On Friday, January 2, the United States Senate adjourned sine die. When it did, Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, who had been Alaska's senior senator for more years than a majority of his constituents are old, ended his political career in ignominy after having been defeated for reelection in November after having been convicted of seven felonies in October.
I first met Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1978, when I testified on behalf of the Rural Alaska Community Action Program (RuralCAP) before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to urge the Committee to include in H.R. 39, a bill to establish new parks, refuges, and wilderness areas in Alaska, a provision that would protect subsistence hunting and fishing from capricious regulation by the State of Alaska. I finished and the opportunity to ask questions moved down the dais to Senator Stevens, who, with his lip curled and a pugnacious angry edge to his voice that, I had not expected, Ted lectured me and everyone else in the hearing room that the provision RurALCAP wanted "will be in this bill over my dead body."
That's how it kicked off. I was 31 and Ted was 54. Today, I am 61 and Ted is 85.
In 1980, Congress included the provision RurALCAP wanted in H.R. 39. And Ted Stevens let it happen, not only because he did not have the votes to prevent it, but also because, as I came to understand better years later, when his temper dampens down, Ted Stevens is a pragmatist, rather than an ideologue.
After our first dust-up, for the next 15 years I represented the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), which frequently took me into Ted Stevens's Capitol Hill office. And when I departed AFN, I continued to represent Alaska clients regarding legislative matters that required me to work with Ted and his staff. In 1997, when Alaska Governor Tony Knowles got into the soup by mishandling a lawsuit that had potentially disastrous consequences for the State of Alaska, Ted hired me to handle his request to the U.S. Supreme Court that the Court straighten the situation out, which it did. And when I wrote a book about the history of the Alaska Native land claims movement, Ted was extremely generous to me with his time and recollections. That book, Take My Land Take My Life, contains the only published Ted Stevens political biography to 1971. As a consequence and by default, Take My Land is cited as a principal source at the end of the Ted Stevens biography posted on Wikipedia.
Even though I am a Democrat who has never voted for Ted Stevens or given his campaigns a dime, over the past thirty years I have come to like Ted personally and to have immense respect for his intelligence, his tenacity, and his work ethic. But I have no respect for the bilious hair-triggered-tempered abuse that, throughout his career in the Senate, Ted Stevens regularly inflicted, not only on colleagues and staff, but on any and everyone unlucky enough to find him or herself within range when a messenger delivered a message that, no matter how courteously it was conveyed, Ted Stevens did not want to hear.
Simply put, Ted Stevens is, and has always been, a truculent bully who over the years became so used to demanding to have everything his own way--and usually getting it--that he came to consider his most reprehensible character defect a virtue in which he took pride by bragging about what a mean son-of-a-bitch he is and wearing his signature Incredible Hulk necktie onto the floor of the Senate.
After watching Ted Stevens operate for as many years as I have, my view of it is that it was that absolute worst element of his nature that is responsible for the situation in which Ted now finds himself. Because while his loss of his Senate seat in the November election was by no means inevitable, his felony convictions for having hidden petty graft that in his mind was no graft at all, or something like them, were inevitable. Because, while it is an old saw, Lord Acton is right that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." And for at least the last twenty years, Ted Stevens has ruled Alaska as if he were Louis XIV, the Sun King who believed that he was the center of his own universe.
In Ted Stevens's universe, the coins of the realm were constituent service and federal money.
In 1975 when I was a legal services attorney in Bethel, the hardscrabble river front town that serves as the county seat of sorts for the 56 Yup'ik Eskimo villages that are scattered across the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, I represented three teenage Native girls who had been refused employment on a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) fire crew because the crew boss refused to allow women to work for him. By the time I learned about the situation, the time period for filing an employment discrimination claim with the BLM had run. So someone suggested that I write to Ted Stevens, Mike Gravel, who at the time was Alaska's other senator, and Don Young, Alaska's congressman, and ask for their help. So I did.
I received a form letter back from Don Young in which he said he soon would be back in touch. But he never was. I received nothing at all from Mike Gravel. But three weeks later I received a letter from Ted Stevens in which the senator wrote that he wholeheartedly agreed with me that my clients deserved an opportunity to file their claim and that he had spoken with Curt Berkland, the national director of the BLM, and Director Berkland had assured him that the BLM's Anchorage office would accept the claim even though it had no legal obligation to do so.
