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TPM Muckraker’s Zachary Roth looks at what went wrong in the government’s public corruption case against former lobbyist Kevin Ring, who was an associate of the now-imprisoned Jack Abramoff. The judge declared a mistrial Thursday after the jury deadlocked.

Kevin Ring (Getty Images)

The bottom line: Ring wasn’t a public official. And so the government had a hard time showing he did anything that was illegal at the time, TPM concludes.

Ring, a former lobbyist at Greenberg Traurig, was accused of showering officials at the Justice Department and in Congress with restaurant meals and event tickets, allegedly so they’d be kindly disposed to help Ring’s lobbying clients. That got Ring charged with honest services fraud. 

But former Justice Department prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg told TPM that it’s one thing to convince a jury that government officials broke the law by taking gifts. It’s another, more difficult argument to make that a lobbyist broke the law by offering gifts.

Zeidenberg said:

“If you’ve got a public official who’s elected by the people, and he’s stuffing his face at the trough, it’s more viscerally offensive to a jury…than when you’ve got a lobbyist …  What do you think lobbyists do?”

Congress later tightened gift and ethics laws in response to the Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Washington lawyer Stan Brand, who represents defendants in ethics and public corruption probes, told TPM that some of the 17 lobbyists, Hill staffers, and government officials who pleaded guilty in the Abramoff probe must now be wondering if they should have gone to trial.

“It could certainly make some of these defendants think, maybe they should have pushed harder,” Brand told TPM.

Brand also called the Ring mistrial another “setback” for the Public Integrity Section. The chief of the section and other lawyers there are under criminal contempt investigation by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan for their handling of evidence in the Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) case, which was later dismissed.

Prosecutors have said they intend to try Ring a second time.