Updated Biography of Cliff Groh with Yet More Disclosures

Anchorage--

As time marches on, facts about my life change and I also learn more facts about the past.   So here is another updated biography with updated disclosures:

Updated Biography of Cliff Groh with Yet More Disclosures

Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has been a lawyer for more than 20 years. He is now a writer and attorney in Anchorage. Formerly a prosecutor, Groh has represented some criminal defendants in his private law practice. His law practice focuses on the writing of appeals and motions and the revision of legal documents.


Groh has been doing research for a book on the Alaska public corruption scandals uncovered by the current federal investigations and the resulting trials. To that end, he has observed most of the trials of former state legislators Pete Kott and Vic Kohring in Anchorage and all of the trial of then-U.S. Senator Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C. He has taught two classes on Alaska public corruption through the Opportunities for Lifelong Education (OLE) program, and has also presented another lecture through that program. He maintains a blog on the Alaska public corruption scandals at www.alaskacorruption.blogspot.com on the Internet.

Groh was interviewed for an hour about Alaska public corruption on C-SPAN by the network's founder Brian Lamb, and he has also given a Polaris lecture on the subject at the University of Alaska Anchorage for the Forty-Ninth State Fellows program.    Groh is a columnist for the Alaska Bar Rag, the official publication of the Last Frontier's lawyers, and most of his offerings in that periodical have addressed the cases arising out of the "POLAR PEN" federal probe into Alaska public corruption.   

Groh's writings on Ted Stevens and the federal prosecution of him have appeared in various outlets, including the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Press, and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner website.   He has also been interviewed live regarding "POLAR PEN" cases on the Alaska Public Radio Network, Anchorage's TV Channel 4, and KOAN-AM and FM.   His comments on these matters have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Reuters news service and on Anchorage's TV Channels 11 and 2.   

Groh served as the Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Revenue from 1987 through 1990. In that capacity, he served essentially as the State of Alaska's tax lobbyist in the successful effort in 1989 to revise the state's oil taxes in a way that increased revenues from the giant Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk fields. The legislation adopted in 1989 created a regime for oil taxes that lasted until the Alaska Legislature adopted the Petroleum Profits Tax in 2006.

Groh was also the principal legislative staff member working on Permanent Fund Dividend legislation in 1982. That legislation produced the per capita Permanent Fund Dividend Alaska has today. Groh has co-authored two chapters for an academic book on Permanent Fund Dividends to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Groh worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Anchorage and in rural Alaska communities such as St. Paul, Unalaska, and Sand Point. He has handled approximately 30 jury trials as a prosecutor. He has also served as in-house and outside counsel for municipal governments in Alaska. He served as a delegate to the Conference of Alaskans in 2004.

When Groh was first out of college in the late 1970s, he worked as a reporter with a statewide newspaper called the Alaska Advocate. He has also published historical articles on topics ranging from the Permanent Fund Dividend to the history of journalistic coverage of the capital move campaigns.

Groh is a graduate of Harvard College, where his senior honors thesis was on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA). His law degree is from the University of California at Berkeley (then called Boalt Hall, now known as Berkeley Law).

Disclosures of Potentially Relevant Interests and Relationships


Groh’s work in government has included service in both partisan and non-partisan positions. Groh has worked for Democrats while serving in partisan positions in the Alaska State Legislature and the Alaska Department of Revenue. He is a registered Democrat who was a delegate to the 1988 Alaska Democratic Convention.


Groh socialized with Bruce Weyhrauch during periods in the 1980s and early 1990s when both lived in Juneau, and Groh had some social contacts with Weyhrauch afterwards. While serving as City and Borough Attorney for the City and Borough of Sitka, Groh arranged in 2002 or 2003 for Weyhrauch to act as counsel for the City and Borough in a case where Groh had a conflict of interest. Weyhrauch and Groh have never discussed the criminal case against Weyhrauch while those legal proceedings were pending, and have discussed only the case's effects on him since the case was adjudicated.


