Feds Don’t Intend to Use Bill Allen as a Witness in the Bruce Weyhrauch Trial, and FBI Agent Mary Beth Kepner May Plead the Fifth Amendment

Anchorage--

A status report filed by a lawyer for former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) says that government attorneys have announced that the federal government does not intend to call imprisoned ex-VECO CEO Bill Allen as a witness in the trial of the ex-legislator, currently scheduled for September 13. The same filing states that a lawyer for FBI Special Agent Mary Beth Kepner has indicated that if called as a witness she might refuse to testify based on her her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Kepner was the investigator widely thought to have pushed for the federal government’s “POLAR PEN” probe into Alaska public corruption, and she later served as the investigation’s co-lead agent for the Bureau.

Weyhrauch’s lawyer Doug Pope also argues in his status report that the trial should be postponed past its currently set date of September 13 because the Ninth Circuit—the intermediate federal appellate court for the Western U.S.—will soon issue rulings that will affect the evidence that can be introduced at the trial.

As I have repeatedly disclosed, I have known Bruce Weyhrauch since we both worked as staff for the Alaska Legislature in the early 1980s. We socialized a number of times when I lived in Juneau in the 1980s and early 1990s, but he has never discussed this case with me.