It’s hard to recall a high-profile case in recent years where the government has been involved in so many missteps. Here’s the latest one in the Stevens’ case.
By RICHARD MAUER
Anchorage Daily News
Federal prosecutors have found a new reason to apologize over misleading information they’ve provided to the judge in former Sen. Ted Stevens’ trial, and this time Stevens’ lawyers are saying the government should be held in contempt.
In a letter to the judge dated Jan. 30 and made public Thursday, William Welch, head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, said he erred when he said in January that government employees cited in an FBI agent’s complaint alleging improprieties by government officials “want their story to be made public.”
In fact, he wrote, not all of them gave their consent to having their names released Jan. 14 in a publicly filed copy of the eight-page complaint, though he didn’t identify which ones.
In the complaint, agent Chad Joy accused a fellow agent and prosecutors of violating FBI policy and fair-trial rules in the wide-ranging public corruption investigation in Alaska and in Stevens’ trial last year.
The new apology comes on top of a series of errors and misstatements made by prosecutors in connection with the complaint and other issues that arose during and after Stevens’ trial.
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