from two of the attorneys under investigation by Schuelke to permanently seal the report, while two other targeted attorneys objected to the release without making a legal motion to stop it.