Groh knew Ted Stevens all of Groh's life, and Groh's father—who passed away in 1998—was a close friend and political ally of Ted Stevens. Groh lived in a dormitory in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1975 with interns of Stevens' Senate office while researching a college senior honors thesis on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.   Ted Stevens apparently made the arrangements for Groh to live in that dormitory, and his office may have paid for the room rental.  Groh sometimes used space in Ted Stevens' Senate office during the summer of 1975 while researching his thesis, and Groh both interviewed and had some social contacts with Stevens that summer.


Groh’s mother was a close friend of Ted Stevens’ first wife Ann Stevens, who died in an airplane crash in 1978. Ted Stevens and his Senate staff worked to arrange for additional medical care for both of Groh’s parents when they were stricken with cancer in the 1990s.

At various points over the years, Groh met and spoke with Jim Clark, Bill Weimar, and Pete Kott about various matters. Groh also exchanged e-mail messages with Vic Kohring about fiscal policy. Groh interviewed Don Young in the 1970s, and as a child he may have played with Ben Stevens.


In the 1980s, Groh’s father served as VECO’s lawyer in some legal matters.   In one such matter, Groh's father defended the corporation against an enforcement action brought by the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC) regarding VECO’s campaign contributions. One or both of Groh’s parents also had some business dealings with Bill Allen in the 1980s. In an apparent attempt to interest Bill Allen in buying real estate, Groh’s father reportedly took Allen to a subdivision in rural Alaska owned by a corporation controlled by Groh’s father. Neither Allen nor VECO purchased any property at the subdivision. Given the limited number of sleeping spaces available in the area at the time, however, that visit by Bill Allen probably means that Groh has slept in a bed that Bill Allen once slept in.

Groh's son was selected in 2012 as one of nine summer interns for U.S. Sen. Mark Begich (D.-Alaska).   Groh made no efforts in his son's obtaining of the position.   


Groh's law practice has included work for a law firm representing a municipal government in administrative proceedings and litigation over the property tax on the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). The opponents in those legal matters consist mostly of the major oil producers on Alaska's North Slope, who are the majority owners of TAPS.

Groh has also worked and/or socialized with a number of the Anchorage lawyers who have worked on matters associated with the federal government's “POLAR PEN” probe into public corruption in Alaska. Some of those attorneys are or have been prosecutors on those matters, and some of those attorneys have served as defense counsel on those matters.

KTVA Channel 11 in Anchorage Posts Police Files on Investigations into Bill Allen's Alleged Crimes with Underage Girls

Anchorage--

KTVA, the Channel 11 TV station in Anchorage, has posted files from the Anchorage Police Department generated by  investigations into crimes involving minors allegedly committed by former Alaska powerbroker, tycoon, and convicted briber Bill Allen.   The station's website also features a piece by Bill McAllister in both video and print form that asks the question "Did the federal government sell out victims of sexual abuse in order to nail some politicians for taking cheap bribes?"

Given that it's Thanksgiving, I don't have time to answer that question or set out my different perspective on it except to point you to my earlier blog post on the related topic of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski asking Attorney General Eric Holder why Allen has not been prosecuted for sex crimes.    That post ends with the question with this question for Sen. Murkowski:   "When will you start pressing the Attorney General to explain why the federal government has not prosecuted Ben Stevens, the former President of the Alaska State Senate whom Bill Allen pleaded guilty to bribing?"    

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?

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.

Ben Stevens Will Not Be Charged, Feds Have Told Him

Anchorage--

The Department of Justice has told former Alaska State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) that he will not be prosecuted in the federal government's probe into public corruption on the Last Frontier. Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News has today's scoop here. Seventeen months ago, I discussed the federal government's substantial problems in prosecuting Ben Stevens here.

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.

Even More Updated Biography, with Still More Disclosures

Anchorage--

In preparing for publication in another forum of some of my writings on public corruption, I have tweaked my bio and expanded my disclosures of various interests and relationships with various defendants, suspects, and lawyers involved in the investigations and trials covered by this blog.

Biography of Cliff Groh

Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has been a lawyer for more than 20 years. He is now a writer and attorney in Anchorage. Formerly a prosecutor, Groh has represented some criminal defendants in his private law practice. His law practice focuses on the writing of appeals and motions and the revision of legal documents.

