Stevens’ Prosecutors Play Defense, but Rally

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Stevens Telephone Recordings

• Stevens Audiotape, Part 1
• Stevens Audiotape, Part 2
• Stevens Audiotape, Part 3

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The federal government’s criminal prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) ran hot and cold last week — literally.

An apparent problem with the thermostats in courtroom 24 of the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse left the room frigid by Wednesday night, when the government’s case appeared to be teetering on the verge of collapse.

But prosecutors and courthouse maintenance staged a comeback the next day, and by Thursday afternoon, the courtroom was temperate and the government appeared to have re-established the theory of its case — that Stevens must have known workers from his pal’s oil services company were spending hundreds of hours on an extreme makeover of his home and that the Senator wasn’t paying for any of it.

Strangely, the government’s listing case appeared to have been righted by a witness prosecutors had not intended to call.

By Wednesday night, the government’s case appeared on the brink of collapse because of prosecutors’ repeated mishandling of evidence.

Judge Emmet Sullivan railed against prosecutors for repeatedly failing to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense, suggesting the government had tried to intentionally bury some evidence and had allowed a witness to enter evidence into the case that the government knew was false. As he had the week before, Sullivan considered a defense motion to dismiss the case.

Instead, he decided to strike key evidence from the record — including evidence the government had offered to establish the hours that workers spent renovating Stevens’ home.

What seemed even more daunting for prosecutors was Sullivan’s announcement that he would tell the jury that the government had intentionally presented false evidence, a statement that probably would raise doubts in the minds of the jurors about the rest of the case against Stevens.

But in the frosty courtroom Thursday morning, even the judge’s temper appeared to have cooled.

He agreed to soften the language of his instruction to the jury, essentially eliminating the reference to false evidence, and allowed prosecutors to call one last witness, despite their indication the night before that they had finished their case.

That decision outraged the defense.

Lead defense attorney Brendan Sullivan punched his right fist into his left palm and threw his arms up in exasperation.

Defense attorney Robert Cary told the judge that he was allowing the prosecution to paper over a serious violation of Stevens’ rights. “They were sanctioned for their conduct,” Cary said, but now “they want to reverse, rewind and pretend like it never happened.”

It quickly became clear why the defense was so upset.

The prosecution called Dave Anderson, a former welder for VECO, the oil services company owned by his uncle Bill Allen. It was Anderson’s timesheets that the judge had stricken from the record.

Anderson spent nearly two hours narrating a slide show of the renovation project at Stevens’ home, while chilled jurors in shawls and heavy coats shifted in their seats to keep warm. Anderson detailed the months that he and other VECO employees spent jacking up the house, leveling the land, pouring a concrete foundation for a new garage, welding supports for a new second-floor deck and installing a bedroom balcony and fire escape. Backhoes and other heavy construction equipment lurked in the background of the photos.

Coupled with the dozens of e-mails that the prosecution had already presented in which friends kept Stevens informed about the details of the progress of the work on his house, the evidence cast a shadow on the Senator’s contention that he did not know VECO workers were dedicating hundreds of hours to the project.

The prosecution rested and the defense began its case, which appears to be aimed partly at establishing that Stevens paid a fair price for the renovations and partly at having high-profile witnesses testify to the Senator’s overall integrity.