Anchorage--
Former VECO Vice President Rick Smith is scheduled to get off probation after only one year despite being ordered to serve three years of probation as part of his sentencing for his role in Alaska's biggest public corruption scandal. Anchorage Daily News reporter Richard Mauer reports that Smith's probation officer has labeled him "a low risk to re-offend."
Showing posts with label Rick Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rick Smith. Show all posts
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Friday, October 21, 2011
Pete Kott and Vic Kohring Trade Away Their Citizenship Rights to Guarantee They Won't Return to Prison While Karen Loeffler Declares a Victorious End to "POLAR PEN"
Anchorage—
On a chilly October morning, two men who had admittedly sold their public offices for cash traded away their rights as citizens to buy a guarantee that they would not return to prison.
The guilty pleas of Pete Kott and Vic Kohring triggered a muted victory dance by the people who had pursued them. U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler proclaimed at a post-sentencing press conference that the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption had been a "huge thing" and was now over.
In back-to-back hearings, U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline accepted the plea agreements the two former Alaska lawmakers made with prosecutors. Kott pleaded to bribery, and Kohring pleaded to conspiracy to commit bribery. The bribery occurred in connection with the efforts of VECO CEO Bill Allen and VECO VP Rick Smith in 2006 to get the Alaska Legislature to set tax rates on oil production at levels desired by major oil producers, who were big customers of that Alaska-based multinational oil-services company.
The Apologetic Former Drunk and the Surprisingly Quiet Lightweight
These two defendants were each elected seven times and had tenures as legislators from Southcentral Alaska districts that almost completely overlapped, and both engaged in public corruption. But their different postures in court reflected their different stations in life.
Former Speaker of the Alaska House Kott went first, just as he rose far higher than his fellow Republican Kohring had in the legislature. Kott apologized for his deeds and comments, at least those shown on the "Animal House"-style FBI surveillance videos taken in a VECO-rented hotel suite that were shown at his trial in 2007. That trial produced convictions overturned on grounds of prosecutorial failures discovered in the meltdown of the Ted Stevens prosecution.
"In my heart, I thought that my actions in the Legislature were for the best interests of the State of Alaska," Kott told the court. "I understand that my actions and words off the floor of the Legislature were perhaps wrong."
Judge Beistline agreed with the "wrong" part, telling Kott that the former Air Force officer had "demonstrated a significant character flaw." After 14 years in the legislature, the judge said, Kott seemed to become tired and in need of financial help, so "you sold your soul."
Kott got the sentence he bargained for: no additional time in prison beyond what he has already served on convictions that were overturned, three additional years of supervised release, a $10,000 fine--and no re-trial with the associated cost, hassle, and risk of going back behind bars.
Kohring's sentencing had a different feel presaged by him shaking my hand as he walked into the courtroom and thanking me for being "supportive" on this blog. His comment reminded me of a conversation I had with my wife this morning. I told her that while Kott's lawyer could say in his sentencing memorandum that Kott recognizes that he had an alcohol problem but no longer suffers from it, it was unlikely that Kohring's attorney would say that his client recognized that he had formerly been delusional.
But I was wrong. In a sentencing memorandum whose contents were only disclosed after the proceeding, Kohring's lawyer said that his client had acknowledged to the federal government before his 2007 trial that Bill Allen had given him $1,000 in cash at a restaurant during the 2006 session. Kohring had previously maintained that he believed that the cash "was intended as a gift."
In the sentencing memorandum submitted this week, Kohring's new lawyer said that "What is different now is that Mr. Kohring has reflected on his actions and Bill Allen's motivations when this money was provided, and now acknowledges that receiving $1,000 came with expectations from Bill Allen that he would get something in return from Vic Kohring."
In another unusual move, Kohring's lawyer contended that his client's cluelessness justified a less severe sentence than other public corruption defendants received. Michael Filipovic, Kohring's Seattle-based public defender, said that the tall man sporting long locks was "not a person who had much persuasive ability with others in the House" and "not the person who could move other people's opinions." In a reversal from what politicians' campaign brochures usually boast, Kohring's lawyer argued that it was his client's own low "horsepower" with his legislative colleagues that meant that he was less dangerous than other office-holding defendants.
The final surreal moment at Kohring's sentencing came when he got his chance to speak directly to the court. His lawyer told his client in one of the loudest stage whispers ever that he had the right to say nothing, and--to the surprise of many in the courtroom--Kohring took that advice.
So there Kohring sat. In addition to the "shame, embarrassment and public ridicule" that other defendants in the "POLAR PEN" probe have suffered, Kohring has particularly bad personal problems. He has poor health that leads him to take medication to fight both pain and anxiety, and he is broke with only a lot of debts and only limited part-time work. Kohring lives with his elderly parents in their mobile home in Wasilla, and serves as their primary caregiver.
Perhaps relieved that Kohring did not try to orally reclaim the innocence that his signed plea agreement had given away, Judge Beistline gave Kohring a break. Kohring got the time served he had bargained for, and--in an area in which the parties had not negotiated a specific agreement--the judge only imposed 18 additional months of supervised release. There is no fine for Kohring, and no curfew like Kott got for the first year of his supervised release.
Judge Beistline seemed to lecture Kohring less, and he reserved much of his remarks in both cases for denunciations of two men who were not in the courtroom. The judge called Allen and Smith "two real disreputable characters" whose behavior in handing out baseball caps advertised their moral flaws. (Testimony at Kott's trial showed that his girlfriend had made up caps that read "CBC"--for "Corrupt Bastards Club"--that Smith had flung around a bar.) The judge called Allen and Smith "rich, greedy, amoral" (although Smith would surely disagree about the term "rich" being applied to him as well as the multimillionaire Allen).
The corruption scandals uncovered in the "POLAR PEN" probe were a "truly dark moment in the state's history," the judge said. Echoing President Gerald Ford's comment when he pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, Judge Beistline told Kott that he was accepting the plea agreement because "I recognize the need to put this long state nightmare to an end."
This Thing's Over and It Gave Us Better Government
That was a common theme from the prosecution and the judge throughout the day: The federal investigation had improved Alaska government, and it was finished.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Feldis said during the Kohring sentencing that he was proud to live in a state and a country where public corruption was not tolerated, and he stated that "Juneau is not the same place it was five years ago."
What had happened to Kohring and Kott would "send shudders to anybody thinking about crossing the line," the judge told Kohring.
"The message has been sent," U.S. Attorney Loeffler said at the post-hearings press conference. "We're in a different era, I hope."
Loeffler worked hard in front of the reporters to embrace the positive while tap dancing away from the negative. Pointing to the 10 people convicted of crimes--including six people who had been sitting lawmakers, representing 10 percent of the legislature--the chief federal prosecutor in Alaska said that the record showed that "We're not a Third World country." She said that the investigations and prosecution had produced a state legislature that was "more honest and open."
Although Loeffler left open the possibility that some other unit of the Department of Justice would do something else, she announced that the job was over for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska. "We're done."
Loeffler repeatedly refused to answer questions about some less attractive aspects of the federal probe into Alaska public corruption. She made it clear that the decisions about Ben Stevens--including the one not to prosecute him--were not made by her office, but by other elements within the Department of Justice. Any federal charges of Bill Allen for alleged sexual abuse of minors would come from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, not her office. All questions about investigations of prosecutors and investigators who formerly handled "POLAR PEN" cases had to be directed to people in Washington, D.C., where those investigations were being run.
Loeffler and the chief FBI agent in Anchorage, Mary Rook, did confirm the locations of some personnel who formerly worked on those cases. The former lead FBI agent on POLAR PEN, Mary Beth Kepner, attended Kott's sentencing and still works in the Anchorage FBI office. Chad Joy, who formerly served as co-lead agent and became a whistle-blower with grievances particularly aimed at Kepner, is no longer with the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Bottini still works in the Anchorage office, and Assistant U.S. Attorney James Goeke works for the Department of Justice outside of Alaska.
(This blog post was improved by sitting next to Mark Regan during some of the proceedings. The precise wording of the quotation from Pete Kott comes from the report of Kim Murphy in the Los Angeles Times.)
Tomorrow: What Did "POLAR PEN" Mean?
Thursday, August 11, 2011
What About Ben?
Anchorage--
So I haven't been the most consistent blogger. To compensate, here's an early taste of my new column for the Alaska Bar Rag, the official quarterly publication for the Last Frontier's lawyers. As you can see, I submitted a few hours before the news of last night, which caused me to drop in one sentence as an update.
What About Ben?
By Cliff Groh
Judging by what has happened in court, Ben Stevens might argue that he was an honest man wrongly dragged into the Last Frontier’s public corruption scandals.
After all, the man who only a half dozen years ago seemed set to be the next Alaska Governor or U.S. Senator was the only state legislator in 2006 whose offices were searched by the FBI who did NOT become either a criminal defendant or a cooperating witness.
But you have to wonder.
Accounts of the actions of Ben Stevens in the seafood industry as a consultant, lobbyist, investor, and member of a federally funded non-profit board while his father Ted was in the U.S. Senate read like textbooks on conflict of interest. While continuing to deny wrongdoing, Ben Stevens was by his own account under investigation by four federal agencies in 2007.
More pointedly, two executives of the now-defunct oil-services giant VECO testified under oath in 2007 that they had pleaded guilty to bribing Ben Stevens. Those VECO executives—Bill Allen and Rick Smith—agreed with federal prosecutors that the $243,250 in consulting fees that the Anchorage Republican lawmaker reported receiving from VECO through a private company he owned while he served in the State Senate was actually for “giving advice, lobbying colleagues, and taking official acts in matters before the legislature.”
Yet the eight-year-old federal investigation into Alaska public corruption has not produced a charge against Ben Stevens, and I will eat my baseball cap if he is prosecuted in that probe. [UPDATE: Several hours after this column was submitted to the Alaska Bar Rag, the Anchorage Daily News reported on its website that the Department of Justice has advised former Alaska State Senate President Ben Stevens that the ex-lawmaker will not face charges in the federal investigation into public corruption in the 49th State.]
Why didn’t that dog bark?
We must clear substantial underbrush in answering this question. Understand that nothing in this analysis is based on inside information from decision-makers within the federal government. Recognize that nothing written here is intended to accuse anyone of committing a crime. Ignore the controversy stirred by Ben Stevens getting more than $715,000 for three years of part-time work as chief executive of the 2001 Special Olympics World Winter Games. Set aside any surprise over the fact that he served four years on the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics.
Let’s skip any sense of regret or schadenfreude about this obviously intelligent and hard-working man’s meteoric career in business and public office, folks, and just focus as lawyers on how Ben Stevens escaped criminal charges.
It is not enough to whistle the Creedence Clearwater Revival song lyric “I ain’t no senator’s son.” Whatever protection (as well as career promotion) was afforded by having Ted Stevens as a father seemed to be over by 2008, when the iconic U.S. Senator got charged in a case that generated guilty verdicts on seven felonies before imploding less than six months later.
Nor does it work to suggest—as some observers have—that Ben Stevens made his own deal with the feds to give him immunity from prosecution. It’s not just that no evidence exists of such an agreement—there appears to be nothing that the former Anchorage Republican lawmaker ever gave the Justice Department to make such a deal plausible.
No, Ben Stevens’ avoidance of prosecution in the “POLAR PEN” probe seems to stem from a combination of luck, prudence, and hiding in plain sight.
Ben Stevens caught a big break when the Justice Department did not include him in the first wave of defendants charged in May of 2007 with crimes associated with VECO executives’ corruption of state legislators over oil-tax legislation debated the previous year. This omission might have been caused in part by the feds seeing the potential prosecution of Ben Stevens as a bargaining chip they could play later in the negotiations with his father.
Yet time did not turn out to be kind to the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption. The feds charged Ted Stevens without charging Ben Stevens, and the probe’s fortunes soured quickly after the jury returned guilty verdicts against Ted Stevens in October of 2008. The Ted Stevens prosecution collapsed in April of 2009 in the wake of revelations of failures to provide discovery, putting the government employees best informed about “POLAR PEN” under investigation themselves. Additional disclosures have dented the credibility of Allen and Smith, two of the prosecution’s key witnesses in previous trials. Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Skilling v. U.S. sharply pruned the scope of the honest services fraud statute, a favorite weapon wielded by federal prosecutors in public corruption cases that was used against half of the 12 defendants charged in the “POLAR PEN” probe.
The prosecutors might well have perceived additional problems with charging Ben Stevens even back when the feds were flying high in 2007, however. The combination of what appears to be his relative invisibility on incriminating tapes and his extensive financial disclosures may have saved him.
Ben Stevens received almost a quarter of a million dollars in fees from VECO while he was in the State Senate and also took positions as a legislator on oil taxes that VECO wanted him to take, but those facts do not by themselves constitute a crime. What was going on in Ben Stevens’ mind is where the action is in prosecuting him, as it often is in public corruption cases. (That’s also true in the broader category of white-collar crime cases, like that of his father.)
Prosecutors have found that the best way to show that a defendant in a public corruption case has criminal intent is by playing tapes that show him saying and/or doing things that make him look guilty. All the defendants that juries have returned guilty verdicts against in the Alaska public corruption cases have had damaging tapes of them played in front of the jury.
Tapes tend to trump other evidence. As one former federal prosecutor observed, the government attorneys in the “POLAR PEN” cases sometimes seemed primed merely to walk into court and push “PLAY,” and the feds might have thought they didn’t have enough incriminating tapes on Ben Stevens to go forward.
Unlike other legislators convicted in the probe, Ben Stevens might not have frequented the infamous VECO-rented Suite 604 in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel that the FBI bugged to such effect. Whether this conduct flows from a sensible desire to stay away from that “Animal House” atmosphere or from the family needs of a father of four, Ben Stevens’ apparent lack of a starring role in the FBI’s greatest hits has served him well.
Aside from whatever the more than 17,000 conversations the feds intercepted in the “POLAR PEN” probe may show about Ben Stevens, there is another problem the feds have in prosecuting him on offenses involving either VECO or fisheries. That problem is the fact that the former State Senator apparently disclosed all the income he collected for consulting and/or lobbying that he was legally required to disclose. You might think his conduct was unseemly and unsavory, but it’s likely that Ben Stevens would say that he is just a hard-working businessman who laid bare his income as the law required, both when he served as a federal lobbyist and later when he served as a state legislator.
As to all that money from VECO that came in to the legislator when his work product may look minimal or even non-existent, Ben Stevens might well say that he thought he was on retainer—a retainer that allowed Bill Allen to call Ben Stevens about work for VECO anytime 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ben Stevens might add that it was not his problem that Allen seemed to call him so infrequently to work on matters such as advice on salvaging vessels.
Observers might point to the $983,807.66 in fees that Ben Stevens reported receiving for business services and/or management services from VECO and fishing interests alone during the five full calendar years he served as a legislator in comparison to the relatively small amounts involved in the cases that sent other lawmakers to prison. The sheer amount of money, however, is not all that matters.
