William Welch Resigns Post of Chief of Public Integrity Section

Anchorage—


The head of the Washington, D.C.-based team that investigated and prosecuted public corruption in Alaska for more than six years has announced that he will leave his job.

Since March of 2007, William M. Welch II has been chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section, an elite unit of about 30 federal prosecutors who combat public corruption around the country. In that capacity, he supervised the “POLAR PEN” investigation, a probe of public corruption in Alaska that started in the summer of 2003. That investigation has produced criminal charges against 12 people—eight public officials and four lobbyists and power brokers.

The Public Integrity Section has not lost any of those cases in front of a jury, but did have the highest-profile case—against U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens—thrown out on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct after the jury rendered guilty verdicts. Two other defendants—former State Reps. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River) and Vic Kohring (R.-Wasilla)—have been released from prison while a judge sorts out allegations of government wrongdoing in the trials which led to their convictions.

Welch is one of six prosecutors under investigation themselves as a result of the bungled handling of the Ted Stevens case. There are actually two probes of those prosecutors: an internal investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility and a highly unusual probe by a special prosecutor looking at whether the prosecutors committed criminal contempt of court.

The departure of Welch means that most of those six prosecutors have now left the jobs they held during the Ted Stevens trial.

Welch said that he would be returning to his native Massachusetts, where he will remain an employee of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.

Lanny A. Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, told the Washington Post that Welch is "a dedicated public servant who's devoted his entire professional life to serving the American people." Breuer said that he and Welch had come to a "mutual decision" about what was best for the prosecutor and the division.

Welch’s lawyer issued a prepared statement that said “While the ultimate result in the Stevens case has been highly disappointing professionally and personally, Bill knows that his management decisions, where permitted, comported with his own and the department's highest ethical standards."

The Washington Post, which broke this story late last week, said that Raymond Hulser would be the acting chief of the Public Integrity Section upon Welch’s departure on October 30. The newspaper said that a nationwide search would be launched to find a new chief for the section.

Catch-Up II

Anchorage--

1. In a further sign of the turmoil that rolled over the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section following the post-trial meltdown of the Ted Stevens case, William Welch has been taken off his duties as supervisor of another case arising out of investigation of Congressional corruption. The Associated Press reported last week that Welch is no longer overseeing the prosecution of former lobbyist Kevin Ring, a former associate of jailed uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Now one of the subjects of two investigations into prosecutorial misconduct in the Ted Stevens case, Welch is apparently still at least nominally the chief of the Public Integrity Section despite the reported shifts in his work assignments flagged by the Washington Post and noted in this blog yesterday.

2. Additional fall-out from the prosecutors’ problems in the Alaska public corruption cases showed up in District Judge John Sedwick’s order addressing former State Rep. Pete Kott’s request that the public pay for his attorney in the unusual post-trial review of his conviction. Judge Sedwick said that while it was a close question as to whether Kott’s financial situation made him eligible for court-appointed and taxpayer-funded counsel, the federal prosecutors’ unusual screw-up in this case tipped the balance. “[T]he expansion of this case arising from the United States’ admitted, and remarkable, failure to timely provide all of the discovery required…stretches Mr. Kott’s modest means too far.” For a judge in mid-litigation to call one party’s past action “remarkable” is itself fairly remarkable. (Hat tip: Anchorage Daily News.)

Addenda to Clean-Up II

Anchorage--

For an op-ed piece describing the questionable involvements of Ted Stevens and Ben Stevens in fisheries legislation, see John Strohmeyer, "Will feds pursue Stevens on fisheries?" in the Anchorage Daily News edition of April 19, 2009 (web-posted on April 18, 2009), available at http://www.adn.com/opinion/comment/strohmeyer/story/764313.html on the Internet.

For an article on the challenges faced by the Attorney General in dealing with the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section--the outfit that has been running the Alaska public corruption investigation and quarterbacking the prosecution of the cases flowing from it--you should check out Charlie Savage's piece "Elite Unit's Problems Pose Test for Attorney General" in today's edition of the New York Times, which can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/us/politics/08justice.html?_r=1&hpw on the Internet.