Ted Stevens

A criminal inquiry into the way former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was prosecuted on public corruption charges will try to determine whether a team of federal lawyers intentionally deprived Stevens of a fair trial or simply made mistakes under pressure. The careers, and possibly the freedom, of six Justice Department prosecutors hang in the balance. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet G.

In a state with more tundra than turnpikes, Alaska's Ted Stevens is a political force. The former chairman and now ranking Republican on the influential U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, Stevens is known as a master of pork barrel politics, with a record of channeling billions of federal dollars to his home state. He has brought home so much federal funding, in fact, that the cash has been given a special name: Stevens money.

The indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) on corruption charges Tuesday throws into question his grip on a Senate seat he has held for decades and offers Democrats a chance to strengthen their hold on Congress. Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and a towering figure in Alaska's political history, was indicted by a federal grand jury here on charges that he concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from one of the state's most powerful employers.

In the first week of October 1999, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) had the government of Pakistan in a delicate position. The Pakistanis were desperate for the removal of powerful military and economic sanctions imposed after the country conducted nuclear tests in 1998. Many hundreds of millions of dollars in trade was at stake. Stevens was the chairman of the conference committee that was considering allowing that change.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) pleaded not guilty Thursday to seven counts of making false statements on his Senate financial disclosure forms by failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from one of his state's most powerful employers. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan set a tentative trial date for Sept. 24. Stevens, 84, is running for reelection and requested an expedited trial so the matter would be over before election day.

A federal grand jury in Washington indicted Sen. Ted Stevens on corruption charges Tuesday. The reaction in Alaska, four time zones away, was not so much "why?" as "why now?" After all, government prosecutors have been discussing the possibility for more than a year, and many Alaskans assumed that there would be no indictment in the run-up to the state's Aug. 26 GOP primary. The FBI raided the Girdwood home of Alaska's senior senator last summer. His colleague, Rep.

Sen. Ted Stevens accused the Justice Department of trampling on the independence of Congress, arguing Thursday that the corruption case against him should be thrown out. That legal argument will test the limits of a court ruling that prosecutors fear could limit their ability to investigate corruption on Capitol Hill. Stevens said FBI agents went too far when they questioned his Senate aides.

During an election year in which Democrats and Republicans are in a bare-knuckled fight to gain seats in Congress, Hawaii Democrat Daniel K. Inouye is traveling far and wide to work for a fellow senator's reelection. But the colleague Inouye is trying to help is a Republican, Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens, who has been indicted on corruption charges, has become a top Democratic target in a race that could be crucial to the party's hopes of securing a filibuster-proof majority.

The telephone conversation between the two businessmen concerned an old friend, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, and the subject was money -- or at least Stevens' feelings about it. "Ted gets hysterical when he has to spend his own money," said one of the callers. "I know," replied the other. In a corruption case where the core issue is whether Stevens knowingly accepted gifts in violation of federal law, the conversation, secretly recorded by federal investigators, could be crucial evidence.

The corruption trial of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens began Thursday with sharply divergent portraits of the long-serving Republican. In opening statements in the highly anticipated case, prosecutors accused Stevens of using his experience in the ways of Washington to "fly under the radar screen" and flout Senate rules requiring the disclosure of gifts and favors.