Groh has been doing research for a book on the Alaska public corruption scandals uncovered by the current federal investigations and the resulting trials. To that end, he has observed most of the trials of former state legislators Pete Kott and Vic Kohring in Anchorage and all of the trial of then-U.S. Senator Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C. He has taught two classes on Alaska public corruption through the Opportunities for Lifelong Education (OLE) program. He maintains a blog on the Alaska public corruption scandals at www.alaskacorruption.blogspot.com on the Internet. He was interviewed for an hour about Alaska public corruption on C-SPAN by the network's founder Brian Lamb, and he has also given a Polaris lecture on the subject at the University of Alaska Anchorage for the Forty-Ninth State Fellows program.

Groh served as the Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Revenue from 1987 through 1990. In that capacity, he served essentially as the State of Alaska's tax lobbyist in the successful effort in 1989 to revise the state's oil taxes in a way that increased revenues from the giant Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk fields. The legislation adopted in 1989 created a regime for oil taxes that lasted until the Alaska Legislature adopted the Petroleum Profits Tax in 2006.

Groh was also the principal legislative staff member working on Permanent Fund Dividend legislation in 1982. That legislation produced the per capita Permanent Fund Dividend Alaska has today. Groh has co-authored two chapters for an academic book on Permanent Fund Dividends to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Groh worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Anchorage and in rural Alaska communities such as St. Paul, Unalaska, and Sand Point. He has handled approximately 30 jury trials as a prosecutor. He has also served as in-house and outside counsel for municipal governments in Alaska. He served as a delegate to the Conference of Alaskans in 2004.

When Groh was first out of college in the late 1970s, he worked as a reporter with a statewide newspaper called the Alaska Advocate. He has also published historical articles on topics ranging from the Permanent Fund Dividend to the history of journalistic coverage of the capital move campaigns.

Groh is a graduate of Harvard College, where his senior honors thesis was on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA). His law degree is from the University of California at Berkeley (then called Boalt Hall, now known as Berkeley Law).

Disclosures of Potentially Relevant Interests and Relationships

Groh’s work in government has included service in both partisan and non-partisan positions. Groh has worked for Democrats while serving in partisan positions in the Alaska State Legislature and the Alaska Department of Revenue. He is a registered Democrat who was a delegate to the 1988 Alaska Democratic Convention.

Groh socialized with Bruce Weyhrauch during periods in the 1980s and early 1990s when both lived in Juneau, and Groh had some social contacts with Weyhrauch afterwards. While serving as City and Borough Attorney for the City and Borough of Sitka, Groh arranged in 2002 or 2003 for Weyhrauch to act as counsel for the City and Borough in a case where Groh had a conflict of interest. Weyhrauch and Groh have never discussed the criminal case against Weyhrauch.

Groh knew Ted Stevens all of Groh's life, and Groh's father—who passed away in 1998—was a close friend and political ally of Ted Stevens. Groh lived in a dormitory in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1975 with interns of Stevens' Senate office while researching a college senior honors thesis on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and Ted Stevens apparently made the arrangements for Groh to live in that dormitory. Groh sometimes used space in Ted Stevens' Senate office during the summer of 1975 while researching his thesis, and Groh both interviewed and had some social contacts with Stevens that summer.

Groh’s mother was a close friend of Ted Stevens’ first wife Ann Stevens, who died in an airplane crash in 1978. Ted Stevens and his Senate staff worked to arrange for additional medical care for both of Groh’s parents when they were stricken with cancer in the 1990s.

At various points over the years, Groh met and spoke with Jim Clark, Bill Weimar, and Pete Kott about various matters. Groh also exchanged e-mail messages with Vic Kohring about fiscal policy. Groh interviewed Don Young in the 1970s, and as a child he may have played with Ben Stevens.