A common thread in the cases against the state legislators convicted at trial in the “POLAR PEN” probe was what juries saw as clumsy attempts to conceal benefits: a bogus flooring invoice submitted by former Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River); a request to hide help on a credit card balance by former Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla); a phony Website in the case of former Rep. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage). The contemporaneous cover-ups helped the juries find the guilty intent. (Reversals on appeal of the convictions of Kott and Kohring have led to re-trials being scheduled for late this year.)
With Ben Stevens, on the other hand, there appeared to be no subterfuge—all the income seems to have been reported. Although paper trails are often seen as trouble, a particular kind of paper trail—one shorn of detailed descriptions of tasks performed or time spent working—appears to have helped keep Ben Stevens out of trouble. The system could not handle that hiding in plain sight.
You might think that the story of Ben Stevens is a prime Alaska example of the maxim of columnist Michael Kinsley to the effect that the real scandal is not what’s illegal—it’s what’s legal. You might also think that not prosecuting Ben Stevens after getting Allen and Smith to plead guilty to bribing him might pose a particular public relations problem for the Department of Justice, but such a result would be neither illegal nor unprecedented. One well-known irony that involved verdicts by juries rather than the exercise of prosecutorial discretion comes from the notorious Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. Albert Fall was convicted for taking a bribe from oilman Edward Doheny while serving as Secretary of Interior, but Doheny was acquitted of the charge of bribing Fall.
Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has worked as a prosecutor and represented some criminal defendants in his private practice. He is a lawyer and writer in Anchorage whose law practice focuses on the writing and revision of briefs and motions. Disclosures potentially relevant to his writings about the Alaska public corruption probe can be found at http://alaskacorruption.blogspot.com/2011/05/even-more-updated-biography-with-still.html on the Internet. Conversations with numerous people—including Anchorage lawyers Mark Regan and George Freeman—have sharpened the author’s thinking on this column’s subject.
So I haven't been the most consistent blogger. To compensate, here's an early taste of my new column for the Alaska Bar Rag, the official quarterly publication for the Last Frontier's lawyers. As you can see, I submitted a few hours before the news of last night, which caused me to drop in one sentence as an update.
What About Ben?
By Cliff Groh
Judging by what has happened in court, Ben Stevens might argue that he was an honest man wrongly dragged into the Last Frontier’s public corruption scandals.
After all, the man who only a half dozen years ago seemed set to be the next Alaska Governor or U.S. Senator was the only state legislator in 2006 whose offices were searched by the FBI who did NOT become either a criminal defendant or a cooperating witness.
But you have to wonder.
Accounts of the actions of Ben Stevens in the seafood industry as a consultant, lobbyist, investor, and member of a federally funded non-profit board while his father Ted was in the U.S. Senate read like textbooks on conflict of interest. While continuing to deny wrongdoing, Ben Stevens was by his own account under investigation by four federal agencies in 2007.
More pointedly, two executives of the now-defunct oil-services giant VECO testified under oath in 2007 that they had pleaded guilty to bribing Ben Stevens. Those VECO executives—Bill Allen and Rick Smith—agreed with federal prosecutors that the $243,250 in consulting fees that the Anchorage Republican lawmaker reported receiving from VECO through a private company he owned while he served in the State Senate was actually for “giving advice, lobbying colleagues, and taking official acts in matters before the legislature.”
Yet the eight-year-old federal investigation into Alaska public corruption has not produced a charge against Ben Stevens, and I will eat my baseball cap if he is prosecuted in that probe. [UPDATE: Several hours after this column was submitted to the Alaska Bar Rag, the Anchorage Daily News reported on its website that the Department of Justice has advised former Alaska State Senate President Ben Stevens that the ex-lawmaker will not face charges in the federal investigation into public corruption in the 49th State.]
Why didn’t that dog bark?
We must clear substantial underbrush in answering this question. Understand that nothing in this analysis is based on inside information from decision-makers within the federal government. Recognize that nothing written here is intended to accuse anyone of committing a crime. Ignore the controversy stirred by Ben Stevens getting more than $715,000 for three years of part-time work as chief executive of the 2001 Special Olympics World Winter Games. Set aside any surprise over the fact that he served four years on the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics.
Let’s skip any sense of regret or schadenfreude about this obviously intelligent and hard-working man’s meteoric career in business and public office, folks, and just focus as lawyers on how Ben Stevens escaped criminal charges.
It is not enough to whistle the Creedence Clearwater Revival song lyric “I ain’t no senator’s son.” Whatever protection (as well as career promotion) was afforded by having Ted Stevens as a father seemed to be over by 2008, when the iconic U.S. Senator got charged in a case that generated guilty verdicts on seven felonies before imploding less than six months later.
Nor does it work to suggest—as some observers have—that Ben Stevens made his own deal with the feds to give him immunity from prosecution. It’s not just that no evidence exists of such an agreement—there appears to be nothing that the former Anchorage Republican lawmaker ever gave the Justice Department to make such a deal plausible.
No, Ben Stevens’ avoidance of prosecution in the “POLAR PEN” probe seems to stem from a combination of luck, prudence, and hiding in plain sight.
Ben Stevens caught a big break when the Justice Department did not include him in the first wave of defendants charged in May of 2007 with crimes associated with VECO executives’ corruption of state legislators over oil-tax legislation debated the previous year. This omission might have been caused in part by the feds seeing the potential prosecution of Ben Stevens as a bargaining chip they could play later in the negotiations with his father.
Yet time did not turn out to be kind to the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption. The feds charged Ted Stevens without charging Ben Stevens, and the probe’s fortunes soured quickly after the jury returned guilty verdicts against Ted Stevens in October of 2008. The Ted Stevens prosecution collapsed in April of 2009 in the wake of revelations of failures to provide discovery, putting the government employees best informed about “POLAR PEN” under investigation themselves. Additional disclosures have dented the credibility of Allen and Smith, two of the prosecution’s key witnesses in previous trials. Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Skilling v. U.S. sharply pruned the scope of the honest services fraud statute, a favorite weapon wielded by federal prosecutors in public corruption cases that was used against half of the 12 defendants charged in the “POLAR PEN” probe.
The prosecutors might well have perceived additional problems with charging Ben Stevens even back when the feds were flying high in 2007, however. The combination of what appears to be his relative invisibility on incriminating tapes and his extensive financial disclosures may have saved him.
Ben Stevens received almost a quarter of a million dollars in fees from VECO while he was in the State Senate and also took positions as a legislator on oil taxes that VECO wanted him to take, but those facts do not by themselves constitute a crime. What was going on in Ben Stevens’ mind is where the action is in prosecuting him, as it often is in public corruption cases. (That’s also true in the broader category of white-collar crime cases, like that of his father.)
Prosecutors have found that the best way to show that a defendant in a public corruption case has criminal intent is by playing tapes that show him saying and/or doing things that make him look guilty. All the defendants that juries have returned guilty verdicts against in the Alaska public corruption cases have had damaging tapes of them played in front of the jury.
Tapes tend to trump other evidence. As one former federal prosecutor observed, the government attorneys in the “POLAR PEN” cases sometimes seemed primed merely to walk into court and push “PLAY,” and the feds might have thought they didn’t have enough incriminating tapes on Ben Stevens to go forward.
Unlike other legislators convicted in the probe, Ben Stevens might not have frequented the infamous VECO-rented Suite 604 in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel that the FBI bugged to such effect. Whether this conduct flows from a sensible desire to stay away from that “Animal House” atmosphere or from the family needs of a father of four, Ben Stevens’ apparent lack of a starring role in the FBI’s greatest hits has served him well.
Aside from whatever the more than 17,000 conversations the feds intercepted in the “POLAR PEN” probe may show about Ben Stevens, there is another problem the feds have in prosecuting him on offenses involving either VECO or fisheries. That problem is the fact that the former State Senator apparently disclosed all the income he collected for consulting and/or lobbying that he was legally required to disclose. You might think his conduct was unseemly and unsavory, but it’s likely that Ben Stevens would say that he is just a hard-working businessman who laid bare his income as the law required, both when he served as a federal lobbyist and later when he served as a state legislator.
As to all that money from VECO that came in to the legislator when his work product may look minimal or even non-existent, Ben Stevens might well say that he thought he was on retainer—a retainer that allowed Bill Allen to call Ben Stevens about work for VECO anytime 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ben Stevens might add that it was not his problem that Allen seemed to call him so infrequently to work on matters such as advice on salvaging vessels.
Observers might point to the $983,807.66 in fees that Ben Stevens reported receiving for business services and/or management services from VECO and fishing interests alone during the five full calendar years he served as a legislator in comparison to the relatively small amounts involved in the cases that sent other lawmakers to prison. The sheer amount of money, however, is not all that matters.
A common thread in the cases against the state legislators convicted at trial in the “POLAR PEN” probe was what juries saw as clumsy attempts to conceal benefits: a bogus flooring invoice submitted by former Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River); a request to hide help on a credit card balance by former Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla); a phony Website in the case of former Rep. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage). The contemporaneous cover-ups helped the juries find the guilty intent. (Reversals on appeal of the convictions of Kott and Kohring have led to re-trials being scheduled for late this year.)
With Ben Stevens, on the other hand, there appeared to be no subterfuge—all the income seems to have been reported. Although paper trails are often seen as trouble, a particular kind of paper trail—one shorn of detailed descriptions of tasks performed or time spent working—appears to have helped keep Ben Stevens out of trouble. The system could not handle that hiding in plain sight.
You might think that the story of Ben Stevens is a prime Alaska example of the maxim of columnist Michael Kinsley to the effect that the real scandal is not what’s illegal—it’s what’s legal. You might also think that not prosecuting Ben Stevens after getting Allen and Smith to plead guilty to bribing him might pose a particular public relations problem for the Department of Justice, but such a result would be neither illegal nor unprecedented. One well-known irony that involved verdicts by juries rather than the exercise of prosecutorial discretion comes from the notorious Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. Albert Fall was convicted for taking a bribe from oilman Edward Doheny while serving as Secretary of Interior, but Doheny was acquitted of the charge of bribing Fall.
Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has worked as a prosecutor and represented some criminal defendants in his private practice. He is a lawyer and writer in Anchorage whose law practice focuses on the writing and revision of briefs and motions. Disclosures potentially relevant to his writings about the Alaska public corruption probe can be found at http://alaskacorruption.blogspot.com/2011/05/even-more-updated-biography-with-still.html on the Internet. Conversations with numerous people—including Anchorage lawyers Mark Regan and George Freeman—have sharpened the author’s thinking on this column’s subject.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
New Judge, New Trial Dates Coming Up, but Still No Guarantee of Trials for Kott and Kohring
Anchorage--
I'm engaged in pressing personal business that will limit my blogging for a few more days. Today's news is that the move of U.S. District Judge John Sedwick to senior status (semi-retirement) later this year has resulted in the transfer of the cases of former State Reps. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River) and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) to Judge Ralph Beistline.
None of the recent developments have shaken my belief that neither of those former lawmakers will be retried on the federal corruption charges which put them in prison before discovery problems produced the reversals of their convictions.
I'm been lax lately on the posting. To compensate, here's a copy of my column in this month's edition of the Alaska Bar Rag, the quarterly publication for the Last Frontier's lawyers:
What Does the Federal Probe into Public Corruption Mean for Alaska?
by Cliff Groh
(First of several installments)
Born in the Territory of Alaska in 1954, I grew up in a skinny Anchorage media environment in which there was no live TV until the first moon walk occurred when I was 15.
Reading newspapers and magazines as a boy in the 1960s, I noticed occasional stories of public corruption—of police on the take, government officials who accepted bribes—in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois. I really didn’t see that in Alaska, so I asked my father about it. He was a former President of the Alaska Bar Association who had served as both a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney; he had also been on the City Council, the Borough Assembly, and the School Board.
My father said “Well, son, there’s not enough money to steal.”
Back in the mid-1960s, Alaska was a young state with a thin economy. Although people on the Last Frontier felt poor, there was still some of that aura of idealism and optimism that remained from the excitement of achieving statehood in the late 1950s.
The announcement in 1968 of the discovery of a super-giant oilfield at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope brought billions and billions of dollars to Alaska, both to the private economy in paychecks and to the state government’s coffers in taxes and royalties on oil development.
The long-running federal investigation into Alaska public corruption has underscored some of the changes seen in the 49th State, and that probe has also caused some. Most of the cases produced by the federal investigation involved alleged efforts to influence public officials regarding the state’s taxes on oil development.
This probe electrified Alaskans. Think back to the wild days between the late summer of 2006 and the fall of 2008. In those 27 months, 11 people got charged with federal felonies. Those 11 included:
Ø legendary U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska);
Ø five state legislators (some of whom had left office)—State Sen. John Cowdery (R.-Anchorage) and State Reps. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage), Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau), Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River and a former Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives), and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla);
Ø Jim Clark, the chief of staff to former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski;
Ø Bill Allen, a political kingmaker who was the long-time CEO of the multinational oil-services giant VECO, a billion-dollar company;
Ø Bill Weimar, the multimillionaire former head of the private corrections corporation Allvest;
Ø Rick Smith, a VECO vice president who served as Allen’s chief political lieutenant; and
Ø Bill Bobrick, a prominent lobbyist working on municipal issues in the Municipality of Anchorage.
At the end of 2008, 10 of those 11 people had pleaded guilty or heard juries deliver guilty verdicts on all or almost all counts they faced. FBI surveillance tapes—many made at the VECO-rented Suite 604 in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel—greatly aided the prosecutors in their cases at trial. Alaskans were mesmerized by iconic images of Allen telling Kott “I own your ass” and Allen handing cash to Kohring, and many citizens were stunned by how little it seemed to take to get some public officials to sell their offices.
Long accustomed to serving either as a sugar daddy or a political punching bag on the Last Frontier, between late 2006 and late 2008 the feds seemed to be on a roll straightening out a mess in Alaska.
Back in 2008, those 11 defendants seemed very likely to increase by a lot. Multiple sources told Alaska journalist Bill McAllister that 26 people would be indicted in the federal investigation into public corruption in the state. Speculation on potential additional defendants centered on U.S. Rep. Don Young (R.-Alaska) (identified in media reports as being under investigation for alleged campaign fund-raising violations, among other things) and former State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) (whom federal prosecutors got Bill Allen and Rick Smith to say that they had bribed).
Code-named “POLAR PEN” (apparently for its origins in an examination into corruption regarding private prisons), this federal investigation has had big effects, both for people and for policy.
Eight defendants ultimately went to prison, and one served a sentence of home confinement. The executions of the search warrants on the offices of six state legislators beginning in August of 2006 helped fuel the gubernatorial campaign of insurgent Republican candidate Sarah Palin, already running on a platform of “I’m not one of the good old boys.” The oil tax legislation in 2006 that sent some lawmakers to prison was amended the next year to increase taxes substantially on the oil companies after the first indictments frightened some legislators into avoiding even the appearance of being in the pocket of the petroleum industry.