I was elated and for weeks thereafter told everyone what a terrific senator Ted Stevens was for intervening personally with the national director of the BLM to help out my nobody clients. I now know that Ted Stevens likely knew nothing about the matter, that his signature machine signed the letter I received, and that a junior member of his staff, or even an intern, simply made a telephone call to someone on Curt Berkland's staff. But for 40 years thousands of Alaskans received similar help from Ted Stevens's constituent service operation. With that political capital in the bank, whenever he was up for reelection, including last November, the Stevens campaign would broadcast television commercials in which grateful Alaskans looked into the camera and told stories like mine.
Ted Stevens's power inside the Senate to insert into almost any bill he wanted (and particularly into appropriations bills) almost anything he wished in order to move federal dollars into private bank accounts in Alaska is legendary. I can think of twenty examples. Here are three:
In 1971 Ted Stevens was instrumental in persuading Congress to enact the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which settled aboriginal land claims by giving 200 village and 12 regional corporations owned by Alaska Native shareholders title to 44 million acres of land and $962.5 million, $462.5 million of which was paid by the U.S. Treasury. Although no one in the Alaska Native community today will admit to it, by 1984 a significant amount of the $962.5 million had been lost through the inexperience and incompetence of the Native managers and directors of the corporations, as well as through rank corruption.
There was no possibility that Congress would agree to recapitalize the corporations by throwing good federal money after bad. So Ted, who at the time was the Assistant Majority Leader of the Senate, quietly arranged with Kansas Senator Bob Dole, who at the time was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to have Congress alter an obscure provision in the Internal Revenue Code in order to facilitate the sale by ANCSA corporations of their operating losses to corporations like General Motors, which then were allowed to deduct the village and regional corporations' losses from their own balance sheets.
When the IRS refused to allow ANCSA corporations to take full advantage of the arrangement, Ted inserted an amendment into the 1986 Tax Reform Act which overruled the IRS. When he did so, Ted lectured the Senate that it had a moral obligation to accept his amendment because the ANCSA corporations were in "poor financial shape" and had "incurred large net operating losses" "largely as the result of the federal government's delay in implementing the [ANCSA] settlement." As Ted knew as well as I did, the idea that it was the federal government's fault that the money was gone was utter nonsense. But even worse, Ted told the Senate that his amendment would cost the U.S. Treasury only $50 million. The real number will never be known (except to the IRS). The best guesstimate is that the ANCSA corporation net operating loss tax amendment, which had not been introduced as a stand-alone bill and about which no hearing was held prior to its blithe acceptance on Ted Stevens's vouch by an inattentive Senate, may have cost the U.S. Treasury as much as $1 billion: $700 million to the ANCSA corporations, $300 million to corporations like General Motors.
In 1997 Ted Stevens became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee on which he had served since 1973. In 1998, Ted summoned the managers and attorneys who worked for the Seattle and Anchorage-based fishing companies, whose vessels harvested Bering Sea pollock, to the Appropriations Committee's ornate hearing room on the first floor of the Capitol. I was one of them. When we assembled, Ted Stevens walked in with Washington Senator Slade Gorton and Trevor McCabe, the member of Ted's staff who handled commercial fishing legislation. Ted told us that we had been summoned in order to spend as much time we needed cloistered behind the hearing room's massive oak doors to divide up among ourselves the Bering Sea pollock catch - a public resource worth $600 million annually.
Over the next several months we did so in a negotiation that Trevor McCabe supervised that was tantamount to the Beagle Boys dividing up Scrooge McDuck's fortune. When we finished, Ted plugged our work product - which Trevor, who did the drafting, wryly named the "American Fisheries Act" (AFA) - into that year's 637-page Omnibus Appropriations Act. Like the ANCSA corporation net operating loss tax amendment, no bill, no public hearing. No one knows the amount of money the owners of those companies have made over the past ten years from the private monopoly the AFA created, but no doubt the number is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the same Omnibus Appropriations Act, Ted just as quietly plugged in another provision whose enactment created an entity called the Denali Commission whose only mission is to be a conduit for moving Ted Stevens-appropriated federal dollars out of the U.S. Treasury and into rural Alaska: $20 million in 1999, $25 million in 2000, $65 million in 2001. And so on.
