Bill Welch (© 2009 The Republican Company)
The former chief of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, who stepped down amid a criminal investigation of his team’s handling of the prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, emerged Thursday as the lead prosecutor in a high-profile leak case.
William Welch II, who was chief of Public Integrity Section from 2007 to 2009, was named in a Justice Department news release announcing the indictment of Thomas Andrews Drake, a former National Security Agency official accused of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter.
Late last year, Welch returned to Springfield, Mass., where he had been an Assistant U.S. Attorney before joining the Public Integrity section as a deputy chief in 2006. He remains an employee of the Criminal Division with the title “Senior Litigation Counsel” but is based in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts. The Drake indictment was filed in Maryland on Wednesday with Welch’s signature.
The department recently selected Jack Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, to replace Welch as section chief. Raymond Hulser, who will be Smith’s Principal Deputy, has led the section on an acting basis since Welch’s departure.
Welch’s former Principal Deputy in the Public Integrity Section, Brenda Morris, who is also under investigation, left Washington under similar circumstances. In September, she moved to U.S. Attorney’s office in Atlanta for personal reasons but is still identified by the department as Senior Litigation Counsel in the Criminal Division.
She, too, recently surfaced in a high-profile public corruption investigation involving Alabama lawmakers and gambling legislation.
The cases are the first public indication that the prosecutors have continued to handle sensitive matters for the department since Stevens’ conviction on false statement charges was thrown out roughly one year ago. A court-appointed prosecutor is investigating whether the six lawyers involved in the prosecution violated criminal contempt statutes by withholding evidence favorable to Stevens’ defense.
The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting a separate investigation. Both probes are near completion, people familiar with them say.
Nicholas Marsh, another member of the Stevens trial team, has also been in the public eye since his transfer out of the Public Integrity Section last summer. As a lawyer in the department’s Office of International Affairs, Marsh was involved in requesting the extradition of Roman Polanski to face sentencing in the U.S. for having sex with a minor three decades ago.