And after almost 40 years in the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens got defeated for re-election in November of 2008 eight days after a jury returned guilty verdicts on seven felony counts of failing to disclose gifts on U.S. Senate forms. At the Senator’s insistence, the trial started only 55 days after the indictment instead of eight months or so later as would normally have occurred in this kind of case. Given the small margin in the voting, it’s clear that Stevens would have been re-elected if the trial had either not started or still been in progress on election day.
But now—about eight years after the investigation started—it’s all different. The POLAR PEN probe has fizzled out in ways that are both surprising and disappointing.
The case against Ted Stevens collapsed in the wake of revelations of prosecutors’ substantial failures to share evidence with the defense; the seven guilty verdicts got overturned, and Attorney General Eric Holder elected not to seek a retrial. The meltdown of the Ted Stevens case led to the federal government finding discovery failures in the cases against former Reps. Kott and Kohring, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed their convictions. (Although as of this writing the federal government could retry Kott and Kohring, I predict that this will never happen. Note that this forecast comes from the same analyst who confidently predicted that Ted Stevens would never testify in his own defense.)
Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that substantially narrowed the scope of the honest-services fraud statute—a law that provided a favorite arrow in the quiver of federal prosecutors—the Department of Justice dismissed the federal felony charges against Weyhrauch and let him plead guilty to a unique state misdemeanor that resulted in no jail time. (Weyhrauch’s lawyers have also gotten permission from the U.S. District Court to forward to the Alaska Bar Association evidence that they allege shows “serious misconduct by government prosecutors appearing before the grand jury,” including the suborning of perjury.) Clark was also allowed to withdraw his guilty plea in the wake of that Supreme Court decision.
The prosecutors charged a 12th defendant in 2009—former State Rep. Beverly Masek (R.-Willow)—who pleaded guilty and served a prison sentence, but she is clearly the last defendant in the POLAR PEN probe.
It is the probers who are now on the griddle. The federal government is conducting two probes of the conduct of the prosecutors and investigators who worked on the federal government’s investigation of Alaska public corruption. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit—the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)—is holding one of the two satellite probes; the other investigation is a highly unusual criminal probe run by a special counsel selected by the trial judge in the Ted Stevens case. Fingerpointing among various prosecutors over the discovery and handling of allegations against Bill Allen involving sexual abuse of minors appears to have contributed to the delays in wrapping up the two probes, which have each gone on for more than two years.
A story that seemed to start out with white hats and black hats has picked up a lot of shades of gray. The arc of some Alaskans’ feelings went from the bumper stickers of “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside” to “Thanks FBI for cleaning up Alaska”—now it’s more like “How could the feds foul this up?”
This is the first in a series of columns to examine the causes, effects, and significance of the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption. It will rely on my extensive experience in Alaska, which brings both knowledge of how the state works and a number of other associations that might be seen as conflicts of interest when writing about this subject. (The full list of disclosures can be found at my blog at http://alaskacorruption.blogspot.com/2011/05/even-more-updated-biography-with-still.html on the Internet.) There are some lessons here and some elemental human stories, and this series of columns will have some of both.
Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has worked as a prosecutor and represented some criminal defendants in his private practice. He maintains a blog on the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption at www.alaskacorruption.blogspot.com on the Internet. He is a lawyer and writer in Anchorage whose law practice focuses on the writing and revision of briefs and motions.
I'm engaged in pressing personal business that will limit my blogging for a few more days. Today's news is that the move of U.S. District Judge John Sedwick to senior status (semi-retirement) later this year has resulted in the transfer of the cases of former State Reps. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River) and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) to Judge Ralph Beistline.
None of the recent developments have shaken my belief that neither of those former lawmakers will be retried on the federal corruption charges which put them in prison before discovery problems produced the reversals of their convictions.
I'm been lax lately on the posting. To compensate, here's a copy of my column in this month's edition of the Alaska Bar Rag, the quarterly publication for the Last Frontier's lawyers:
What Does the Federal Probe into Public Corruption Mean for Alaska?
by Cliff Groh
(First of several installments)
Born in the Territory of Alaska in 1954, I grew up in a skinny Anchorage media environment in which there was no live TV until the first moon walk occurred when I was 15.
Reading newspapers and magazines as a boy in the 1960s, I noticed occasional stories of public corruption—of police on the take, government officials who accepted bribes—in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois. I really didn’t see that in Alaska, so I asked my father about it. He was a former President of the Alaska Bar Association who had served as both a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney; he had also been on the City Council, the Borough Assembly, and the School Board.
My father said “Well, son, there’s not enough money to steal.”
Back in the mid-1960s, Alaska was a young state with a thin economy. Although people on the Last Frontier felt poor, there was still some of that aura of idealism and optimism that remained from the excitement of achieving statehood in the late 1950s.
The announcement in 1968 of the discovery of a super-giant oilfield at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope brought billions and billions of dollars to Alaska, both to the private economy in paychecks and to the state government’s coffers in taxes and royalties on oil development.
The long-running federal investigation into Alaska public corruption has underscored some of the changes seen in the 49th State, and that probe has also caused some. Most of the cases produced by the federal investigation involved alleged efforts to influence public officials regarding the state’s taxes on oil development.
This probe electrified Alaskans. Think back to the wild days between the late summer of 2006 and the fall of 2008. In those 27 months, 11 people got charged with federal felonies. Those 11 included:
Ø legendary U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska);
Ø five state legislators (some of whom had left office)—State Sen. John Cowdery (R.-Anchorage) and State Reps. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage), Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau), Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River and a former Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives), and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla);
Ø Jim Clark, the chief of staff to former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski;
Ø Bill Allen, a political kingmaker who was the long-time CEO of the multinational oil-services giant VECO, a billion-dollar company;
Ø Bill Weimar, the multimillionaire former head of the private corrections corporation Allvest;
Ø Rick Smith, a VECO vice president who served as Allen’s chief political lieutenant; and
Ø Bill Bobrick, a prominent lobbyist working on municipal issues in the Municipality of Anchorage.
At the end of 2008, 10 of those 11 people had pleaded guilty or heard juries deliver guilty verdicts on all or almost all counts they faced. FBI surveillance tapes—many made at the VECO-rented Suite 604 in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel—greatly aided the prosecutors in their cases at trial. Alaskans were mesmerized by iconic images of Allen telling Kott “I own your ass” and Allen handing cash to Kohring, and many citizens were stunned by how little it seemed to take to get some public officials to sell their offices.
Long accustomed to serving either as a sugar daddy or a political punching bag on the Last Frontier, between late 2006 and late 2008 the feds seemed to be on a roll straightening out a mess in Alaska.
Back in 2008, those 11 defendants seemed very likely to increase by a lot. Multiple sources told Alaska journalist Bill McAllister that 26 people would be indicted in the federal investigation into public corruption in the state. Speculation on potential additional defendants centered on U.S. Rep. Don Young (R.-Alaska) (identified in media reports as being under investigation for alleged campaign fund-raising violations, among other things) and former State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) (whom federal prosecutors got Bill Allen and Rick Smith to say that they had bribed).
Code-named “POLAR PEN” (apparently for its origins in an examination into corruption regarding private prisons), this federal investigation has had big effects, both for people and for policy.
Eight defendants ultimately went to prison, and one served a sentence of home confinement. The executions of the search warrants on the offices of six state legislators beginning in August of 2006 helped fuel the gubernatorial campaign of insurgent Republican candidate Sarah Palin, already running on a platform of “I’m not one of the good old boys.” The oil tax legislation in 2006 that sent some lawmakers to prison was amended the next year to increase taxes substantially on the oil companies after the first indictments frightened some legislators into avoiding even the appearance of being in the pocket of the petroleum industry.
And after almost 40 years in the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens got defeated for re-election in November of 2008 eight days after a jury returned guilty verdicts on seven felony counts of failing to disclose gifts on U.S. Senate forms. At the Senator’s insistence, the trial started only 55 days after the indictment instead of eight months or so later as would normally have occurred in this kind of case. Given the small margin in the voting, it’s clear that Stevens would have been re-elected if the trial had either not started or still been in progress on election day.
But now—about eight years after the investigation started—it’s all different. The POLAR PEN probe has fizzled out in ways that are both surprising and disappointing.
The case against Ted Stevens collapsed in the wake of revelations of prosecutors’ substantial failures to share evidence with the defense; the seven guilty verdicts got overturned, and Attorney General Eric Holder elected not to seek a retrial. The meltdown of the Ted Stevens case led to the federal government finding discovery failures in the cases against former Reps. Kott and Kohring, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed their convictions. (Although as of this writing the federal government could retry Kott and Kohring, I predict that this will never happen. Note that this forecast comes from the same analyst who confidently predicted that Ted Stevens would never testify in his own defense.)
Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that substantially narrowed the scope of the honest-services fraud statute—a law that provided a favorite arrow in the quiver of federal prosecutors—the Department of Justice dismissed the federal felony charges against Weyhrauch and let him plead guilty to a unique state misdemeanor that resulted in no jail time. (Weyhrauch’s lawyers have also gotten permission from the U.S. District Court to forward to the Alaska Bar Association evidence that they allege shows “serious misconduct by government prosecutors appearing before the grand jury,” including the suborning of perjury.) Clark was also allowed to withdraw his guilty plea in the wake of that Supreme Court decision.
The prosecutors charged a 12th defendant in 2009—former State Rep. Beverly Masek (R.-Willow)—who pleaded guilty and served a prison sentence, but she is clearly the last defendant in the POLAR PEN probe.
It is the probers who are now on the griddle. The federal government is conducting two probes of the conduct of the prosecutors and investigators who worked on the federal government’s investigation of Alaska public corruption. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit—the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)—is holding one of the two satellite probes; the other investigation is a highly unusual criminal probe run by a special counsel selected by the trial judge in the Ted Stevens case. Fingerpointing among various prosecutors over the discovery and handling of allegations against Bill Allen involving sexual abuse of minors appears to have contributed to the delays in wrapping up the two probes, which have each gone on for more than two years.
A story that seemed to start out with white hats and black hats has picked up a lot of shades of gray. The arc of some Alaskans’ feelings went from the bumper stickers of “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside” to “Thanks FBI for cleaning up Alaska”—now it’s more like “How could the feds foul this up?”
This is the first in a series of columns to examine the causes, effects, and significance of the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption. It will rely on my extensive experience in Alaska, which brings both knowledge of how the state works and a number of other associations that might be seen as conflicts of interest when writing about this subject. (The full list of disclosures can be found at my blog at http://alaskacorruption.blogspot.com/2011/05/even-more-updated-biography-with-still.html on the Internet.) There are some lessons here and some elemental human stories, and this series of columns will have some of both.
Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has worked as a prosecutor and represented some criminal defendants in his private practice. He maintains a blog on the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption at www.alaskacorruption.blogspot.com on the Internet. He is a lawyer and writer in Anchorage whose law practice focuses on the writing and revision of briefs and motions.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Why Did the Department of Justice and Bruce Weyhrauch Agree to a Deal?
Anchorage--
After almost four years of litigation over four felony charges alleging public corruption, federal prosecutors and former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) agreed to a settlement of the case. The deal that was executed last week allowed the former legislator to plead guilty to a single state misdemeanor of knowingly allowing two unregistered lobbyists to lobby him when Weyhrauch was aware of a substantial probability that they were not registered. For this offense, a judge sentenced Weyhrauch Tuesday to a three-month suspended jail sentence and a $1,000 fine, and put him on a year of probation.
Weyhrauch’s case was the last of the cases arising out of the federal government’s POLAR PEN investigation into Alaska public corruption to be resolved at the trial court level. Why did the two sides come to this deal now?
Know right up front, dear reader, that Bruce Weyhrauch is the defendant in the POLAR PEN cases that I know the best. I have known him for about 30 years, and I have had numerous personal and professional contacts with him during that time. He and I have never spoken about this case, however, or had a conversation since his indictment in 2007. More on my experiences with Bruce Weyhrauch here.
Before this plea arrangement was announced and executed, I was planning to write a post on the things each side had going for it as the trial approached. That post now morphs into an analysis of the factors affecting the sides’ decision to make a deal. I’ll start with the background of the case before I discuss items favoring the prosecution, lay out what was good for the defense, set out the factors pressing each side for a pre-trial settlement, and end with some comments.
BACKGROUND
On May 3, 2007, the federal government filed a grand jury indictment of former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau). The indictment charged Weyhrauch with four felonies: extortion, bribery, honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit those other three crimes.
The context for the charges was the Alaska Legislature’s consideration of the Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) legislation in 2006, legislation that was heavily lobbied by Bill Allen and Rick Smith, executives of the giant oil-services corporation VECO. That company made substantial amounts of money through contracts with Alaska’s major oil producers, who would pay any higher taxes imposed by the State of Alaska.
The indictment alleged that Weyhrauch, an attorney and legislator first elected in 2002, agreed to help the VECO executives try to get their preferred version of oil tax legislation adopted in 2006 in return for a promise of future contract legal work.
Although it was originally scheduled to go to trial in September of 2007, the federal government delayed the case while making a pre-trial appeal of an evidentiary ruling from the trial court. The prosecution had announced that it wanted to argue that Weyhrauch was required to disclose his solicitation and discussions with VECO under a state statute providing that “A legislator may not…unless required by the Uniform Rules of the Alaska State Legislature, take…official action or exert official influence that could substantially benefit…the financial interest of another person with whom the legislator is negotiating for employment.” Under the prosecution’s theory, Weyhrauch was guilty of honest services fraud because he failed to disclose those discussions in violation of this law.
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick ruled that this law—AS 24.60.030(e)(3)—did not require disclosure, and prohibited the prosecution from presenting evidence or arguing to the jury that the law required the lawmaker to disclose his discussions with VECO executives about future contract work before taking official action regarding PPT legislation.
The Department of Justice apparently thought that this evidence was so important to its case against Weyhrauch that the prosecution held up the trial against him to pursue the appeal.
The case then sat on hold for almost three years as it wended its way through the courts. Bruce Weyhrauch’s name was then enshrined forever in the lawbooks when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in his case and two others in June of 2010. The Supreme Court ruled that the honest services fraud statute did not cover the kind of undisclosed self-dealing that the prosecution alleged Weyhrauch engaged in.
After a series of other delays, the case was scheduled to go to trial starting May 9, 2011 in Juneau. Both sides made moves to prepare for the trial.
Then on Friday, March 11, documents were filed in state court in Juneau showing that the parties had agreed to end the case by having Weyhrauch plead guilty to the very substantially reduced—and unprecedented—misdemeanor offense of “participating in, aiding, or abetting a lobbyist engaging in activity as a lobbyist without being registered.”
