"Allen is a horrible witness," Nicholas Marsh, a young Justice Department lawyer brought in from Washington, D.C., to run some of the cases, complained in a 2007 email that defense lawyers for Kott saw only after his conviction. "He's been backsliding significantly on us.... He has now taken to volunteering, even when not asked, things like 'Pete Kott was my friend' and 'He never extorted me.'"
The coup de grâce was a whistle-blower complaint from FBI agent Chad Joy that said prosecution errors and omissions amounted to "serious violations" of federal rules and "possible criminal violations." Among other allegations, Joy said the lead FBI agent in the case had an improperly close relationship with Allen and other sources.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was furious, and the Justice Department moved on its own to dismiss the indictment against Stevens in April 2009 (the former senator was killed in a plane crash a little more than a year later). Kott and Kohring, whose lawyers went on to gain access to thousands of pages of new prosecution documents, had their convictions reversed on appeal and were offered new trials.
Then another prosecution fell apart. Then-Juneau lawmaker Bruce Weyhrauch was hauled before the court after he offered to work as a lawyer for Veco during the oil tax vote. But he never took any money, and a Supreme Court ruling heavily undermined prosecutors' alternative theory of wrongdoing — upholding a defense argument that Marsh and other prosecutors had impatiently dismissed.
Weyhrauch attorney Doug Pope said Marsh "believed he was the smartest guy in the building." But the truth, he believed, was that Marsh and other young prosecutors weren't being closely supervised from Washington. "I was saying before the trial, 'This is a bunch of kids playing in a sandbox. There's no adult supervision.'"
More than two years after they were launched, the investigations into prosecutorial misconduct remain ongoing and secret.
William Welch II, who headed the Justice Department's public integrity section, was transferred to Massachusetts. His deputy, Brenda Morris, who took the lead prosecution chair in the Stevens trial, transferred to Atlanta. Marsh, who spent much of four years detailed to Anchorage overseeing several of the cases, was relegated to the department's Office of International Affairs.
Marsh, his friends said, grew increasingly frustrated in what he saw as exile, fearing as the investigation dragged on that it would be found convenient to pile the blame on him for the prosecution's missteps, even though his actions had all been approved by his superiors, including Welch.
"He was extraordinarily ethical, someone of great character, which is why these allegations were particularly hard on him," said Josh Waxman, a Washington, D.C., attorney and Marsh's longtime friend.
Marsh believed his transfer out of active prosecutions "was a preview of how the investigation was going to turn out," Waxman said. "I believe it was a fateful one in his mind. It had deep, deep psychological impacts."
On Sept. 26, 2010, two days before Stevens was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, Marsh, 37, hanged himself in the basement of his Washington, D.C., home.
The Justice Department and the independent prosecutor have refused to say why the misconduct investigations still have not concluded. "Off the record," said one attorney involved in the case. "Are they waiting for another prosecutor to commit suicide?"
Many worry that blow-back over the prosecution's missteps will eclipse the fact that politicians were caught on tape taking bribes.
"The saddest part of all of this is somehow people think that Ted Stevens wasn't guilty," said Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "And he was. He did all those things. He was convicted, and he was convicted on real evidence," she said. "It's just that the Justice Department screwed up so much that the case was dismissed."
kim.murphy@latimes.com
