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A special prosecutor sorting through the wreckage of the case against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is investigating whether Justice Department lawyers pressured an FBI agent to falsify a summary of his notes from an interview with a government witness, according to people briefed on the matter.

Hank Schuelke (photo by Susana Raab for Main Justice)

The prosecutor, Henry Schuelke III, is examining a discrepancy, which has not been previously disclosed, in two sets of an FBI agent’s notes from an interview with Robert “Rocky” Williams, who helped with renovations to the Alaska Republican’s home, the people said. Schuelke is said to have found differences between the agent’s handwritten notes of the interview and a typewritten summary of the same notes, known in the FBI as a Form 302.

Schuelke has focused on whether two Assistant U.S. Attorneys in Alaska, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke, pressed the agent to change Williams’ statements in order to bolster the government’s case, according to those knowledgeable about the inquiry.

Schuelke, appointed by the federal judge who oversaw the trial, must now decide whether any of the lawyers violated criminal contempt statutes, and faces a difficult decision about whether to charge any of the six prosecutors involved.

The prosecutor is said to have finished interviews and gathering evidence, after roughly a year of investigating the circumstances that led to the collapse of the most prominent public corruption case in decades.

Lawyers for Bottini and Goeke, O’Melveny & Myers LLP partner Kenneth Wainstein and Kobre & Kim LLP partner Matthew Menchel, issued a joint statement to Main Justice: “We are refraining from any public comment on this matter out of deference to the special prosecutor’s ongoing investigation. We are cooperating fully with that investigation, and we have every confidence that it will ultimately reveal the truth about the character and integrity of our clients.”

Brenda Morris enters the courthouse. Behind her is prosecutor Joseph Bottini. (Getty Images)

The FBI agent at the center of the issue is Chad Joy, who jointly led “Polar Pen, ” the FBI corruption investigation in Alaska in which Stevens was the most prominent politician to be charged. Joy filed a whistleblower complaint in 2008, alleging multiple abuses by the government, including that prosecutors withheld documents from Stevens’ lawyers and mishandled witnesses.

The complaint, however, does not refer to Joy’s interviews with Williams, who is now deceased. Nor does it claim that Bottini and Goeke influenced him to tailor the 302.

Joy’s lawyer, Judith Wheat of Griffith & Wheat PLLC, said her client “has been fully cooperative” in Schuelke’s probe but declined to comment further.

The people emphasized that Schuelke’s investigation is not limited to the questions surrounding Joy’s interview with Williams. But the new details suggest Schuelke has probed far beyond allegations made by Joy and Stevens’ defense lawyers.

A finding that prosecutors intentionally violated their obligation to turn over exculpatory material could lead to criminal charges, possibly in an indictment, under rarely invoked provisions of federal contempt statutes.

The focus on the Form 302 also appears likely to further energize an ongoing debate in federal law enforcement over the FBI’s practice of documenting witness and suspect interviews by hand in most cases. Many state and local agencies record interviews using video or audio equipment. An influential advisory body of U.S. Attorneys recently began studying the FBI practice, a strong signal the Justice Department aims to change it.

In addition to Schuelke’s inquiry, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting a separate investigation of the six lawyers, though Schuelke and ethics investigators have shared some information, the people said. Neither Schuelke nor the ethics unit have indicated when they will be finished.

Stevens was convicted in October 2008 of omitting thousands of dollars in home renovations and other gifts from his Senate financial disclosure forms. In April 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder asked the court to throw out the case after learning of irregularities in the way prosecutors shared evidence with Stevens’ defense team, led by Williams & Connolly LLP partners Brendan Sullivan Jr. and Robert Cary.

Matt Friedrich with the Ted Stevens prosecution team outside the D.C. federal courthouse last October. (Getty Images)

Goeke and Bottini jointly prosecuted the case with Washington-based DOJ trial lawyers Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan, and Brenda Morris, a supervisor in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In addition, Schuelke is investigating William Welch II, the chief of the Public Integrity Section at the time.

At the outset of Schuelke’s investigation, court documents and Joy’s complaint pointed to the department’s mishandling of 302s from FBI interviews with the government’s star witness, Bill Allen, the former chief executive officer of an oil services company that financed major improvements to Stevens’ “chalet” in Girdwood, Alaska.

Joy singled out Marsh, accusing him of lobbying the prosecution team to withhold a 302 statement that seemed to undercut a key government argument – that Stevens knew the home renovations were the product of Allen’s largesse. In October 2008, the federal judge presiding over the case, Emmet Sullivan, reprimanded the prosecutors after they belatedly turned over the document to Stevens’ lawyers.

Days before, Sullivan had dressed down the department for allowing Williams, another key witness, to return to Alaska without informing the court or Stevens’ lawyers.  An employee of Allen, Williams had helped on the renovations to Stevens’ home, although how much Williams helped is a matter of dispute. Accounting records showed he worked full-time on the project. But his grand jury testimony and his statements to FBI agents suggested he put in fewer hours.

Williams’s time sheet was important because it bolstered prosecutors’ arguments that Allen and his company, Veco Corp., had financed much of the renovations. At one point Williams told investigators the general contractor whom Stevens had hired — and paid — did 99 percent of the work. In a later interview, Williams said he had no recollection of saying that.

Stevens’s lawyers accused the government of sending Williams back to Alaska to prevent them from cross-examining him or calling him as a witness. In his whistleblower complaint, Joy similarly accused prosecutors of dispatching Williams after he performed poorly during a mock cross-examination.

The government countered that Williams, who suffered from liver disease, was never called because he was in poor health. Williams died in December 2008.

In interviews with the Anchorage Daily News before his death, Williams said he was approached by the FBI in 2006 and was interviewed extensively by Joy and co-case agent Mary Beth Kepner, whom Joy later accused of misconduct in his whistleblower complaint.

Williams never had an attorney present during the interviews, he told the newspaper. “I’ve got nothing to hide. Don’t worry about it a whole lot,” he said.