In exchange for constituent service and federal money, what Ted Stevens received from Alaska voters in return was a blank check to do in the Senate whatever he wished. His votes were rarely reported, much less scrutinized, by the Alaska press because few Alaska voters cared how their senator voted. His support for abortion rights? Few evangelical fundamentalist Christian voters cared. For years Ted was either the chairman or ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. His position on installing a missile defense system on Russia's western border? Who knows? Who cares? His support for the Iraq war? That's Ted's business. His support for the Bush tax cuts? Ditto. Ted Stevens was so bullet proof that he could risk taking what for most of his colleagues would be a shot gun slug through the heart by publicly supporting congressional pay raises because, for Ted Stevens, there was no risk. Prior to the November 2008 election, in seven previous elections, Ted Stevens never received less than 59 percent of the vote. He had not faced a credible Democratic opponent since 1984. And in the 2002 election, Stevens got 78 percent of the Alaska vote.
Last November the pact Ted Stevens made so long ago with Alaska voters almost held. Even though he had been indicted for seven felonies and his trial had concluded (although the jury still was out), a week before the election, a friend emailed me: "Everyone I know is voting for him. Underscore everyone. I'm torn as to judging him - very furious with Bill Allen, Catherine Stevens, and, truth be told, the senator himself. But I'm still planning to vote for him and to drag my minor children out into the cold on Tuesday to wave signs at the Old Glenn Highway overpass. I can't help it. I'm loyal and I/we have him to thank for the state-of-the-art hospital in which we receive all of our excellent health care."
While a lot of Alaskans I know, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike, felt the same sense of obligation, Ted Stevens lost the November 2008 election to Democrat Mark Begich, the boy mayor of Anchorage who at forty-six is within striking range of being young enough to be Ted's grandson, by only 3,724 votes out of more than 315,000 cast. Ironically, the voters whose repudiation of Ted Stevens allowed Mark to sneak by were members of that segment of the Alaska electorate for whom for 40 years Ted Stevens had done more than he had for any other: Native voters in the villages.
Of the 103,00 residents of Alaska who self-report that they have some percentage of indigenous Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut blood in their veins, 45,000 live in or surrounding Anchorage, or one of Alaska's other major population centers. It is not possible to know how they voted. Most of the rest live in one of more than 200 small rural communities that, for the purposes of ANCSA, Congress has designated as "Native villages." Most of those communities have no cash economy other than the ersatz cash economy that government has created. And fiscal year after fiscal year, a huge hunk of that government money has come from Ted Stevens. So after Ted Stevens himself, it was Native voters in the villages who had the most personal stake in seeing Ted reelected.
But in the six election districts in which most Native villages are located, Mark Begich beat Ted Stevens 14,896 votes to 11,417, a 3,479 vote margin that was only 245 votes short of Begich's 3,724-vote statewide margin of victory.
And there is an even more telling statistic.
In the same election, Don Young, the crusty, blunt-talking Republican who has been Alaska's lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives almost as long as Ted Stevens had been a senator, faced the toughest reelection challenge of his career in the guise of Ethan Berkowitz, a former state legislator. A runaway rich kid from San Francisco, Berkowitz was Harvard-educated and adequately financed. But what he most had going for him was the malodorous scent of corruption that was swirling around Don. The allegation, which the U.S. House of Representatives has asked the Department of Justice to investigate, is that when Don was chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure he traded a $10 million federal highway project quid pro quo to a Florida real estate developer for $40,000 worth of campaign contributions.
When he wants to be, Don Young can be a terrific one-on-one campaigner, which is an asset in a state with a population as small as Alaska's in which all politics are retail. But every poll predicated that Don was going to lose the election and lose it badly. But Don Young beat Ethan Berkowitz by an astonishing 16,280 votes.
A lot of those votes came from the six Native village election districts. But the vote counts tell an even more interesting story about why the Ted Stevens-Mark Begich election turned out as it did. In those six districts, Mark Begich and Ethan Berkowitz received almost the same number of votes, 14,896 votes for Begich, 14,886 votes for Berkowitz. But Don Young won 15,411 votes, while Ted Stevens won only 11,417. That means that 3,994 Native voters who voted for Don Young could not bring themselves to vote for Ted Stevens. That's another way to explain how Ted lost the election.
After the election when I surveyed friends who live in the Bush who I thought could explain the Stevens and Young vote counts, what they told me was that what turned away Native voters who otherwise would have supported him was Stevens's conviction, not his indictment. And after thinking about it, I think that likely is the correct explanation.