In the 1980s, Groh’s father served as VECO’s lawyer in defending the corporation against an enforcement action brought by the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC) regarding VECO’s campaign contributions. One or both of Groh’s parents also had some business dealings with Bill Allen in the 1980s. In an apparent attempt to interest Bill Allen in buying real estate, Groh’s father reportedly took Allen to a subdivision in rural Alaska owned by a corporation controlled by Groh’s father. Neither Allen nor VECO purchased any property at the subdivision. Given the limited number of sleeping spaces available in the area at the time, however, that visit by Bill Allen probably means that Groh has slept in a bed that Bill Allen once slept in.

Groh's law practice has included work for a law firm representing a municipal government in administrative proceedings and litigation over the property tax on the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). The opponents in those legal matters consist mostly of the major oil producers on Alaska's North Slope, who are the majority owners of TAPS.

Groh has also worked and/or socialized with a number of the Anchorage lawyers who have worked on matters associated with the federal government's “POLAR PEN” probe into public corruption in Alaska. Some of those attorneys are or have been prosecutors on those matters, and some of those attorneys have served as defense counsel on those matters.

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.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski Spars with Attorney General over Failure to Prosecute Bill Allen for Sexual Crimes with Minors

Anchorage—


U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R.-Alaska) pressed Attorney General Eric Holder this morning at a Senate hearing about why the federal government has not prosecuted former VECO CEO Bill Allen for having sex with underage girls.


Holder stated that neither “political connections” nor Allen’s cooperation with the Department of Justice in the federal probe into Alaska public corruption were the reasons that the convicted briber escaped prosecution for sexual crimes involving teenagers.


Holder said that the decisions on charging Allen “were made only on the basis of the facts, the law, and the principles that we have to apply.” According to Erika Bolstad's article in the Anchorage Daily News, Holder also said that "But the decisions had nothing to do with political connections, whether somebody's cooperated in a case or something like that."


Sen. Murkowski continued to express unhappiness over the failure to bring sex-related charges against Allen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for bribery; conspiracy to commit extortion, bribery, and honest-services fraud; and conspiracy to commit tax violations.


Now a politically radioactive pariah perceived as a demon and a pervert, less than five years ago Allen was a multimillionaire tycoon and political titan who palled around with powerful Alaskans very familiar to Lisa Murkowski. Allen is in prison in part for his illegal lobbying of legislators to support an oil-tax plan pushed by then-Gov. Frank Murkowski, Lisa Murkowski’s father and the man who appointed her to the U.S. Senate. Pursuant to an agreement with federal prosecutors, Allen testified against two state lawmakers and then-U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, a Last Frontier icon who served as Lisa Murkowski’s mentor on Capitol Hill. Allen frequently took one-on-one vacations with Ted Stevens in the desert, trips both men called “Boot Camps.”

"This is something that has so troubled Alaskans to the core," the Anchorage Daily News quoted Murkowski as telling Holder this morning. "You have an extremely high-profile political figure, extraordinarily wealthy, truly abusing in a very terrible way a 15-year-old girl over a period of years. The assumption just is that the wealthy politician--or the wealthy guy with the political connections--is able to get away with a level of criminality that simply would not be accepted elsewhere."

Bolstad’s story says that Murkowski stated this morning that the U.S. Senator was considering asking the Justice Department's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to examine the handing of the child abuse allegations against Allen. The colloquy between Senator Murkowski and General Holder occurred at a hearing held by a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, according to the Website www.mainjustice.com.


There is substantial evidence that Bill Allen violated laws—both state and federal--regarding sex, as shown in multiple reports by Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne of the Website www.alaskadispatch.com and Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News.


Two points and two questions arise based on this blogger’s experiences. As an assistant district attorney for the Alaska Department of Law, I spent a lot of time prosecuting people for committing sexual offenses against minors. I also spent years working in and around the Alaska State Legislature, and I recognize that public corruption is bad for our people, our government, and our society. As I have watched the progress of the federal government’s POLAR PEN probe into Alaska public corruption, I have been bothered by the crimes and seamy behavior of various Alaska powerbrokers and by the mistakes made by various federal investigators and prosecutors in examining those crimes.


