WASHINGTON — IN THE SPRING of 2009, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took the extraordinary step of asking a federal judge to dismiss corruption charges against former senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). This was no easy decision.
Mr. Stevens had been prosecuted by the Justice Department’s vaunted Public Integrity Section and convicted of failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from an Alaskan oil services firm and its former chief executive.
Yet Mr. Holder rightly sought a reversal of the conviction and vowed not to relaunch the prosecution after learning that his lawyers had failed to turn over information to the defense that could have called the government’s case into question.
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