Weyhrauch pleaded guilty on Monday and was sentenced on Tuesday morning. Weyhrauch’s lawyer Doug Pope said despite the government’s “pathetically weak case,” the prosecution had put Weyhrauch and his family “through a special kind of living hell.” At the sentencing hearing, Weyhrauch’s attorney Ray Brown said that his client had “spent over $300,000 in defense cost.” State District Court Judge Keith Levy stressed the importance of being faithful to the public trust as a legislator in denying the defense request for a suspended imposition of sentence, an outcome that would have allowed Weyhrauch to get the conviction wiped off his record if he successfully completed probation.
As he left the courthouse, Weyhrauch told reporters that "No citizen of this country should have gone through what I've gone through -- what the federal government, they've done to me, they can do to anyone.” He added that "I look forward to a bright tomorrow and spending time with my family."
THINGS THE PROSECUTION HAD GOING FOR IT
1. Undisclosed angling for work from VECO. Bruce Weyrhauch solicited VECO for contract legal work and discussed with VECO executives possibilities for that work while he was a state legislator working on PPT legislation in 2006, and never disclosed the solicitation or the discussions.
2. Working with VECO on oil tax legislation in ways that are arguably suspicious. Weyhrauch also communicated with Allen and Smith in ways that helped those executives in the legislative process on the PPT bill. The ways that Weyhrauch apparently helped the VECO executives allegedly included switching his vote on an amendment to the legislation after the government said he received “instructions” to do so from Allen and State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River), a legislator working closely with Allen.
3. Crooked-appearing associates. Some of the people that Weyhrauch dealt with on the VECO legislation—including Allen, Smith, and Kott—look criminal and tawdry on tapes (including some videotapes) that the FBI made during its investigation into Alaska public corruption.
4. Other people’s comments suggesting Weyhrauch sold his office. In a telephone conversation captured by the FBI, Allen and State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) agreed that Weyhrauch came to support VECO’s preferred version of the PPT bill because Allen had told Weyhrauch that VECO would give him contract legal work in the future. In other conversations away from Weyhrauch, Allen and Smith also made other comments that explicitly or implicitly linked Weyhrauch’s support for the VECO-supported version of the legislation to Weyhrauch’s expectation of future legal work from VECO.
5. Weyhrauch’s tough financial situation. It was widely known in the Capitol that the lawmaker was pressed for money in 2006, as the solo practitioner struggled to support three children in a house that had been renovated. The indictment alleges that while meeting with Allen and Smith to discuss future legal work, Weyhrauch told Allen that he "was not doing well financially."
6. Bad optics over “This is our floor” speech. During legislative consideration of the PPT bill, Rep. Ethan Berkowitz (D.-Anchorage), the House Minority Leader, angrily denounced outside pressures on the process. “This is our floor. Our floor,” Berkowitz said in a clip that was widely replayed. “No telephone call is supposed to change what we’re doing. No lobbyist is supposed to peer over the ruling and tell us to change our mind.” Weyhrauch got up to object and assert that Berkowitz’s characterization was incorrect. Regardless of the reason(s) that Berkowitz made that speech, the prosecution might have suggested that Weyhrauch’s hasty objection represented consciousness of guilt.
______________________________________________________
The line above represents a division between things the prosecution could clearly have gotten before the jury (the points above that line) and things the government’s lawyers would have hoped they could get into evidence (the points below the line).
7. Alleged chiseling on per diem payments. The prosecution claimed that the lawmaker had repeatedly submitted “fraudulent” requests for payment for some legislative work compensated on a basis of time worked, apparently alleging that Weyhrauch had a pattern of seeking payment for work he did not perform. The trial judge prohibited the prosecution from introducing this evidence, but the government announced in pre-trial pleadings that it would be looking for other ways to get these allegations before the jury during the trial.
8. Other behavior in the legal arena that was arguably inappropriate. Weyhrauch took a fee from a company to seek executive clemency (often called a “pardon”) for a company that had been convicted of criminally negligent homicide. This representation for the firm Whitewater Engineering had Weyhrauch ask Governor Frank Murkowski to give this unusual relief, which Murkowski granted in the waning days of his administration. Although not prohibited by laws and rules then in effect regarding the conduct of lawyers and legislators, Weyhrauch’s conduct could be portrayed as evidence of poor judgment and a conflict of interest, as the Governor would clearly want Weyhrauch’s legislative assistance on other matters. Weyhrauch donated his legal fee from the company to a charity, apparently after the FBI’s search of the lawmaker’s office pursuant to a search warrant signaled that Weyhrauch was a target of the POLAR PEN federal investigation into Alaska public corruption.
9. Evidence suggesting that Weyhrauch should have known better. Before he became a legislator, Weyhrauch had been on the board of the Alaska Bar Association and had served as its President, positions in which he had participated in decisions about the imposition of professional discipline on other attorneys. Additionally, Weyhrauch—like Ben Stevens—served on the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics in 2005-2006.
THINGS THE DEFENSE HAD GOING FOR IT
1. No money changed hands. Weyhrauch got no money from VECO, and the government seemed to have no evidence that he linked any legislative assistance regarding VECO’s preferred version of the PPT bill to any future contract legal work from VECO.
2. Innocent explanations for Weyhrauch’s actions on oil tax legislation. The defense was prepared to present witnesses that Weyhrauch’s thinking about the PPT bill evolved for legitimate and non-corrupt reasons during 2006. Although the prosecution would have argued that a legislator can help a cause in ways other than voting on the floor—such as gathering intelligence and lobbying other lawmakers—the defense would have picked through the many votes legislators took on PPT bills during the regular session and two special sessions and pointed to at least one instance in which Weyhrauch had voted that year against VECO’s preferred position on the legislation.
3. Favorite arrow in prosecutor’s quiver blunted severely. The Supreme Court’s narrowing of the honest services fraud statute in 2010 took away a very important argument for the prosecution against Weyhrauch.
4. Shrunken government witness list. By 2011, the government’s witness list had gotten smaller, as the prosecution had indicated that it would not call Bill Allen to the stand. Additionally, the defense alleged that a lawyer for lead FBI agent Mary Beth Kepner had indicated that she would claim a Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination if called to testify at Weyhrauch’s trial.
5. Tape shortage. Tapes of incriminating behavior and statements had been critical in the conviction of a number of defendants in cases arising out of the federal investigation, and Weyhrauch doesn’t show up on truly damning tapes the way a number of other defendants have. Weyhrauch never went to Suite 604, the “Animal House” headquarters of Allen and Smith’s lobbying operation in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel that was the scene of tapes that made a number of defendants look both guilty and crude.
6. Shaky law on disclosure. The government never alleged that Weyhrauch’s solicitation of legal work from VECO violated the ethical rules applying to Alaska lawyers, and Weyhrauch and his defense claimed that he was acting within the letter and intent of state law and legislative guidelines when he solicited work from companies with business before the legislature without disclosing it. Weyhrauch had told other legislators that he had sent out numerous letters seeking work from potential clients, and he told the Anchorage Daily News that other companies he solicited had business before the legislature.
7. The Department of Justice in full retreat. Disclosures of failures in meeting responsibilities to provide evidence to the defense have led to the meltdown of the prosecution against U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and the release of former State Reps. Kott and Vic Kohring put the government’s investigation in a bad odor. Two probes into the prosecutors and the investigators in POLAR PEN have been going on for close to two years. Although touching on this sad and emotional subject could have been dangerous, the defense might have been looking for some way to get before the jury the suicide of former Department of Justice attorney and POLAR PEN point man Nicholas Marsh in an attempt to argue that he was trying to escape the consequences of his actions.
Weyhrauch’s defense attorneys had already filed a sealed document in federal court alleging “misconduct before the grand jury” that indicted him. Although we don’t know what would have come of that effort, the Department of Justice might have seen the continuation of litigation in the Weyhrauch case as another way unpleasant facts might have surfaced regarding the POLAR PEN prosecution.
With all these problems and concerns, the feds were looking to fold their tent. Letting Weyhrauch plead to a misdemeanor in state court was as close as the prosecutors could come to dumping the case without actually dismissing it. On the other hand, Weyhrauch’s plea to that misdemeanor stopped the meter running on his attorney bills, already over $300,000.
8. Home court advantage. By 2011, Weyhrauch’s lawyers had succeeded in getting the trial moved from Anchorage to Juneau, where at least some in the jury pool may have been exposed to positive information from the defendant’s political campaigns and extensive community service.
9. Minnow among the whales. One of the people the indictment alleges that Weyhrauch conspired with is former State Senate President Ben Stevens, who remains uncharged despite the federal government’s allegation that Bill Allen arranged to have VECO pay him more than $243,250 over five years for “giving advice, lobbying colleagues, and taking official acts in matters before the legislature.” Along with “Where’s Bill?,” another defense theme at a trial could be “Where’s Ben?”
10. Family man with good family. As his lawyers recognized, a jury might be affected by Weyhrauch’s three attractive children and his particularly nice wife.
An additional background factor playing into each side’s handling of the trial, particularly before a Juneau jury, would have been a mishap Weyhrauch experienced in his hometown nine days before he was indicted and arrested. Back in April of 2007, Weyhrauch was reported missing while alone in his small boat in the waters off of Juneau. He was found 17 hours later on an island with signs of hypothermia.
This unusual incident would likely only have come out openly in the trial if Weyhrauch had testified in his own defense. If he had taken the stand, he likely would have said the same things about the case that he told Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News after the sentencing. In the rules that govern Alaska’s citizen legislature, there is no duty to disclose solicitation of work from a company like VECO, Weyhrauch said. “Once you represent somebody you disclose it.” He also said that his busy schedule of work and family responsibilities kept him from learning that Allen and Smith were corrupt. He said that the grueling schedule had led him not to run for re-election in 2006, a decision his lawyers have said that he made before he solicited work from VECO.
EVALUATION
Some of Bruce Weyhrauch’s conduct as revealed in this case was troublesome, but that doesn’t mean that it merited criminal punishment under the law. In the words of close observer Mark Regan, the charges against this former legislator “have been disproportionate to the gravity of his alleged wrongdoing.” (If an instance of questionable judgment was grounds for prosecution if it disappointed an old friend, it’s not clear when I would ever get out of prison.)
Given the large number of lawmakers who dealt in 2006 with Bill Allen and Rick Smith, it is of course odd that Bruce Weyhrauch stands as almost certainly the only Alaska legislator who will ever be convicted of the crime the Associated Press characterized as "letting unregistered lobbyists peddle their ideas to him." A good lawyer like Weyhrauch of course knows that being odd does not mean illegal and that selective prosecution is definitely common in American law.
On a personal level, it was nice to see LuAnn Weyhrauch smile on the video the Anchorage Daily News posted showing her and her husband leaving the courthouse after the sentencing. Bruce Weyhrauch has a lot of things going for him as he puts this terrible experience behind him, as he is smart, hardworking, and fiercely loyal to his family and friends. There is of course a terrible irony in that it was Bruce Weyhrauch’s search for income to support his family that has led to a case that has cost him at least $300,000 as well as a long walk through hell. You have to wonder how much he regrets running in 2004 for his second term in the legislature, and you have to wonder how much he would paid some higher power in 2006 to avoid going through the ordeal of the last four years.
After almost four years of litigation over four felony charges alleging public corruption, federal prosecutors and former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) agreed to a settlement of the case. The deal that was executed last week allowed the former legislator to plead guilty to a single state misdemeanor of knowingly allowing two unregistered lobbyists to lobby him when Weyhrauch was aware of a substantial probability that they were not registered. For this offense, a judge sentenced Weyhrauch Tuesday to a three-month suspended jail sentence and a $1,000 fine, and put him on a year of probation.
Weyhrauch’s case was the last of the cases arising out of the federal government’s POLAR PEN investigation into Alaska public corruption to be resolved at the trial court level. Why did the two sides come to this deal now?
Know right up front, dear reader, that Bruce Weyhrauch is the defendant in the POLAR PEN cases that I know the best. I have known him for about 30 years, and I have had numerous personal and professional contacts with him during that time. He and I have never spoken about this case, however, or had a conversation since his indictment in 2007. More on my experiences with Bruce Weyhrauch here.
Before this plea arrangement was announced and executed, I was planning to write a post on the things each side had going for it as the trial approached. That post now morphs into an analysis of the factors affecting the sides’ decision to make a deal. I’ll start with the background of the case before I discuss items favoring the prosecution, lay out what was good for the defense, set out the factors pressing each side for a pre-trial settlement, and end with some comments.
BACKGROUND
On May 3, 2007, the federal government filed a grand jury indictment of former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau). The indictment charged Weyhrauch with four felonies: extortion, bribery, honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit those other three crimes.
The context for the charges was the Alaska Legislature’s consideration of the Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) legislation in 2006, legislation that was heavily lobbied by Bill Allen and Rick Smith, executives of the giant oil-services corporation VECO. That company made substantial amounts of money through contracts with Alaska’s major oil producers, who would pay any higher taxes imposed by the State of Alaska.
The indictment alleged that Weyhrauch, an attorney and legislator first elected in 2002, agreed to help the VECO executives try to get their preferred version of oil tax legislation adopted in 2006 in return for a promise of future contract legal work.
Although it was originally scheduled to go to trial in September of 2007, the federal government delayed the case while making a pre-trial appeal of an evidentiary ruling from the trial court. The prosecution had announced that it wanted to argue that Weyhrauch was required to disclose his solicitation and discussions with VECO under a state statute providing that “A legislator may not…unless required by the Uniform Rules of the Alaska State Legislature, take…official action or exert official influence that could substantially benefit…the financial interest of another person with whom the legislator is negotiating for employment.” Under the prosecution’s theory, Weyhrauch was guilty of honest services fraud because he failed to disclose those discussions in violation of this law.
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick ruled that this law—AS 24.60.030(e)(3)—did not require disclosure, and prohibited the prosecution from presenting evidence or arguing to the jury that the law required the lawmaker to disclose his discussions with VECO executives about future contract work before taking official action regarding PPT legislation.
The Department of Justice apparently thought that this evidence was so important to its case against Weyhrauch that the prosecution held up the trial against him to pursue the appeal.
The case then sat on hold for almost three years as it wended its way through the courts. Bruce Weyhrauch’s name was then enshrined forever in the lawbooks when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in his case and two others in June of 2010. The Supreme Court ruled that the honest services fraud statute did not cover the kind of undisclosed self-dealing that the prosecution alleged Weyhrauch engaged in.
After a series of other delays, the case was scheduled to go to trial starting May 9, 2011 in Juneau. Both sides made moves to prepare for the trial.
Then on Friday, March 11, documents were filed in state court in Juneau showing that the parties had agreed to end the case by having Weyhrauch plead guilty to the very substantially reduced—and unprecedented—misdemeanor offense of “participating in, aiding, or abetting a lobbyist engaging in activity as a lobbyist without being registered.”