The first point is that I don’t believe that Allen’s decision to cooperate with federal authorities in the POLAR PEN public corruption probe played no role in the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute him. It’s frequently true that cooperating witnesses get concessions in charges and sentences based on their cooperation with prosecutors. The second point is that “the facts” and “the principles that we have to apply” that Holder referenced might be interpreted to include the value of the information and cooperation that cooperating witnesses have to offer.


My questions are for Sen. Murkowski:


1. Is it rich for you complain about excessively soft treatment for a “wealthy guy with the political connections” when Bill Allen’s biggest political connection by far was with Ted Stevens?


2. When will you start pressing the Attorney General to explain why the federal government has not prosecuted Ben Stevens, the former President of the Alaska State Senate whom Bill Allen pleaded guilty to bribing?

Play-Acting the Ben Stevens and Bill Allen Relationship

Anchorage—

The Alaska Dispatch has released a video dramatizing an FBI tape of a 2006 telephone conversation. The production features ex-lawmaker Andrew Halcro playing his former legislative colleague Ben Stevens and long-time Anchorage theatre personality Dick Reichman doing an impression of the halting Bill Allen. It’s worth watching at http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/features/4924-file-no-194a-an-13620 on the Internet.

Updated Biography, Plus Even More Disclosures

Anchorage--


In preparing for my Polaris Lecture at the University of Alaska Anchorage tonight, I have tweaked my bio and expanded my disclosures of various interests and relationships with various defendants, suspects, and lawyers involved in the investigations and trials covered by this blog. You can read all that below, and you can come see me talk tonight at 7:30 p.m. at UAA’s nifty new ConocoPhillips Integrated Sciences Building (the one with the planetarium) in Room 120.

Biography of Cliff Groh

Cliff Groh is a lifelong Alaskan who has been a lawyer for more than 20 years. He is now a writer and attorney in Anchorage. Formerly a prosecutor, Groh has represented some criminal defendants in his private law practice.

Groh has been doing research for a book on the Alaska public corruption scandals uncovered by the current federal investigations and the resulting trials. To that end, he has observed most of the trials of former state legislators Pete Kott and Vic Kohring in Anchorage and all of the trial of then-U.S. Senator Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C. He has taught two classes on Alaska public corruption through the Opportunities for Lifelong Education (OLE) program. He maintains a blog on the Alaska public corruption scandals at www.alaskacorruption.blogspot.com on the Internet.

Groh served as the Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Revenue from 1987 through 1990. In that capacity, he served essentially as the State of Alaska's tax lobbyist in the successful effort in 1989 to revise the state's oil taxes in a way that increased revenues from the giant Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk fields. The legislation adopted in 1989 created a regime for oil taxes that lasted until the Alaska Legislature adopted the Petroleum Profits Tax in 2006.

Groh was also the principal legislative staff member working on Permanent Fund Dividend legislation in 1982. That legislation produced the per capita Permanent Fund Dividend Alaska has today.

Groh worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Anchorage and in rural Alaska communities such as St. Paul, Unalaska, and Sand Point. He has handled approximately 30 jury trials as a prosecutor. He has also served as in-house and outside counsel for municipal governments in Alaska. He served as a delegate to the Conference of Alaskans in 2004.

When Groh was first out of college in the late 1970s, he worked as a reporter with a statewide newspaper called the Alaska Advocate. He has also published historical articles on topics ranging from the Permanent Fund Dividend to the history of journalistic coverage of the capital move campaigns.

Groh is a graduate of Harvard College, where his senior honors thesis was on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA). His law degree is from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall).

Disclosures of Potentially Relevant
Interests and Relationships

Groh’s work in government has included service in both partisan and non-partisan positions. Groh has worked for Democrats while serving in partisan positions in the Alaska State Legislature and the Alaska Department of Revenue. He is a registered Democrat who was a delegate to the 1988 Alaska Democratic Convention.

Groh socialized with Bruce Weyhrauch during periods in the 1980s and early 1990s when both lived in Juneau, and Groh had some social contacts with Weyhrauch afterwards. While serving as City and Borough Attorney for the City and Borough of Sitka, Groh arranged in 2002 or 2003 for Weyhrauch to act as counsel for the City and Borough in a case where Groh had a conflict of interest.

