Stevens’ Prosecutors Play Defense, but Rally

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Stevens Telephone Recordings

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By Friday afternoon, the defense was in full swing, and the judge said to the jury, “We’re still working on the temperature here, it’s a little bit warmer.”

Some of that warmth apparently was the radiance of the star defense witness, former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

With Powell’s arrival, spectators filled the courtroom, and the general offered a fiery defense of Stevens. Powell said Stevens’ reputation is, “in a word, sterling.”

Powell said that throughout the 1980s, when he held several senior military positions that required him to work closely with Congress, he frequently dealt with Stevens. Powell said Stevens was direct and straightforward and would stand by any agreement he had made. There was “never any suggestion that he would be doing anything that was in any way improper,” Powell said.

“He fights for his state, he fights for his people, but at the same time he has the best interests of his country at heart.”

Powell said that in the terms of the infantry ranks from which he rose, “this is a guy you take on a long patrol.”

While it was delivered to a smaller audience, the more significant testimony might have been that of Tony Hannah, the contractor whom Stevens paid about $3,700 to raise the house 10 feet. Anderson had described this portion of the work the day before, explaining how he had loosened the bolts underneath the house, installed the jacks to raise it and built the new first-floor walls to place the house back down on.

But Hannah said he had loosened the bolts and done the other preparatory work for raising the house. After it was up in the air, he said, he had to come back several times before lowering the house back down because each time he returned, the first-floor walls were incomplete.

He said the job would normally take a week to 10 days, but Stevens’ house took about five weeks. And he said he did not recall ever meeting Anderson.

Stevens’ team also called two officials from the Anchorage assessors office to testify Friday. The official who assessed the Senator’s house after the renovations testified that she evaluated the upgrade as adding $106,000 to the home’s value, and she said she evaluated that work as “C+” quality. The other official testified that the assessed value of Stevens home rose from $87,500 before the renovations to $192,300 afterward.

The prosecution has argued that VECO and Allen spent about $188,000 on the renovations that Stevens did not repay and did not disclose as a gift. But the defense has noted that Stevens paid other contractors about $160,000 for working on the house. Stevens’ attorneys have argued before the judge — and are likely to make this point in closing — that because he paid $160,000 and the value of his house increased by a little more than $100,000, there was no reason for the Senator to assume that he had not paid the full cost of the renovation work. And because he paid more than the value increase, he received no gifts.

As the fortunes of his defense have risen and fallen, Stevens has remained stoic throughout. He has barely smiled, chatted only occasionally with his legal counsel and generally passively watched testimony or occasionally taken notes.

He has chatted with courtroom sketch artists during breaks in the proceedings, and on Friday he exchanged silent waves with some of his Alaskan neighbors as they departed the witness chair to head back to the Last Frontier, where the cold is more predictable.

Stevens’ defense is likely to call about a dozen more witnesses before it rests, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and the case may be before the jury by midweek.