Weyhrauch pleaded guilty on Monday and was sentenced on Tuesday morning. Weyhrauch’s lawyer Doug Pope said despite the government’s “pathetically weak case,” the prosecution had put Weyhrauch and his family “through a special kind of living hell.” At the sentencing hearing, Weyhrauch’s attorney Ray Brown said that his client had “spent over $300,000 in defense cost.” State District Court Judge Keith Levy stressed the importance of being faithful to the public trust as a legislator in denying the defense request for a suspended imposition of sentence, an outcome that would have allowed Weyhrauch to get the conviction wiped off his record if he successfully completed probation.
As he left the courthouse, Weyhrauch told reporters that "No citizen of this country should have gone through what I've gone through -- what the federal government, they've done to me, they can do to anyone.” He added that "I look forward to a bright tomorrow and spending time with my family."
THINGS THE PROSECUTION HAD GOING FOR IT
1. Undisclosed angling for work from VECO. Bruce Weyrhauch solicited VECO for contract legal work and discussed with VECO executives possibilities for that work while he was a state legislator working on PPT legislation in 2006, and never disclosed the solicitation or the discussions.
2. Working with VECO on oil tax legislation in ways that are arguably suspicious. Weyhrauch also communicated with Allen and Smith in ways that helped those executives in the legislative process on the PPT bill. The ways that Weyhrauch apparently helped the VECO executives allegedly included switching his vote on an amendment to the legislation after the government said he received “instructions” to do so from Allen and State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River), a legislator working closely with Allen.
3. Crooked-appearing associates. Some of the people that Weyhrauch dealt with on the VECO legislation—including Allen, Smith, and Kott—look criminal and tawdry on tapes (including some videotapes) that the FBI made during its investigation into Alaska public corruption.
4. Other people’s comments suggesting Weyhrauch sold his office. In a telephone conversation captured by the FBI, Allen and State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) agreed that Weyhrauch came to support VECO’s preferred version of the PPT bill because Allen had told Weyhrauch that VECO would give him contract legal work in the future. In other conversations away from Weyhrauch, Allen and Smith also made other comments that explicitly or implicitly linked Weyhrauch’s support for the VECO-supported version of the legislation to Weyhrauch’s expectation of future legal work from VECO.
5. Weyhrauch’s tough financial situation. It was widely known in the Capitol that the lawmaker was pressed for money in 2006, as the solo practitioner struggled to support three children in a house that had been renovated. The indictment alleges that while meeting with Allen and Smith to discuss future legal work, Weyhrauch told Allen that he "was not doing well financially."
6. Bad optics over “This is our floor” speech. During legislative consideration of the PPT bill, Rep. Ethan Berkowitz (D.-Anchorage), the House Minority Leader, angrily denounced outside pressures on the process. “This is our floor. Our floor,” Berkowitz said in a clip that was widely replayed. “No telephone call is supposed to change what we’re doing. No lobbyist is supposed to peer over the ruling and tell us to change our mind.” Weyhrauch got up to object and assert that Berkowitz’s characterization was incorrect. Regardless of the reason(s) that Berkowitz made that speech, the prosecution might have suggested that Weyhrauch’s hasty objection represented consciousness of guilt.
______________________________________________________
The line above represents a division between things the prosecution could clearly have gotten before the jury (the points above that line) and things the government’s lawyers would have hoped they could get into evidence (the points below the line).
7. Alleged chiseling on per diem payments. The prosecution claimed that the lawmaker had repeatedly submitted “fraudulent” requests for payment for some legislative work compensated on a basis of time worked, apparently alleging that Weyhrauch had a pattern of seeking payment for work he did not perform. The trial judge prohibited the prosecution from introducing this evidence, but the government announced in pre-trial pleadings that it would be looking for other ways to get these allegations before the jury during the trial.
8. Other behavior in the legal arena that was arguably inappropriate. Weyhrauch took a fee from a company to seek executive clemency (often called a “pardon”) for a company that had been convicted of criminally negligent homicide. This representation for the firm Whitewater Engineering had Weyhrauch ask Governor Frank Murkowski to give this unusual relief, which Murkowski granted in the waning days of his administration. Although not prohibited by laws and rules then in effect regarding the conduct of lawyers and legislators, Weyhrauch’s conduct could be portrayed as evidence of poor judgment and a conflict of interest, as the Governor would clearly want Weyhrauch’s legislative assistance on other matters. Weyhrauch donated his legal fee from the company to a charity, apparently after the FBI’s search of the lawmaker’s office pursuant to a search warrant signaled that Weyhrauch was a target of the POLAR PEN federal investigation into Alaska public corruption.
9. Evidence suggesting that Weyhrauch should have known better. Before he became a legislator, Weyhrauch had been on the board of the Alaska Bar Association and had served as its President, positions in which he had participated in decisions about the imposition of professional discipline on other attorneys. Additionally, Weyhrauch—like Ben Stevens—served on the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics in 2005-2006.
THINGS THE DEFENSE HAD GOING FOR IT
1. No money changed hands. Weyhrauch got no money from VECO, and the government seemed to have no evidence that he linked any legislative assistance regarding VECO’s preferred version of the PPT bill to any future contract legal work from VECO.
2. Innocent explanations for Weyhrauch’s actions on oil tax legislation. The defense was prepared to present witnesses that Weyhrauch’s thinking about the PPT bill evolved for legitimate and non-corrupt reasons during 2006. Although the prosecution would have argued that a legislator can help a cause in ways other than voting on the floor—such as gathering intelligence and lobbying other lawmakers—the defense would have picked through the many votes legislators took on PPT bills during the regular session and two special sessions and pointed to at least one instance in which Weyhrauch had voted that year against VECO’s preferred position on the legislation.
3. Favorite arrow in prosecutor’s quiver blunted severely. The Supreme Court’s narrowing of the honest services fraud statute in 2010 took away a very important argument for the prosecution against Weyhrauch.
4. Shrunken government witness list. By 2011, the government’s witness list had gotten smaller, as the prosecution had indicated that it would not call Bill Allen to the stand. Additionally, the defense alleged that a lawyer for lead FBI agent Mary Beth Kepner had indicated that she would claim a Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination if called to testify at Weyhrauch’s trial.
5. Tape shortage. Tapes of incriminating behavior and statements had been critical in the conviction of a number of defendants in cases arising out of the federal investigation, and Weyhrauch doesn’t show up on truly damning tapes the way a number of other defendants have. Weyhrauch never went to Suite 604, the “Animal House” headquarters of Allen and Smith’s lobbying operation in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel that was the scene of tapes that made a number of defendants look both guilty and crude.
6. Shaky law on disclosure. The government never alleged that Weyhrauch’s solicitation of legal work from VECO violated the ethical rules applying to Alaska lawyers, and Weyhrauch and his defense claimed that he was acting within the letter and intent of state law and legislative guidelines when he solicited work from companies with business before the legislature without disclosing it. Weyhrauch had told other legislators that he had sent out numerous letters seeking work from potential clients, and he told the Anchorage Daily News that other companies he solicited had business before the legislature.
7. The Department of Justice in full retreat. Disclosures of failures in meeting responsibilities to provide evidence to the defense have led to the meltdown of the prosecution against U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and the release of former State Reps. Kott and Vic Kohring put the government’s investigation in a bad odor. Two probes into the prosecutors and the investigators in POLAR PEN have been going on for close to two years. Although touching on this sad and emotional subject could have been dangerous, the defense might have been looking for some way to get before the jury the suicide of former Department of Justice attorney and POLAR PEN point man Nicholas Marsh in an attempt to argue that he was trying to escape the consequences of his actions.
Weyhrauch’s defense attorneys had already filed a sealed document in federal court alleging “misconduct before the grand jury” that indicted him. Although we don’t know what would have come of that effort, the Department of Justice might have seen the continuation of litigation in the Weyhrauch case as another way unpleasant facts might have surfaced regarding the POLAR PEN prosecution.
With all these problems and concerns, the feds were looking to fold their tent. Letting Weyhrauch plead to a misdemeanor in state court was as close as the prosecutors could come to dumping the case without actually dismissing it. On the other hand, Weyhrauch’s plea to that misdemeanor stopped the meter running on his attorney bills, already over $300,000.
8. Home court advantage. By 2011, Weyhrauch’s lawyers had succeeded in getting the trial moved from Anchorage to Juneau, where at least some in the jury pool may have been exposed to positive information from the defendant’s political campaigns and extensive community service.
9. Minnow among the whales. One of the people the indictment alleges that Weyhrauch conspired with is former State Senate President Ben Stevens, who remains uncharged despite the federal government’s allegation that Bill Allen arranged to have VECO pay him more than $243,250 over five years for “giving advice, lobbying colleagues, and taking official acts in matters before the legislature.” Along with “Where’s Bill?,” another defense theme at a trial could be “Where’s Ben?”
10. Family man with good family. As his lawyers recognized, a jury might be affected by Weyhrauch’s three attractive children and his particularly nice wife.
An additional background factor playing into each side’s handling of the trial, particularly before a Juneau jury, would have been a mishap Weyhrauch experienced in his hometown nine days before he was indicted and arrested. Back in April of 2007, Weyhrauch was reported missing while alone in his small boat in the waters off of Juneau. He was found 17 hours later on an island with signs of hypothermia.
This unusual incident would likely only have come out openly in the trial if Weyhrauch had testified in his own defense. If he had taken the stand, he likely would have said the same things about the case that he told Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News after the sentencing. In the rules that govern Alaska’s citizen legislature, there is no duty to disclose solicitation of work from a company like VECO, Weyhrauch said. “Once you represent somebody you disclose it.” He also said that his busy schedule of work and family responsibilities kept him from learning that Allen and Smith were corrupt. He said that the grueling schedule had led him not to run for re-election in 2006, a decision his lawyers have said that he made before he solicited work from VECO.
EVALUATION
Some of Bruce Weyhrauch’s conduct as revealed in this case was troublesome, but that doesn’t mean that it merited criminal punishment under the law. In the words of close observer Mark Regan, the charges against this former legislator “have been disproportionate to the gravity of his alleged wrongdoing.” (If an instance of questionable judgment was grounds for prosecution if it disappointed an old friend, it’s not clear when I would ever get out of prison.)
Given the large number of lawmakers who dealt in 2006 with Bill Allen and Rick Smith, it is of course odd that Bruce Weyhrauch stands as almost certainly the only Alaska legislator who will ever be convicted of the crime the Associated Press characterized as "letting unregistered lobbyists peddle their ideas to him." A good lawyer like Weyhrauch of course knows that being odd does not mean illegal and that selective prosecution is definitely common in American law.
On a personal level, it was nice to see LuAnn Weyhrauch smile on the video the Anchorage Daily News posted showing her and her husband leaving the courthouse after the sentencing. Bruce Weyhrauch has a lot of things going for him as he puts this terrible experience behind him, as he is smart, hardworking, and fiercely loyal to his family and friends. There is of course a terrible irony in that it was Bruce Weyhrauch’s search for income to support his family that has led to a case that has cost him at least $300,000 as well as a long walk through hell. You have to wonder how much he regrets running in 2004 for his second term in the legislature, and you have to wonder how much he would paid some higher power in 2006 to avoid going through the ordeal of the last four years.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The Bare Record of the Federal Probe into Alaska Public Corruption
Anchorage--
With the substantial misinformation on this topic floating around the Internet, it seems useful to lay out the record on the federal investigation into public corruption in Alaska. Twelve people have been charged--nine for crimes associated with the defunct multinational oilfield-services corporation VECO, and three for crimes associated with efforts regarding private corrections facilities.
Of the nine people charged with crimes associated with VECO, six people stand convicted today while three other cases ran off the rails. The convictions against one of those six--ex-State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River)--looks shaky on appeal, however, and the conviction of another of the six--ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau)--was for a unique state misdemeanor instead of the four felony charges that the federal government originally laid against him.
Of the three people charged with crimes associated with private prisons, all three cases resulted in federal felony convictions that will stay in place.
Here's a graphic showing the current status of the cases, in this blog's characteristically unflashy style:
Individual / Role / Crimes charged / Sentence of custody after resolution of case / Legal status as of 19 March 2011
Ted Stevens / U.S. Sen. / Deliberate failure to report on Senate disclosure forms gifts and/or liabilities, primarily associated with VECO and/or its long-time CEO Bill Allen / Never sentenced after jury verdicts of guilty set aside following revelations of prosecutorial misconduct / Free until death in August of 2010
Pete Kott / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / Six years after jury verdicts of guilty / Free while courts sort out allegations of prosecutorial misconduct (case currently in Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Vic Kohring / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / 3.5 years after jury verdicts of guilty / Convictions overturned by Ninth Circuit based on prosecutors' failures to turn over evidence to the defense; no decision announced by Department of Justice on re-trial
Tom Anderson / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding private prisons / Five years after jury verdicts of guilty / Released from prison to halfway house in February of 2011
Beverly Masek / State Rep. / Conspiracy to take bribes from Bill Allen and a relative regarding oil tax legislation / Six months in prison after guilty plea / Out of prison
Bruce Weyhrauch / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / Three-month suspended sentence following guilty plea to state misdemeanor of knowingly dealing with unregistered lobbyists in return for dismissal of felony charges / Free on probation
John Cowdery / State Sen. / Conspiracy with Bill Allen to bribe another legislator regarding PPT oil tax legislation / Six months of home confinement pursuant to guilty plea / Free after end of sentence
Jim Clark / Chief of Staff to Governor Frank Murkowski / Conspiracy to commit honest services fraud by taking illegal campaign contribution from VECO for Frank Murkowski’s gubernatorial re-election campaign / Allowed to withdraw guilty plea to charge after U.S. Supreme Court cut back on scope of statute making honest services fraud a crime / Free
Bill Allen / Chairman (former CEO) of VECO and Power Broker / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 as well as tax violations / Three years after guilty pleas / In prison
Rick Smith / Vice President of VECO and Political Lieutenant of Bill Allen / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 as well as tax violations / 21 months after guilty pleas / In prison
Bill Weimar / Power Broker and Private Corrections Magnate / Conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and structuring transactions regarding campaign contribution to legislative candidate whom Weimar believed would support Weimar's efforts regarding private prisons / Six months in prison and six months of home confinement after guilty pleas / Discharged from this sentence, but now charged with felony child sexual abuse in Florida
Bill Bobrick / Lobbyist / Conspiracy to commit extortion, bribery, and money laundering in conjunction with efforts regarding private corrections facilities / Five months in prison and five months in home confinement after guilty pleas / Free after serving sentence
With the substantial misinformation on this topic floating around the Internet, it seems useful to lay out the record on the federal investigation into public corruption in Alaska. Twelve people have been charged--nine for crimes associated with the defunct multinational oilfield-services corporation VECO, and three for crimes associated with efforts regarding private corrections facilities.