Groh has known Ted Stevens all of Groh's life, and Groh's father—who passed away in 1998—was a close friend and political ally of Ted Stevens. Groh lived in a dormitory in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1975 with interns of Stevens' Senate office while researching a college senior honors thesis on the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and Ted Stevens apparently made the arrangements for Groh to live in that dormitory. Groh sometimes used space in Ted Stevens' Senate office during the summer of 1975 while researching his thesis, and Groh both interviewed and had some social contacts with Stevens that summer.

Groh’s mother was a close friend of Ted Stevens’ first wife Ann Stevens, who died in an airplane crash in 1978. Ted Stevens and his Senate staff worked to arrange for additional medical care for both of Groh’s parents when they were stricken with cancer in the 1990s.

At various points over the years, Groh met and spoke with Jim Clark, Bill Weimar, and Pete Kott about various matters. Groh also exchanged e-mail messages with Vic Kohring about fiscal policy. Groh has interviewed Don Young in the 1970s, and as a child he may have played with Ben Stevens.

In the 1980s, Groh’s father served as VECO’s lawyer in defending the corporation against an enforcement action brought by the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC) regarding VECO’s campaign contributions. One or both of Groh’s parents also had some business dealings with Bill Allen in the 1980s. In an apparent attempt to interest Bill Allen in buying real estate, Groh’s father reportedly took Allen to a subdivision in rural Alaska owned by a corporation controlled by Groh’s father. Neither Allen nor VECO purchased any property at the subdivision. Given the limited number of sleeping spaces available in the area at the time, however, that visit by Bill Allen probably means that Groh has slept in a bed that Bill Allen once slept in.

Groh has also worked and/or socialized with a number of the Anchorage lawyers who have worked on matters associated with the “POLAR PEN” probe into public corruption in Alaska. Some of those attorneys are or have been prosecutors on those matters, and some of those attorneys have served as defense counsel on those matters.

Why Haven't Ben Stevens and Don Young Been Prosecuted?--UPDATED

Anchorage—

Back in the fall of 2008, it looked like former Alaska State Senate President Ben Stevens (R.-Anchorage) and U.S. Rep. Don Young (R.-Alaska) would be charged soon in the federal investigation into Alaska public corruption.

Federal prosecutors had induced former VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith to plead guilty to bribing Ben Stevens over the ex-lawmaker’s role in oil-tax legislation, and news reports disclosed that investigators were looking closely at Ben Stevens’ income from consulting contracts with fisheries entities with interests in legislation supported by his father, then-U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska).

As for Young, the press had reported that the Congressman for all Alaska faced a federal probe on multiple fronts. Particularly problematic for Young, it appeared, were the roles of Allen and Smith in Young’s campaign fundraising.

More generally, back in late October of 2008 the prosecutors appeared to be on a roll. Every defendant who had been charged in the federal probe into Last Frontier public corruption—codenamed “POLAR PEN”—had either pleaded guilty or had the jury return guilty verdicts at trial, and a prominent Alaska journalist had reported that multiple sources had told him that a total of 26 people would be indicted.

Sixteen months later, however, neither Ben Stevens nor Don Young has been charged with any crime. The total number of people charged in the federal probe is stuck at 12, with only one of those—ex-State Rep. Beverly Masek (R.-Willow)—being charged in the last year and a half. The judge who has overseen most of the cases brought in the federal probe into Alaska public corruption announced in October that the likelihood of charges against any more people amounted to “sheer speculation.” And Ben Stevens and Don Young—and their lawyers—would also like you to know that each of them vigorously denies wrongdoing.

Why haven’t federal prosecutors charged either man?

I don’t know for sure, and I haven’t spoken about this with anybody with inside information on the decision-making. With those caveats, here’s my speculation, which puts the factors pointing towards non-prosecution into three categories:

1. The Department of Justice appears to feel both singed and relatively short-staffed after the Ted Stevens case blew up and former legislators Pete Kott and Vic Kohring got out of prison.

