Asserting that “the Justice Department did not live up to its solemn constitutional responsibilities,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) says she wants an independent investigation of the handling of child sex-abuse charges against the key prosecution witness in the trial of Sen. Ted Stevens, once one of the most powerful figures in Washington.
Lisa Murkowski (Getty)
Murkowski can no longer defer to Attorney General Eric Holder and accept his explanations for why the key witness, wealthy Alaska oil man Bill Allen, was not prosecuted on the sex charges, she declared in a letter to the offices of the DOJ’s acting inspector general and counsel for professional responsibility.
“I would like to believe that Department of Justice personnel followed applicable laws and departmental policies in its handling of the sex abuse allegations against Mr. Allen, just as U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan expected the Justice Department would follow the law in its decisions whether to release potentially exculpatory evidence to Senator Stevens’ defense team,” Murkowski said. “However, we now know that the Justice Department did not live up to its solemn constitutional responsibilities in the Stevens prosecution.”
Murkowski has previously called for a probe into why the DOJ did not prosecute Allen for transporting a minor prostitute across state lines, and why it did not allow the Alaska Department of Law to do so, either, as noted in a report by KTVA television in Anchorage. Her latest call for an inquiry comes as sexual abuse of minors has become a particularly incendiary topic because of allegations involving coaches at Penn State and Syracuse universities.
“Murkowski says she can’t just accept statements by Attorney General Eric Holder that there was no deal allowing Allen to avoid prosecution in exchange for testimony in the public corruption trials of Alaska politicians,” KTVA said.
“We take into consideration, a number of factors, among them being the age of the case, the reliability of the witnesses, the ability to say that we have a better than 50 percent chance of winning a case,” Holder said months ago, as KTVA recalled.
The DOJ’s prosecution of Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, ended in a conviction in 2008 on charges that he failed to report gifts from Allen, then the chief of an oil services company. Since the conviction, however, the case has become a long-running nightmare for DOJ.
Early in 2009, Holder took the extraordinary step of having the charges dismissed as allegations emerged that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that might have helped the defense. Those allegations have grown in seriousness and intensity, outraging the trial judge, Emmet Sullivan, and leading outside investigators to conclude that prosecutors willfully and intentionally withheld evidence, as Main Justice reported recently.
Stevens lost his Senate seat in 2008 and was killed in a plane crash last year. But the drama in which he was the star character plays on in Alaska, where a number of state lawmakers have been implicated. One was Ben Stevens, former president of the Alaska state senate and a Republican like his father, Ted. He, too, came under scrutiny for benefiting from Allen’s generosity, although he was recently told that he will not be prosecuted (see our report).
Cliff Groh, a former prosecutor who has blogged about the public corruption probe, told KTVA he thinks the outrage over Bill Allen is in part an attempt to rewrite history. “And there does seem to be a sentiment to want to wipe Alaska clean by putting all the blame on Bill Allen — unique pervert, deviate, demon. I just don’t think that works.”
Lately, there have been signs that the Alaska episode, in which Allen’s apparent weakness for underage girls is just one unsavory element, is winding down, as Main Justice reported. The episode has already brought deep professional embarrassment and official rebuke to some prosecutors, including one who took his own life.
And the embarrassment may not be over. Judge Sullivan is sitting on a 500-page report conducted by a special counsel he appointed, only a portion of which has been released, about the botched prosecution. He has said he hopes to release as much of the report as possible early in 2012.
