Ted Stevens' Trial May Have Been Flawed, but Senator's Unusual Connections to Convicted Contributor Aren't in Doubt

Stevens Trial May Have Been Flawed, but Senator's Unusual Connections to Convicted Contributor Aren't in Doubt

Former Senator Ted Stevens might be getting the "get out of jail free" card, although it was money that nearly put him there in the first place. The U.S. Department of Justice has asked the judge in Stevens's corruption case to throw out the Alaska Republican's conviction because prosecutors withheld evidence from the senator's defense team.

Stevens had been found guilty on seven counts of lying on his Senate financial disclosure forms about thousands of dollars in improper gifts from Bill Allen, the former chief executive of multinational oil services company VECO. Among those gifts was $250,000 in home renovations that Allen said the company paid for, according to prosecutors.

While the attorney general might question the fairness of the Stevens's trial, Alaska’s senator from 1969 to 2008 had clear financial connections with Allen and VECO. Stevens, who lost his re-election race in November shortly after the conviction, collected at least $156,000 in campaign contributions from VECO through his campaign and committees he used to support fellow Republican candidates. CRP calculated the total to Stevens and other federal lawmakers in 2007 after two VECO executives, including Allen, pleaded guilty to bribery in a separate case involving Alaska state legislators. At that time Allen acknowledged rewarding VECO executives with bonuses as repayment for campaign contributions, which is illegal, and paying employees to work on renovations of Stevens's property. The company has since been sold.

OpenSecrets.org's Personal Financial Disclosures database contains the six years of reports that the federal indictment said Stevens falsified, plus his other financial disclosures back to 1995
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Preserved on 5 April 2009
Published by Lindsay Renick Mayer on April 1, 2009 1:16 PM