A lot has gone wrong for the federal government on its probe in the last 16 months, and the investigation started going downhill very soon after the jury returned its guilty verdicts on October 27, 2008 against then-U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The case completely collapsed last April, when in the wake of admitted failures by the prosecution before the trial to over to the defense evidence (“discovery” in legal lingo) the trial judge set aside the jury verdicts and dismissed the case.

The lawyers who served as the prosecutors against Ted Stevens are now the subjects of two investigations themselves. One probe is an internal investigation run by the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and the other is a highly unusual probe instigated by the trial judge and run by a special counsel that is looking at the possibility of charging those lawyers with criminal contempt of court.

Then in June, the new prosecution teams assigned to the Alaska public corruption investigation announced that they had discovered additional evidence that should have turned over before the trials of former State Reps. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River) and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla). In another highly unusual development, the government agreed that Kott and Kohring could leave prison pending the resolution of the questions raised by these discovery failures—and both ex-lawmakers are still free.

The meltdown of the Ted Stevens prosecution and the continuing revelations of the prosecution’s failures have put a cloud over the lawyers best-informed about the Alaska public corruption investigation and dirtied up the government’s primary cooperating witnesses.

The Department of Justice appears to face problems both perceptual and practical in pushing ahead with complicated new cases in “POLAR PEN,” the long-running federal probe of Alaska public corruption.

The perceptual problem is that the collapse of the Ted Stevens prosecution and the post-trial litigation in the cases of Kott and Kohring have made the feds look inept, malicious, or both. The prosecutors’ handling of the Ted Stevens case, in particular, stands as a black mark on the Department of Justice. Attorney General Eric Holder might think that the benefit from teaching government lawyers a lesson by pulling the plug on the Alaska public corruption investigation was worth the price in any corrupt public officials who thereby escaped punishment.

And then there’s the practical problem—the people who spent the most time on your dime learning the most about public corruption in Alaska are now on the griddle themselves for their alleged misconduct in the Ted Stevens trial. The lead FBI agent on the “POLAR PEN” investigation may also be facing an internal investigation over various allegations made by Chad Joy, a colleague who worked closely with her.

The federal government’s reputation for unlimited resources notwithstanding, there are only about 30 lawyers in the Public Integrity Section, the Department of Justice’s specialized unit dedicated to fighting public corruption. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage could help directly now that it is no longer recused from working on the “POLAR PEN” cases. Particularly given the Attorney General’s possible desire to take advantage of a teachable moment for prosecutors, however, the Department may decide (or have already decided) that it wants to move on to other matters in this investigation that has already run on almost seven years.

Even if the Department decides it’s willing to throw in the staff needed to prosecute Ben Stevens and Don Young, the new team(s) of federal prosecutors would be stuck with dealing with key witnesses who look significantly worse than they did 16 months ago.

It's not just the fact that former VECO executives Bill Allen and Rick Smith are now in prison that they may be less attractive witnesses for federal prosecutors than they were before--the government has bigger problems than that. The increased questions about Bill Allen’s memory and credibility that have arisen in the post-trial litigation in the Ted Stevens and Kott cases are bad enough.

Even worse, though, are the details of Allen’s alleged sexual abuse of minors. Prosecutors would have to be worried about the risks that evidence of Allen’s alleged sexual offenses would somehow get in front of a jury in a trial and create such anger that jurors would go for jury nullification and acquit Ben Stevens or Young out of outrage that Allen has so far escaped prosecution for what some jurors might see as crimes worse than public corruption. Publicity regarding Allen’s sordid past has been so extensive in Alaska—which is the only logical place that Ben Stevens could be tried, at least for crimes involving oil-tax legislation—that prosecutors would also have to be concerned about the jury being tainted even without the introduction of evidence about the alleged sex crimes of the former VECO CEO.

UPDATE (March 7): Bill Allen is less likely to be cooperative as a federal witness against Ben Stevens or Don Young if Allen comes to believe that the Anchorage police--or especially the federal government--is investigating him for allegedly committing sex crimes.