Of the nine people charged with crimes associated with VECO, six people stand convicted today while three other cases ran off the rails. The convictions against one of those six--ex-State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River)--looks shaky on appeal, however, and the conviction of another of the six--ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau)--was for a unique state misdemeanor instead of the four felony charges that the federal government originally laid against him.
Of the three people charged with crimes associated with private prisons, all three cases resulted in federal felony convictions that will stay in place.
Here's a graphic showing the current status of the cases, in this blog's characteristically unflashy style:
Individual / Role / Crimes charged / Sentence of custody after resolution of case / Legal status as of 19 March 2011
Ted Stevens / U.S. Sen. / Deliberate failure to report on Senate disclosure forms gifts and/or liabilities, primarily associated with VECO and/or its long-time CEO Bill Allen / Never sentenced after jury verdicts of guilty set aside following revelations of prosecutorial misconduct / Free until death in August of 2010
Pete Kott / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / Six years after jury verdicts of guilty / Free while courts sort out allegations of prosecutorial misconduct (case currently in Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Vic Kohring / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / 3.5 years after jury verdicts of guilty / Convictions overturned by Ninth Circuit based on prosecutors' failures to turn over evidence to the defense; no decision announced by Department of Justice on re-trial
Tom Anderson / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding private prisons / Five years after jury verdicts of guilty / Released from prison to halfway house in February of 2011
Beverly Masek / State Rep. / Conspiracy to take bribes from Bill Allen and a relative regarding oil tax legislation / Six months in prison after guilty plea / Out of prison
Bruce Weyhrauch / State Rep. / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 / Three-month suspended sentence following guilty plea to state misdemeanor of knowingly dealing with unregistered lobbyists in return for dismissal of felony charges / Free on probation
John Cowdery / State Sen. / Conspiracy with Bill Allen to bribe another legislator regarding PPT oil tax legislation / Six months of home confinement pursuant to guilty plea / Free after end of sentence
Jim Clark / Chief of Staff to Governor Frank Murkowski / Conspiracy to commit honest services fraud by taking illegal campaign contribution from VECO for Frank Murkowski’s gubernatorial re-election campaign / Allowed to withdraw guilty plea to charge after U.S. Supreme Court cut back on scope of statute making honest services fraud a crime / Free
Bill Allen / Chairman (former CEO) of VECO and Power Broker / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 as well as tax violations / Three years after guilty pleas / In prison
Rick Smith / Vice President of VECO and Political Lieutenant of Bill Allen / Crimes associated with corruption regarding Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) oil tax legislation in 2006 as well as tax violations / 21 months after guilty pleas / In prison
Bill Weimar / Power Broker and Private Corrections Magnate / Conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and structuring transactions regarding campaign contribution to legislative candidate whom Weimar believed would support Weimar's efforts regarding private prisons / Six months in prison and six months of home confinement after guilty pleas / Discharged from this sentence, but now charged with felony child sexual abuse in Florida
Bill Bobrick / Lobbyist / Conspiracy to commit extortion, bribery, and money laundering in conjunction with efforts regarding private corrections facilities / Five months in prison and five months in home confinement after guilty pleas / Free after serving sentence
Monday, March 14, 2011
Feds Blink and Give Bruce Weyhrauch a Misdemeanor in Plea Deal, Anchorage Daily News Reports
Anchorage--
Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News has the scoop: The federal government has agreed to drop four felony counts--including bribery, extortion, and conspiracy--against ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) in return for the former lawmaker pleading guilty in state court to dealing with VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith when Weyhrauch should have known they were unregistered lobbyists.
I'll have more when this agreement when it appears on the official federal court Website (apparently later today), but there are some important points now:
1. This is a major climb-down by the Department of Justice. Weyhrauch faces a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $1,000 fine under the misdemeanor conviction, and he will almost certainly avoid jailtime and keep his license to practice law.
2. The feds' retreat appears to be close to total in the POLAR PEN probe into Alaska public corruption. Mauer notes that the document was signed and filed in federal court Friday, the same day that a federal appeals court threw out the convictions of former State Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) and ordered a new trial.
3. By dropping the felony case against Weyhrauch and agreeing to give him a misdemeanor, the Department of Justice is closing the door on more discovery into ugly matters likely to be embarrassing to the federal government. As of this moment, the last document filed on the federal courts' website in this case is a court order directing the prosecution to respond to a broad defense request for more information, including copies of any law enforcement reports of Bill Allen invoking his Fifth Amendment rights not to answer questions about Allen's involvement in "sex with underage women or sex trafficking."
4. In response to Mauer's question regarding whether the State of Alaska will now investigate any of the many other legislators who were actively lobbied by unregistered lobbyists Bill Allen and Rick Smith on oil tax legislation in 2006, all signs point to "No."
(Disclosure: I have had numerous personal and professional contacts with Bruce Weyhrauch between 1981 and 2005, but he and I have never discussed his case or spoken since his indictment in 2007.)
Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News has the scoop: The federal government has agreed to drop four felony counts--including bribery, extortion, and conspiracy--against ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) in return for the former lawmaker pleading guilty in state court to dealing with VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith when Weyhrauch should have known they were unregistered lobbyists.
I'll have more when this agreement when it appears on the official federal court Website (apparently later today), but there are some important points now:
1. This is a major climb-down by the Department of Justice. Weyhrauch faces a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $1,000 fine under the misdemeanor conviction, and he will almost certainly avoid jailtime and keep his license to practice law.
2. The feds' retreat appears to be close to total in the POLAR PEN probe into Alaska public corruption. Mauer notes that the document was signed and filed in federal court Friday, the same day that a federal appeals court threw out the convictions of former State Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) and ordered a new trial.
3. By dropping the felony case against Weyhrauch and agreeing to give him a misdemeanor, the Department of Justice is closing the door on more discovery into ugly matters likely to be embarrassing to the federal government. As of this moment, the last document filed on the federal courts' website in this case is a court order directing the prosecution to respond to a broad defense request for more information, including copies of any law enforcement reports of Bill Allen invoking his Fifth Amendment rights not to answer questions about Allen's involvement in "sex with underage women or sex trafficking."
4. In response to Mauer's question regarding whether the State of Alaska will now investigate any of the many other legislators who were actively lobbied by unregistered lobbyists Bill Allen and Rick Smith on oil tax legislation in 2006, all signs point to "No."
(Disclosure: I have had numerous personal and professional contacts with Bruce Weyhrauch between 1981 and 2005, but he and I have never discussed his case or spoken since his indictment in 2007.)
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Why Wasn't the Tape Enough to Convict Vic Kohring?
Anchorage—
A commenter made the same point that I heard repeatedly Friday.
Why wasn’t the tape alone enough to convict Vic Kohring?
I deleted the comment because it included an obscenity (let’s keep it clean on this family site), but I want to answer the question.
The tape in question is a videotape the FBI made in the infamous Suite 604 of Juneau’s Baranof Hotel on March 30, 2006. It shows then-State Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) with long-time VECO CEO Bill Allen and his political lieutenant Rick Smith.
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick thought the tape alone was enough to convict Kohring, and a number of other Alaskans do as well. As the former legislator’s hometown newspaper editorialized about what is shown on the tape, “If that’s not a bribe, we need to redefine the term.”
You can look at the tape here—it’s less than 21 minutes long. It does make Vic Kohring look bad.
In the tape, the legislator is sitting in the hotel suite Allen and Smith are using as the
headquarters for their lobbying campaign on the oil tax legislation known as the Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) bill. Kohring asks Allen and Smith for help paying off a delinquent $17,000 credit card bill. Near the tape’s end, Kohring takes some cash from Allen—ostensibly so that Kohring can put it in a gift to his daughter with Easter eggs—and then almost immediately asks how he, the legislator, can help the oil-services tycoon get the Legislature to pass Allen’s preferred version of the oil tax bill.
Judge Sedwick said back in August that in his analysis the only conduct the jury convicted Kohring of was the solicitation of Allen for help in paying off the lawmaker’s credit card bill while the Alaska Legislature was considering the oil tax legislation that Allen was lobbying so heavily on. After seeing the tape during the trial in 2007 and reviewing it again during the appeal, Judge Sedwick concluded that the tape alone was enough to convict Kohring of a corrupt solicitation.
The key sentence in Judge Sedwick’s decision was this: “The court cannot bend or warp its understanding of the videotape into a shape that raises any reasonable probability that Kohring would not have been convicted on [the count that charged him with attempted extortion] by any jury which saw the videotape and contemplated what it saw in the context of Allen’s mission in Juneau and the inescapable inference from the evidence as a whole that Kohring understood and was willing to help with Allen’s corrupt mission.”
Essentially, Judge Sedwick was conducting a thought experiment. He was saying that even if you imagine that Bill Allen did not testify, looking at that videotape in conjunction with other evidence presented by the prosecution left “Guilty” as the only verdict on the attempted extortion charge and two other related charges.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looked at it differently, however, in the decision issued Friday reversing Judge Sedwick and ordering a new trial for Kohring. The Court of Appeals announced that the jury might have convicted Kohring based on the several cash payments Allen made to the legislator and noted that Allen did in fact testify at the trial. Based on its analysis, the Court of Appeals declared that evidence about Allen’s views of the purposes and effect of those payments and evidence that could shed light on Allen’s motivations for testifying as he did both became highly relevant. Thus both kinds of evidence, said the Court of Appeals, should have been turned over to the defense by the prosecution before trial. Since that didn’t happen, the convictions were reversed and Kohring would get a new trial.
Evidence that was particularly important to be disclosed to the defense, according to the Court of Appeals, was evidence of Allen’s “past conduct” in terms of alleged sexual relations with minors. The defense was entitled to present to the jury evidence that Allen might be tempted to shade his testimony to help him escape prosecution for sexual offenses, said the Court of Appeals, as well as use that evidence to question him in ways that would suggest that Allen was a liar. As the Court of Appeals noted, “Evidence that Allen attempted to suborn perjurious testimony from one of the minors and attempted to make another unavailable for a trial would have been highly probative of his ‘character for truthfulness.’”
The Court of Appeals stated that “Indeed, if the evidence of Allen’s past conduct had been disclosed, there is a reasonable probability that the withheld evidence would have altered at least one juror’s assessment regarding Allen’s testimony against Kohring.” (Internal quotation marks are omitted.) The Court of Appeals is suggesting here that if the prosecution had provided the defense the evidence regarding Allen’s past conduct, the result would have been a hung jury instead of a conviction.
So for the Court of Appeals, the tape didn’t trump—the fear of prosecution over sexual offenses and the alleged attempted cover-ups did. But we may get a chance to see Judge Sedwick’s apparent thought experiment of “Imagine if Bill Allen never testified at Vic Kohring’s trial” become a reality. Now that the convictions have been overturned in what one defense attorney has labeled “the Vic Kohring Catastrophe,” the federal government needs to decide whether it will re-try the former lawmaker. In a trial of Kohring’s former colleague ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) on corruption charges involving the oil tax debate in 2006—a trial set to start May 9—the prosecution has announced it does not plan to call Allen, now imprisoned on convictions for bribery, conspiracy, and tax violations. Will the Department of Justice take the same “No Bill on the stand” approach in a re-trial of Vic Kohring?
(Disclosure: I have had both personal and professional contacts with Bruce Weyhrauch, but I have never discussed this case with him and we have not had a conversation since his indictment in 2007.)
A commenter made the same point that I heard repeatedly Friday.
Why wasn’t the tape alone enough to convict Vic Kohring?
I deleted the comment because it included an obscenity (let’s keep it clean on this family site), but I want to answer the question.
The tape in question is a videotape the FBI made in the infamous Suite 604 of Juneau’s Baranof Hotel on March 30, 2006. It shows then-State Rep. Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla) with long-time VECO CEO Bill Allen and his political lieutenant Rick Smith.
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick thought the tape alone was enough to convict Kohring, and a number of other Alaskans do as well. As the former legislator’s hometown newspaper editorialized about what is shown on the tape, “If that’s not a bribe, we need to redefine the term.”
You can look at the tape here—it’s less than 21 minutes long. It does make Vic Kohring look bad.
In the tape, the legislator is sitting in the hotel suite Allen and Smith are using as the
headquarters for their lobbying campaign on the oil tax legislation known as the Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) bill. Kohring asks Allen and Smith for help paying off a delinquent $17,000 credit card bill. Near the tape’s end, Kohring takes some cash from Allen—ostensibly so that Kohring can put it in a gift to his daughter with Easter eggs—and then almost immediately asks how he, the legislator, can help the oil-services tycoon get the Legislature to pass Allen’s preferred version of the oil tax bill.
Judge Sedwick said back in August that in his analysis the only conduct the jury convicted Kohring of was the solicitation of Allen for help in paying off the lawmaker’s credit card bill while the Alaska Legislature was considering the oil tax legislation that Allen was lobbying so heavily on. After seeing the tape during the trial in 2007 and reviewing it again during the appeal, Judge Sedwick concluded that the tape alone was enough to convict Kohring of a corrupt solicitation.
The key sentence in Judge Sedwick’s decision was this: “The court cannot bend or warp its understanding of the videotape into a shape that raises any reasonable probability that Kohring would not have been convicted on [the count that charged him with attempted extortion] by any jury which saw the videotape and contemplated what it saw in the context of Allen’s mission in Juneau and the inescapable inference from the evidence as a whole that Kohring understood and was willing to help with Allen’s corrupt mission.”
Essentially, Judge Sedwick was conducting a thought experiment. He was saying that even if you imagine that Bill Allen did not testify, looking at that videotape in conjunction with other evidence presented by the prosecution left “Guilty” as the only verdict on the attempted extortion charge and two other related charges.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looked at it differently, however, in the decision issued Friday reversing Judge Sedwick and ordering a new trial for Kohring. The Court of Appeals announced that the jury might have convicted Kohring based on the several cash payments Allen made to the legislator and noted that Allen did in fact testify at the trial. Based on its analysis, the Court of Appeals declared that evidence about Allen’s views of the purposes and effect of those payments and evidence that could shed light on Allen’s motivations for testifying as he did both became highly relevant. Thus both kinds of evidence, said the Court of Appeals, should have been turned over to the defense by the prosecution before trial. Since that didn’t happen, the convictions were reversed and Kohring would get a new trial.
Evidence that was particularly important to be disclosed to the defense, according to the Court of Appeals, was evidence of Allen’s “past conduct” in terms of alleged sexual relations with minors. The defense was entitled to present to the jury evidence that Allen might be tempted to shade his testimony to help him escape prosecution for sexual offenses, said the Court of Appeals, as well as use that evidence to question him in ways that would suggest that Allen was a liar. As the Court of Appeals noted, “Evidence that Allen attempted to suborn perjurious testimony from one of the minors and attempted to make another unavailable for a trial would have been highly probative of his ‘character for truthfulness.’”
