Massive prosecutorial misconduct in Ted Steven's case detailed in new report

The special prosecutor who examined the botched prosecution of Ted Stevens said he found evidence of willful concealment of information from the late Alaska senator’s defense lawyers on at least three occasions, according to a lengthy investigation published today.

That evidence, special prosecutor Henry “Hank” Schuelke III said, would have aided Stevens’ defense of public corruption charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Two assistant U.S. attorneys, the report said, concealed information that went to the credibility of the government’s chief witness.

The report found that prosecutors in the Stevens case never conducted or supervised a comprehensive review of information that the government was obligated to provide to the Alaska senator’s defense attorneys.

The 525-page report digs into a host of issues, including discovery obligations and alleged mismanagement of the case. Supervisors decided the government would “have to play our cards close to the vest” in the prosecution, according to the report.

Schuelke, appointed by a Washington federal trial judge to investigate the Justice Department’s missteps, said that not only was the review for exculpatory information not supervised, “the prosecutors themselves were unsupervised.”