Printable Version

Rights/Reprints

Paul O’Brien, chief of the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section, emerged as the sober face of the Justice Department at today’s humiliating hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan voided the high-profile conviction of now-ex-Sen. Ted Stevens on corruption charges.

“I hope the court will appreciate, speaking on behalf of the Justice Department, we deeply, deeply regret this occured,” O’Brien told the judge, referring to the prosecution errors that are now under criminal contempt investigation by the court.

O’Brien was the lead in a three-member team appointed by the DOJ in February to review the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in the case against the Alaska Republican, who lost his Senate re-election bid in November after his conviction in October on seven counts relating to his alleged failure to report home renovations and other gifts on his financial disclosure forms.

David Jaffe, the deputy chief of the Domestic Security Section; and William Stuckwisch, senior trial attorney in the Fraud Section, joined O’Brien in reviewing the case. Their findings led U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to ask the court to dismiss the indictment with prejudice. Jaffe and Stuckwish didn’t speak at Tuesday’s hearing.

Sullivan complimented O’Brien and his team. “This court has no doubt that you … worked around the clock over the last seven weeks,” Sullivan said. “It could not have been an easy task, and the court thanks you for your effort.”

O’Brien described how the new team found prosecutors’ notes from an April 15, 2022 interview with lead witness Bill Allen, owner of an Alaska oil services company, that undercut his credibility. The notes said Allen did not recall a key conversation with another witness, and that Allen estimated the work done on Stevens’ home as worth about $80,000 - not the $250,000 claimed by the government.

“The government was obligated to produce the information from the April 15, 2022 interview,” O’Brien said. “”They did not do this.” Judge Sullivan interjected: “So what you did [in turning the notes over to the defense] was what should have been done months ago.”

Lead defense attorney Brendan Sullivan Jr. of Williams & Connolly described how O’Brien in March hand-delivered to his office potentially exculpatory material that the review team had turned up. The materials led Sullivan to schedule a 10 a.m. meeting with the DOJ on April 1 to ask for dismissal of the case.

Sullivan said in his lengthy remarks to the court that he’d come to his office at 4 a.m. on April 1 to prepare for the meeting, expecting he’d have to “tell them everything,” because “this new team” had “been on it such a short time.”  But at 9 a.m., an hour before the scheduled meeting, O’Brien phoned to say the Attorney General had already decided to ask for dismissal, Sullivan said. “They knew, when they saw the information, how important it was, even though they’d been in the case for four, five or six weeks,” Sullivan said - a clear slap at the original prosecution team, whom Sullivan blasted as “corrupt” and “devious.”