The Court of Appeals stated that “Indeed, if the evidence of Allen’s past conduct had been disclosed, there is a reasonable probability that the withheld evidence would have altered at least one juror’s assessment regarding Allen’s testimony against Kohring.” (Internal quotation marks are omitted.) The Court of Appeals is suggesting here that if the prosecution had provided the defense the evidence regarding Allen’s past conduct, the result would have been a hung jury instead of a conviction.
So for the Court of Appeals, the tape didn’t trump—the fear of prosecution over sexual offenses and the alleged attempted cover-ups did. But we may get a chance to see Judge Sedwick’s apparent thought experiment of “Imagine if Bill Allen never testified at Vic Kohring’s trial” become a reality. Now that the convictions have been overturned in what one defense attorney has labeled “the Vic Kohring Catastrophe,” the federal government needs to decide whether it will re-try the former lawmaker. In a trial of Kohring’s former colleague ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) on corruption charges involving the oil tax debate in 2006—a trial set to start May 9—the prosecution has announced it does not plan to call Allen, now imprisoned on convictions for bribery, conspiracy, and tax violations. Will the Department of Justice take the same “No Bill on the stand” approach in a re-trial of Vic Kohring?
(Disclosure: I have had both personal and professional contacts with Bruce Weyhrauch, but I have never discussed this case with him and we have not had a conversation since his indictment in 2007.)
Friday, December 3, 2010
Don Young and Charlie Rangel
Anchorage--
U.S. Rep. Don Young was one of only two Republicans who voted against the censure of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y.), which passed 333-79. The other Republican was Peter King, like Rangel a veteran member of the House delegation from New York City’s metropolitan area.
You could think of three reasons for Young to vote “No” on the censure of Rangel, who faced allegations involving failures to report income and improper charitable fund-raising.
The first would be the one offered by Young himself: He has never voted to censure a fellow Member of the House, preferring to let the voters decide on the consequences of a Member’s ethical violations.
A second factor would be fellow feeling arising from all their years of service together. You might think that it would hard to find two guys more dissimilar than the moose-hunting former riverboat captain and the long-time clubhouse pol from Harlem, but the two have had decades to build bonds. Both Young and Rangel have been in the U.S. House more than 35 years, and Rangel is one of only eight Members of Congress who have served on Capitol Hill longer than Young.
A third reason would be a different kind of solidarity between the pair, one that Erika Bolstad highlighted in the Anchorage Daily News: Young knows what it’s like to be under ethical scrutiny. “The Congressman for all Alaska” was under federal criminal investigation for a number of years on multiple fronts, including his receipt of gifts and campaign contributions from VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith--now in federal prison. The House and Senate also voted in 2008 to ask the Department of Justice to investigate how the language in the "Coconut Road" earmark changed after the legislation passed both houses. This earmark for a Florida interchange project appeared in a transportation bill championed by Young shortly after a real estate developer who would benefit from the earmark raised $40,000 in campaign contributions for the Congressman.
Young announced less than four months ago that the Department of Justice had told him that the federal government had ended the federal criminal probe of him. Young, like Rangel, was re-elected to another term in the House last month.
U.S. Rep. Don Young was one of only two Republicans who voted against the censure of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y.), which passed 333-79. The other Republican was Peter King, like Rangel a veteran member of the House delegation from New York City’s metropolitan area.
You could think of three reasons for Young to vote “No” on the censure of Rangel, who faced allegations involving failures to report income and improper charitable fund-raising.
The first would be the one offered by Young himself: He has never voted to censure a fellow Member of the House, preferring to let the voters decide on the consequences of a Member’s ethical violations.
A second factor would be fellow feeling arising from all their years of service together. You might think that it would hard to find two guys more dissimilar than the moose-hunting former riverboat captain and the long-time clubhouse pol from Harlem, but the two have had decades to build bonds. Both Young and Rangel have been in the U.S. House more than 35 years, and Rangel is one of only eight Members of Congress who have served on Capitol Hill longer than Young.
A third reason would be a different kind of solidarity between the pair, one that Erika Bolstad highlighted in the Anchorage Daily News: Young knows what it’s like to be under ethical scrutiny. “The Congressman for all Alaska” was under federal criminal investigation for a number of years on multiple fronts, including his receipt of gifts and campaign contributions from VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith--now in federal prison. The House and Senate also voted in 2008 to ask the Department of Justice to investigate how the language in the "Coconut Road" earmark changed after the legislation passed both houses. This earmark for a Florida interchange project appeared in a transportation bill championed by Young shortly after a real estate developer who would benefit from the earmark raised $40,000 in campaign contributions for the Congressman.
Young announced less than four months ago that the Department of Justice had told him that the federal government had ended the federal criminal probe of him. Young, like Rangel, was re-elected to another term in the House last month.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Jim Clark Walks, But Has to Keep Cooperating with the Feds
Anchorage—
Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrowing of the application of a critical statute, the federal government has agreed to dismiss the case against Jim Clark, even though the ex-Chief of Staff to former Gov. Frank Murkowski had pleaded guilty back in March of 2008.
The problem for the feds is that the law that Clark pleaded guilty to violating was the honest services fraud statute, which the Supreme Court performed radical surgery on last June. The part that Clark admitted that he ran afoul of while Chief of Staff had been cut off, so as the law stands now the indictment did not charge him with an actual crime.
Although a federal judge must approve this agreement to throw out the charge against Clark, it seems highly likely that this will be a mere formality.
The feds made a big point in their filing today that they are holding Clark to his plea bargain, which requires him to cooperate with the government in the investigation and prosecution of others in return for the government not charging Clark with other crimes.
The only “other” out there now would appear to be ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau), who is charged with bribery, extortion, and conspiracy. Weyhrauch’s case is back in District Court in Anchorage after having traveled up to the Supreme Court (where he was one of the winning defendants in the decision last June cutting back the scope of the honest services fraud statute) and down again.
Weyhrauch’s case is also the only one left unadjudicated in the seven-year-old federal investigation into Alaska public corruption that the feds call “POLAR PEN.” Of the 12 people charged in the probe, only three are in prison now: former VECO CEO Bill Allen; former VECO VP Rick Smith; and former State Rep. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage).
Disclosure: Bruce Weyhrauch is the defendant in the cases arising from the federal probe into Alaska public corruption that I know the best personally. I worked with Bruce Weyhrauch when we both served on the staff of the Alaska Legislature in the early 1980s and have socialized with him some since then. I have seen him less since I moved away from Juneau in the early 1990s, and he has never discussed this case with me.
Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrowing of the application of a critical statute, the federal government has agreed to dismiss the case against Jim Clark, even though the ex-Chief of Staff to former Gov. Frank Murkowski had pleaded guilty back in March of 2008.
The problem for the feds is that the law that Clark pleaded guilty to violating was the honest services fraud statute, which the Supreme Court performed radical surgery on last June. The part that Clark admitted that he ran afoul of while Chief of Staff had been cut off, so as the law stands now the indictment did not charge him with an actual crime.
Although a federal judge must approve this agreement to throw out the charge against Clark, it seems highly likely that this will be a mere formality.
The feds made a big point in their filing today that they are holding Clark to his plea bargain, which requires him to cooperate with the government in the investigation and prosecution of others in return for the government not charging Clark with other crimes.
The only “other” out there now would appear to be ex-State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau), who is charged with bribery, extortion, and conspiracy. Weyhrauch’s case is back in District Court in Anchorage after having traveled up to the Supreme Court (where he was one of the winning defendants in the decision last June cutting back the scope of the honest services fraud statute) and down again.
Weyhrauch’s case is also the only one left unadjudicated in the seven-year-old federal investigation into Alaska public corruption that the feds call “POLAR PEN.” Of the 12 people charged in the probe, only three are in prison now: former VECO CEO Bill Allen; former VECO VP Rick Smith; and former State Rep. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage).
Disclosure: Bruce Weyhrauch is the defendant in the cases arising from the federal probe into Alaska public corruption that I know the best personally. I worked with Bruce Weyhrauch when we both served on the staff of the Alaska Legislature in the early 1980s and have socialized with him some since then. I have seen him less since I moved away from Juneau in the early 1990s, and he has never discussed this case with me.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Judge Sedwick Turns Down Vic Kohring's Attempts to Either Get His Case Thrown Out or Get a New Trial
Anchorage—
As noted above, U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick today rejected ex-State Rep. Vic Kohring’s efforts to get relief based on the prosecution’s admitted failures to turn over before trial evidence favorable to the former Republican legislator from Wasilla.
It’s worth going over this 31-page ruling in bullet point style:
1. To Judge Sedwick, ex-VECO CEO Bill Allen was so obviously crooked as of the first half of 2006 that anybody around the legislature with a room temperature IQ could see it. On March 30, 2006, Kohring went to see the “notorious” Allen in the Baranof Hotel’s Suite 604, “the location which Kohring knew was the very center of Allen’s web of corruption in Juneau.”
2. The judge does not buy any argument that Vic Kohring was too clueless, too honest, or too powerless to commit the crimes for which he was convicted. As to the former lawmaker’s character, the court states that “While Kohring may not have been an inherently corrupt individual, at some point he became motivated to engage in political corruption.”
3. The judge believes that the FBI surveillance videotape showing Kohring’s meeting with Allen in Suite 604 on March 30, 2006 conclusively establishes Kohring’s guilt, notwithstanding any of the evidence the government wrongfully withheld. The judge focuses on Count 3 of the indictment of Kohring, which charged him with attempted extortion. Judge Sedwick looks at the videotape showing Kohring going over to Suite 604 to ask Allen to help with Kohring’s $17,000 credit card bill. The judge notes that this approach occurred during the legislature’s consideration of the proposed Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) bill, oil-tax legislation Allen clearly was lobbying heavily. Add it all up, and the judge sees an obviously corrupt solicitation amounting to attempted extortion.
The court emphasizes the legal rule that a convicted defendant seeking relief based on the government’s failure to disclose evidence before trial must demonstrate a reasonable probability that the withheld evidence affected the jury’s verdict. (Although the judge would not use this term, this concept is similar to the cry of “No harm, no foul” you might hear in pick-up basketball.) The judge views the tape of the March 30 meeting as so incriminating that the prosecution’s failure to disclose did not make a difference in the outcome. “The court cannot bend or warp its understanding of the videotape into a shape that raises any reasonable probability that Kohring would not have been convicted on Count 3 by any jury which saw the videotape and contemplated what it saw in the context of Allen’s mission in Juneau and the inescapable inference from the evidence as a whole that Kohring understood and was willing to help with Allen’s corrupt mission.” The judge also points to Kohring’s recorded voice mail messages to Allen’s chief political lieutenant Rick Smith the next day detailing the legislator’s efforts on behalf of what he knew Allen and Smith wanted regarding oil-tax legislation. To Judge Sedwick, those recorded messages are the cherry on top of Vic Kohring’s guilty sundae.
4. In what Kohring’s lawyers must tonight be damning as unfair jiu-jitsu, the judge relies heavily on the fact that the jury acquitted the defendant of the charge of actual (not attempted) extortion to let stand the convictions on three other charges. Judge Sedwick reasons that the evidence wrongfully withheld by the prosecution could undermine confidence in convictions based on alleged cash payments by Allen to Kohring. As the judge notes, some of the previously undisclosed evidence shows that Allen sometimes told prosecutors that he made those cash payments as gifts or as expressions of pity and did not intend them as bribes. The judge also notes that those alleged cash payments would provide a basis to convict Kohring of extortion, but the jury acquitted Kohring of that charge.
The judge concludes, however, that the charge of attempted extortion in Count 3 was based on Kohring’s solicitation of help on his $17,000 credit card bill and not on any of the payments totaling up to $2,600 that Allen made to Kohring or the job at VECO worth $3,000 given to the lawmaker’s nephew. The judge rules that the March 30 videotape and the recorded messages of March 31 support the conviction for attempted extortion in Count 3. Judge Sedwick also announces that the same recorded evidence could provide the basis for the convictions for conspiracy to commit extortion and attempted extortion (Count 1) and bribery (Count 4).
Accordingly, confidence in those three convictions based on taped evidence cannot be shaken by any withheld evidence about Allen’s shaky memory, Allen’s evolving accounts of his past actions, or inconsistencies between Allen’s and Smith’s recollections of the circumstances or purposes of any payments to Kohring. Once again, the tapes trump, and undisputed evidence on the tapes can compensate for undisclosed evidence that was not taped.
Ironically, this means that the famous “Easter egg” shot of Allen giving cash to Kohring on March 30—the iconic image of the whole federal investigation into Alaska public corruption—is not even conduct for which Kohring was convicted.
5. Despite his denial of Kohring’s requests for dismissal of the charges, a new trial, or an evidentiary hearing, Judge Sedwick is letting the former legislator walk around free while his lawyers pursue an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Although this court has not found a sufficient basis to order a new trial or dismissal of the indictment, it is certainly possible that the Circuit Court will see the matter differently.” Given that Kohring is neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety, Judge Sedwick will let him remain on release pending appeal.
As noted above, U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick today rejected ex-State Rep. Vic Kohring’s efforts to get relief based on the prosecution’s admitted failures to turn over before trial evidence favorable to the former Republican legislator from Wasilla.
It’s worth going over this 31-page ruling in bullet point style:
1. To Judge Sedwick, ex-VECO CEO Bill Allen was so obviously crooked as of the first half of 2006 that anybody around the legislature with a room temperature IQ could see it. On March 30, 2006, Kohring went to see the “notorious” Allen in the Baranof Hotel’s Suite 604, “the location which Kohring knew was the very center of Allen’s web of corruption in Juneau.”
2. The judge does not buy any argument that Vic Kohring was too clueless, too honest, or too powerless to commit the crimes for which he was convicted. As to the former lawmaker’s character, the court states that “While Kohring may not have been an inherently corrupt individual, at some point he became motivated to engage in political corruption.”
3. The judge believes that the FBI surveillance videotape showing Kohring’s meeting with Allen in Suite 604 on March 30, 2006 conclusively establishes Kohring’s guilt, notwithstanding any of the evidence the government wrongfully withheld. The judge focuses on Count 3 of the indictment of Kohring, which charged him with attempted extortion. Judge Sedwick looks at the videotape showing Kohring going over to Suite 604 to ask Allen to help with Kohring’s $17,000 credit card bill. The judge notes that this approach occurred during the legislature’s consideration of the proposed Petroleum Profits Tax (PPT) bill, oil-tax legislation Allen clearly was lobbying heavily. Add it all up, and the judge sees an obviously corrupt solicitation amounting to attempted extortion.
