Usually when a sitting U.S. Senator is caught up in a corruption scandal, it quickly becomes big news. In Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-Alaska) case, the story is still just below the surface, but if the initial reports are any indication of where this is going, Stevens may soon be going down “the tubes.”
TPMM explained yesterday that Stevens “jacked his house off the ground, inserted a new first story and placed the old first floor on top, thanks to the help of a top executive at local oil company Veco Corp. who hired at least one key contractor to complete the feat of a job.”
This is noteworthy in large part because of a federal criminal investigation of Veco that has led to guilty pleas from two former executives of the company on bribery and conspiracy charges. The scandal has already ensnared four Alaska politicians, all Republicans, including state Senate President Ben Stevens, Ted Stevens’ son.
In the case of doubling the size of Ted Stevens’ house, the project is now drawing federal scrutiny, not just because Veco is involved, but also because Veco “was not in the business of residential construction or remodeling.”
Today, it got slightly worse.
In Aug. 2006, the Bush administration took the unusual step of blocking the Sen. Stevens from having any say in choosing the new U.S. attorney for the state:
“Stevens has been trying to get an Alaska lawyer appointed U.S. attorney here, but for one reason or another the people he recommended have been knocked out, a spokesman for the senator said Wednesday.”
Instead, the Justice Department brought in a prosecutor from Pittsburgh. A Stevens aide told the Anchorage Daily News that the senator was “furious at the way the attorney general handled this.” In Sept. 2006, the Justice Department recused the entire U.S. attorney’s office in Alaska from the case, explaining that it would be run out of the department’s Public Integrity section.
Stevens can be furious all he wants, but the fact that the DoJ doesn’t want him involved in the U.S. Attorney’s office in any way suggests Justice officials suspect Stevens of some wrongdoing.
As far as the federal probe is concerned, the AP noted today that two sources close to the investigation said “Stevens was not considered a target of the investigation.”
As Laura McGann explained, that shouldn’t necessarily comfort the senator or his supporters.
The carefully-crafted language “I’m not a target” has been peddled by other politicians tied to investigations, like former Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA).
The phrase makes the politician sound practically exonerated, when really, prosecutors tend to wait to send out a “target” letter until shortly before an indictment is issued. (Feel like pleading guilty? Now’s your chance.) Former number two at the Interior Department J. Steven Griles was named a target in the Abramoff scandal in January; he pled guilty to lying to Congress in March.
We haven’t learned about any GOP lawmakers finding themselves under criminal investigation in weeks. I guess we were due for a new one.