To a much lesser degree, Allen’s former political lieutenant Smith also looks worse than he did before because of recent revelations about his alleged psychological instability since he pleaded guilty. This could be particularly importantly important in a prosecution of Young, as Smith would apparently be a key witness against the Congressman in any prosecution involving the alleged illegal receipt of gratuities.

2. A controversy over the constitutionality over one of the feds’ primary weapons against public corruption has appeared to make them wary about bringing more complicated cases in this area.

One of the favorite arrows in the quiver of federal prosecutors in white-collar crime cases is “the honest services fraud statute.” The feds have for years used this law in the public corruption realm and against alleged corporate malefactors as well. Half of the 12 people who have been charged in the “POLAR PEN” probe, for example, have faced charging documents that have included at least one count of honest services fraud.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has given a number of hints in the past few months that it might rule this law unconstitutional soon. The Supreme Court just heard its third case during its current term on the honest services fraud statute—one of them being the case of former State Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch (R.-Juneau). All indications are that this controversial law is going to get pruned substantially or even ruled unconstitutional. This uncertainty over a preferred tool seems to be causing federal prosecutors all over the country to be hold back, and Ben Stevens and Don Young may be benefitting from the resulting legal limbo.

3. The combination of his extensive financial disclosures and—perhaps—his relative invisibility on incriminating tapes may help prevent the prosecution of Ben Stevens, and Don Young’s apparent receipt of things of relatively little value may be aiding Alaska’s only Congressman avoid charges.

Ben Stevens got 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 the combination of those two 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. This focus on tapes to prove intent has been true since before the famous ABSCAM cases in the 1970s, but the emphasis on such tangible and simple-seeming evidence has only increased with the popularity of such television programs as “CSI,” where technicians each week come up with scientific proof that a suspect committed a crime.

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 are powerful evidence, and tapes tend to trump other evidence.

An obstacle in prosecuting Ben Stevens is that there may be no evidence of him looking bad on tape. Absence from incriminating videotapes or audiotapes might occur through avoiding hanging out in the infamous VECO-rented Suite 604 or by not talking much on the telephone with Bill Allen or Rick Smith. If Ben Stevens has been able to stay out of the FBI’s greatest hits, he may be as smart—or at least as shrewd and cunning—as some of his former legislative colleagues say he is. (It’s also possible--as he and his attorneys would certainly assert—that Ben Stevens might never have been caught saying or doing anything incriminating on tape because he didn’t say or do anything incriminating.)

Aside from whatever the more than 17,000 conversations the feds intercepted in this investigation 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 got 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 when he served as a state legislator.

As to all that money from VECO that came in while his legislator when his work product may look tiny 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 Bill Allen seemed to call him so infrequently to work on matters such as advice on salvaging vessels.

Don Young may face even less problems that Ben Stevens, in part because the sheer volume of money going to Young as income—as opposed to campaign contributions—may not seem that impressive. As Mark Regan has pointed out in a guest post on this blog, documents made public in Allen’s sentencing suggested that the feds were investigating Young for matters that involved less than $200,000 in VECO expenses on campaign fundraisers over about 14 years and perhaps $1,000 in a set of golf clubs allegedly bought by Smith for Young with Allen’s credit card.

Numerous Alaskans would be surprised if Ben Stevens and Don Young escaped prosecution after being under investigation for years, but many people are probed a long time without being charged. 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. The criminal justice system has produced some odd outcomes in the public corruption sphere as well as in some less famous cases. 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 oilman Edward Doheny was acquitted of the charge of bribing Fall.

Additional caveats and acknowledgments: Recall again that Ben Stevens and Don Young would say that the reason that they have not been charged with crimes is that they are not guilty. Nothing in this analysis should be taken as expressing any view that any particular person is guilty of any crime. My background in both prosecution and criminal defense sharpened my thinking in writing this analysis of the factors involved in evaluating potential criminal charges. So did numerous conversations with other attorneys and journalists, including lawyers Mark Regan of Fairbanks and George Freeman of Anchorage. Those who have spoken with me are responsible for none of what might be bad about what I write and much of what is good.