The court emphasizes the legal rule that a convicted defendant seeking relief based on the government’s failure to disclose evidence before trial must demonstrate a reasonable probability that the withheld evidence affected the jury’s verdict. (Although the judge would not use this term, this concept is similar to the cry of “No harm, no foul” you might hear in pick-up basketball.) The judge views the tape of the March 30 meeting as so incriminating that the prosecution’s failure to disclose did not make a difference in the outcome. “The court cannot bend or warp its understanding of the videotape into a shape that raises any reasonable probability that Kohring would not have been convicted on Count 3 by any jury which saw the videotape and contemplated what it saw in the context of Allen’s mission in Juneau and the inescapable inference from the evidence as a whole that Kohring understood and was willing to help with Allen’s corrupt mission.” The judge also points to Kohring’s recorded voice mail messages to Allen’s chief political lieutenant Rick Smith the next day detailing the legislator’s efforts on behalf of what he knew Allen and Smith wanted regarding oil-tax legislation. To Judge Sedwick, those recorded messages are the cherry on top of Vic Kohring’s guilty sundae.
4. In what Kohring’s lawyers must tonight be damning as unfair jiu-jitsu, the judge relies heavily on the fact that the jury acquitted the defendant of the charge of actual (not attempted) extortion to let stand the convictions on three other charges. Judge Sedwick reasons that the evidence wrongfully withheld by the prosecution could undermine confidence in convictions based on alleged cash payments by Allen to Kohring. As the judge notes, some of the previously undisclosed evidence shows that Allen sometimes told prosecutors that he made those cash payments as gifts or as expressions of pity and did not intend them as bribes. The judge also notes that those alleged cash payments would provide a basis to convict Kohring of extortion, but the jury acquitted Kohring of that charge.
The judge concludes, however, that the charge of attempted extortion in Count 3 was based on Kohring’s solicitation of help on his $17,000 credit card bill and not on any of the payments totaling up to $2,600 that Allen made to Kohring or the job at VECO worth $3,000 given to the lawmaker’s nephew. The judge rules that the March 30 videotape and the recorded messages of March 31 support the conviction for attempted extortion in Count 3. Judge Sedwick also announces that the same recorded evidence could provide the basis for the convictions for conspiracy to commit extortion and attempted extortion (Count 1) and bribery (Count 4).
Accordingly, confidence in those three convictions based on taped evidence cannot be shaken by any withheld evidence about Allen’s shaky memory, Allen’s evolving accounts of his past actions, or inconsistencies between Allen’s and Smith’s recollections of the circumstances or purposes of any payments to Kohring. Once again, the tapes trump, and undisputed evidence on the tapes can compensate for undisclosed evidence that was not taped.
Ironically, this means that the famous “Easter egg” shot of Allen giving cash to Kohring on March 30—the iconic image of the whole federal investigation into Alaska public corruption—is not even conduct for which Kohring was convicted.
5. Despite his denial of Kohring’s requests for dismissal of the charges, a new trial, or an evidentiary hearing, Judge Sedwick is letting the former legislator walk around free while his lawyers pursue an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Although this court has not found a sufficient basis to order a new trial or dismissal of the indictment, it is certainly possible that the Circuit Court will see the matter differently.” Given that Kohring is neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety, Judge Sedwick will let him remain on release pending appeal.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Applying "No Harm, No Foul" Principle, Judge Lets Vic Kohring's Convictions Stand
Anchorage--
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick has ruled that former State Rep. Vic Kohring's corruption-related convictions will stay in place. The court announced today that FBI surveillance tapes of Kohring's interactions with ex-VECO CEO Bill Allen and Allen's chief political lieutenant Rick Smith showed the former Wasilla Republican lawmaker's guilt so conclusively that it wouldn't have mattered if the government had given to the defense before the trial all the evidence the defense was entitled to get.
I have to run off to an appointment, so there's more to come later.
U.S. District Judge John Sedwick has ruled that former State Rep. Vic Kohring's corruption-related convictions will stay in place. The court announced today that FBI surveillance tapes of Kohring's interactions with ex-VECO CEO Bill Allen and Allen's chief political lieutenant Rick Smith showed the former Wasilla Republican lawmaker's guilt so conclusively that it wouldn't have mattered if the government had given to the defense before the trial all the evidence the defense was entitled to get.
I have to run off to an appointment, so there's more to come later.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Can the Government Get a Conviction on Bruce Weyhrauch Now?
Anchorage--
Ed. Note--The post below is by Mark Regan, and focuses on the state of the prosecution's case against former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings yesterday on the honest services fraud statute. Mark Regan's posts will appear in Times font, while I will continue to post in Georgia font.--Cliff Groh
From Mark Regan--
What sort of case can the Government now make out against Bruce Weyhrauch?
Pete Kott got thousands of dollars in inflated payments to his flooring business. Vic Kohring got wads of cash. All Bruce Weyhrauch may have gotten was a promise that VECO would talk with him about some future legal work.
Now that the Supreme Court has said that Weyhrauch's failure to disclose that promise isn't enough by itself for the Government to convict him of honest services mail fraud, one big question is, can it convict him of something else?
The indictment in Bruce Weyhrauch's case charged him with four offenses: an extortion count (Count 3), a bribery count (Count 5), an honest services fraud count (Count 7), and a conspiracy to commit extortion, bribery, and honest services fraud count (Count 1). (The other counts in the indictment are against former State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River), who was charged in the same indictment.) In the Skilling case, the Supreme Court has now invalidated honest services fraud charges that depend on a failure to disclose something. That leaves pending the extortion and bribery charges, along with whatever honest services fraud charge there might be that can be made to look like a bribe or kickback.
In the proceedings just before Weyhrauch's trial, the Government identified a state legislative ethics statute, AS 24.60.030(e)(3), that might provide a standard for an honest services fraud claim. It provides:
(e) A legislator may not directly, or by authorizing another to act on the legislator's behalf,
* * *
(3) unless required by the Uniform Rules of the Alaska State Legislature, take or withhold official action or exert official influence that could substantially benefit or harm the financial interest of another person with whom the legislator is negotiating for employment.
The Government's extortion and bribery theories are that Weyhrauch unlawfully attempted to obtain a promise of contract work from VECO in exchange for voting VECO's way on the legislation. An honest services fraud claim based on AS 24.60.030(e)(3) presumably would say that Weyhrauch voted VECO's way while he was negotiating for employment.
How solid would those charges be? It depends on what evidence the Government and Bruce Weyhrauch would have been able to present at trial. Trial didn't happen on schedule, and any statements witnesses might have made haven't become public. The Government's trial brief is also quite unhelpful in showing what evidence the Government might have tried to present to support these claims if the case had indeed gone to trial in 2007 -- but it's still possible to look at the indictment for some clues.
The indictment claims, citing a May 4, 2006 letter from Weyhrauch to Bill Allen, that Weyhrauch was trying to get legal business from VECO at the same time that he was voting VECO's way on oil tax legislation (paragraphs 36-41), and that during a conversation that same day in the infamous Room 604 of the Baranof Hotel, Bill Allen and Rick Smith discussed whether Weyhrauch's letter was connected to Weyhrauch's willingness to vote VECO's way on oil taxes (paragraph 38). Kott, Weyhrauch, Allen, and Smith then worked together on oil tax legislation, and on May 9, Allen said to Smith that if the PPT tax came out at 20%, they would have to give Weyhrauch some contract legal work. (Indictment, paragraph 49.)
On May 19 -- during a period in which the House was not in session while legislators heard a lengthy presentation at another location on the proposed gas pipeline contract -- Weyhrauch set up a meeting with VECO in Anchorage for May 24. Before the meeting, Allen and Smith agreed to "string him out" with legal work. A few days after the meeting, Weyhrauch wrote a note to VECO looking forward to working with Allen and VECO in the future. (Indictment, paragraphs 51-57.)
Later, during the early June special session, Weyhrauch again voted VECO's way, and in a conversation with Bill Allen Ben Stevens agreed with Allen that Weyhrauch had voted with VECO because Bill Allen had said that VECO would give Weyhrauch some contract work. (Indictment, paragraphs 60-62.)
But there is no allegation that VECO ever did give Bruce Weyhrauch any contract work, let alone give him the kind of money-for-no-work payoff that it gave Pete Kott and Vic Kohring. Also absent from any of this is any statement by Weyhrauch himself, even a hearsay statement, tying his vote to his desire to do work for VECO. Nor is there any suggestion that Bruce Weyhrauch might have said to Bill Allen, as Pete Kott said to Allen, that "I had to cheat, steal, beg, borrow, and lie" in order to face Allen, or that Bill Allen might have responded to Bruce Weyhrauch, as he responded to Pete Kott, "I own your ass." (Indictment, para. 45.) And the indictment does not quote any VECO document, or make any direct claim about any particular conversation between VECO officials and Weyhrauch, where a promise of future work might have been made in exchange for a commitment by the legislator to vote a particular way. In fact, one paragraph of the indictment says that at the May 24, 2006 meeting in Anchorage, Weyhrauch and VECO discussed jobs and discussed oil taxes -- but it is probably significant that this paragraph does not try to link the two topics beyond saying that they were both discussed at that meeting. (Indictment, paragraph 54.) If the conversation indicated a quid pro quo, you'd expect that particular paragraph to have said so.
So the quid pro quo that justifies extortion and bribery cases is hard to find among these facts. It might be easier to find support for a charge that Weyhrauch violated the Alaska legislative ethics statute, AS 24.60.030(e)(3), by negotiating for work with VECO at the same time he was taking official action to support VECO on oil taxes -- but would that be close enough to bribery or kickbacks to satisfy the Supreme Court's new standard for honest services fraud federal prosecutions?
The Government has the first crack at deciding what to do, and if it decides to proceed, the Ninth Circuit and Judge Sedwick will have to try to sort things out.
--Mark Regan
Ed. Note--The post below is by Mark Regan, and focuses on the state of the prosecution's case against former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau) in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings yesterday on the honest services fraud statute. Mark Regan's posts will appear in Times font, while I will continue to post in Georgia font.--Cliff Groh
From Mark Regan--
What sort of case can the Government now make out against Bruce Weyhrauch?
Pete Kott got thousands of dollars in inflated payments to his flooring business. Vic Kohring got wads of cash. All Bruce Weyhrauch may have gotten was a promise that VECO would talk with him about some future legal work.
Now that the Supreme Court has said that Weyhrauch's failure to disclose that promise isn't enough by itself for the Government to convict him of honest services mail fraud, one big question is, can it convict him of something else?
The indictment in Bruce Weyhrauch's case charged him with four offenses: an extortion count (Count 3), a bribery count (Count 5), an honest services fraud count (Count 7), and a conspiracy to commit extortion, bribery, and honest services fraud count (Count 1). (The other counts in the indictment are against former State Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River), who was charged in the same indictment.) In the Skilling case, the Supreme Court has now invalidated honest services fraud charges that depend on a failure to disclose something. That leaves pending the extortion and bribery charges, along with whatever honest services fraud charge there might be that can be made to look like a bribe or kickback.
In the proceedings just before Weyhrauch's trial, the Government identified a state legislative ethics statute, AS 24.60.030(e)(3), that might provide a standard for an honest services fraud claim. It provides:
(e) A legislator may not directly, or by authorizing another to act on the legislator's behalf,
* * *
(3) unless required by the Uniform Rules of the Alaska State Legislature, take or withhold official action or exert official influence that could substantially benefit or harm the financial interest of another person with whom the legislator is negotiating for employment.
The Government's extortion and bribery theories are that Weyhrauch unlawfully attempted to obtain a promise of contract work from VECO in exchange for voting VECO's way on the legislation. An honest services fraud claim based on AS 24.60.030(e)(3) presumably would say that Weyhrauch voted VECO's way while he was negotiating for employment.
How solid would those charges be? It depends on what evidence the Government and Bruce Weyhrauch would have been able to present at trial. Trial didn't happen on schedule, and any statements witnesses might have made haven't become public. The Government's trial brief is also quite unhelpful in showing what evidence the Government might have tried to present to support these claims if the case had indeed gone to trial in 2007 -- but it's still possible to look at the indictment for some clues.
The indictment claims, citing a May 4, 2006 letter from Weyhrauch to Bill Allen, that Weyhrauch was trying to get legal business from VECO at the same time that he was voting VECO's way on oil tax legislation (paragraphs 36-41), and that during a conversation that same day in the infamous Room 604 of the Baranof Hotel, Bill Allen and Rick Smith discussed whether Weyhrauch's letter was connected to Weyhrauch's willingness to vote VECO's way on oil taxes (paragraph 38). Kott, Weyhrauch, Allen, and Smith then worked together on oil tax legislation, and on May 9, Allen said to Smith that if the PPT tax came out at 20%, they would have to give Weyhrauch some contract legal work. (Indictment, paragraph 49.)
On May 19 -- during a period in which the House was not in session while legislators heard a lengthy presentation at another location on the proposed gas pipeline contract -- Weyhrauch set up a meeting with VECO in Anchorage for May 24. Before the meeting, Allen and Smith agreed to "string him out" with legal work. A few days after the meeting, Weyhrauch wrote a note to VECO looking forward to working with Allen and VECO in the future. (Indictment, paragraphs 51-57.)
Later, during the early June special session, Weyhrauch again voted VECO's way, and in a conversation with Bill Allen Ben Stevens agreed with Allen that Weyhrauch had voted with VECO because Bill Allen had said that VECO would give Weyhrauch some contract work. (Indictment, paragraphs 60-62.)
But there is no allegation that VECO ever did give Bruce Weyhrauch any contract work, let alone give him the kind of money-for-no-work payoff that it gave Pete Kott and Vic Kohring. Also absent from any of this is any statement by Weyhrauch himself, even a hearsay statement, tying his vote to his desire to do work for VECO. Nor is there any suggestion that Bruce Weyhrauch might have said to Bill Allen, as Pete Kott said to Allen, that "I had to cheat, steal, beg, borrow, and lie" in order to face Allen, or that Bill Allen might have responded to Bruce Weyhrauch, as he responded to Pete Kott, "I own your ass." (Indictment, para. 45.) And the indictment does not quote any VECO document, or make any direct claim about any particular conversation between VECO officials and Weyhrauch, where a promise of future work might have been made in exchange for a commitment by the legislator to vote a particular way. In fact, one paragraph of the indictment says that at the May 24, 2006 meeting in Anchorage, Weyhrauch and VECO discussed jobs and discussed oil taxes -- but it is probably significant that this paragraph does not try to link the two topics beyond saying that they were both discussed at that meeting. (Indictment, paragraph 54.) If the conversation indicated a quid pro quo, you'd expect that particular paragraph to have said so.
So the quid pro quo that justifies extortion and bribery cases is hard to find among these facts. It might be easier to find support for a charge that Weyhrauch violated the Alaska legislative ethics statute, AS 24.60.030(e)(3), by negotiating for work with VECO at the same time he was taking official action to support VECO on oil taxes -- but would that be close enough to bribery or kickbacks to satisfy the Supreme Court's new standard for honest services fraud federal prosecutions?
The Government has the first crack at deciding what to do, and if it decides to proceed, the Ninth Circuit and Judge Sedwick will have to try to sort things out.
--Mark Regan
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