Justice Department Wanted to Include Undisclosed Gifts of Firearms in the Ted Stevens Indictment, but Then Figured Out He'd Reported Them

Anchorage--

The report of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility ("OPR") on the botched Ted Stevens prosecution is well over 600 pages long, and it will take a while for me to get through it.    One nugget that does appear early on:    The Justice Department had in early 2008 considered including in the indictment of Stevens charges involving unreported gifts of firearms.   Stevens had accepted an annual gift of a firearm at the Kenai River Classic from 2002 through 2006, and had at some point allegedly received a $20,000 shotgun at the same event.    By May of 2008, an internal memorandum showed that the charges involving firearms had fallen out of the indictment after the Justice Department had discovered that Stevens had alerted his staff to the firearms as gifts in 2006 and reported them in 2007.