Every October the Alaska Federation of Natives holds its annual convention, usually, as it did last October, in Anchorage. Several thousand Native leaders and opinion-makers from every Native village in Alaska get together for three days in one room. And the convention is broadcast live into every television set in every Native village.
On Saturday, October 25, Ted Stevens, was in Washington, D.C., waiting for the verdict in his trial to come in. So in the Anchorage Convention Center a speech that Ted had videotaped was projected onto twenty-foot tall screens and was broadcast into the villages. The speech was the usual amalgamation of reminders to the delegates about the wonderful things their senator had done for them and the even more wonderful things he was going to do for them when he was reelected (most of which involved federal appropriations of one kind or another). When the speech ended, Ted called in live. When he rang off, the several thousand Natives in the convention hall gave the voice on the telephone a standing ovation.
Watching from the back of the room, I concluded that most Native voters in the villages who had voted for Ted Stevens in past elections would vote for him again no matter how the trial played out because they continued to understand the relationship between Ted's reelection and their economic self-interest. But I was wrong.
Two days later, Monday, October 27, the jury on which Ted Stevens had been waiting came in with a guilty verdict on each of the seven felony counts with which Ted had been charged, most of which involved Ted's failure to report $250,000 worth of free remodeling work on his house in Girdwood, the ski resort south of Anchorage, that he had received from Bill Allen, a corpulent former oil field worker who for more than twenty years had been the oil industry's bagman in Juneau, the state capitol. Eight days later Stevens lost the election.
It is impossible to prove. But I believe Ted Stevens would have won if on election day he had been indicted, but not yet convicted. And he certainly would have won if he had been acquitted.
If that is correct, then Ted Stevens has no one to blame for the defeat and disgrace that, notwithstanding a lifetime of public service, will be his legacy, but himself. Because Mark Begich did not beat Ted Stevens. Ted Stevens beat Ted Stevens.
When he was indicted, Ted hired Brendan "Mr. Chairman, I am not a potted plant" Sullivan, one of Washington, D.C.'s preeminent trial lawyers who is best known for having made a fool of Ted's "brother," Senator Daniel Inouye, in 1987 when Sullivan represented Colonel Oliver North during the televised Iran-Contra hearings that Inouye chaired. Sullivan and his law firm, Williams & Connolly, are as expensive as they come. And everyone I know who is in a position to know estimates that Williams & Connolly's representation cost Ted Stevens at least a million dollars and it probably cost a lot more. Since Ted does not have that kind of money, how Williams & Connolly is being paid and by whom is a mystery about which both the Alaska press and the national press have been oddly incurious.
Brendan Sullivan is an experienced hand who knows what he is doing. Which is why it was so startling that when he appeared with Ted at his arraignment on July 31, Sullivan not only refused to waive his client's right to a speedy trial, but he demanded that the trial begin in September so that there would be a verdict prior to the November election. Under normal circumstances, the trial would have begun the spring or summer of 2009. And no matter how many Williams & Connolly associates Sullivan threw - at who knows what cost - at the wire-tap and other evidence that the prosecutors had spent several years assembling, there is no way Brendan Sullivan could have been as prepared to go to trial in September as would have been next May or June.
The decision to go to trial immediately was so clearly crazy that when I heard about it I assumed that it was a decision Ted Stevens made personally and over his attorney's objection. I since have been told by someone who is close enough to someone who is close enough to Ted to know that that is what happened.
When he was asked about it the week after his arraignment, Ted told the Anchorage Daily News: "The verdict is the general election, let's face it." But Ted got it wrong. The verdict was the general election only because there was a verdict. Because it is reasonable to assume that 1,863 more voters than the more than 147,000 who did would have given their senator the benefit of the doubt and their vote if there had been no verdict and, rather than sitting in a courtroom, Ted Stevens had spent September and October traveling the state protesting his innocence.
At the end of the trial, the defense made a second awful decision. The decision was that Ted Stevens would take the stand and testify even though he did not have to do so in order to explain to the jury why he was a blameless victim of his false friend Bill Allen's prevarications. But once Ted testified on direct examination, he also would have to testify on cross-examination.
The decision to testify was another decision so clearly crazy that it had to have been made by Ted Stevens personally and over his attorney's objection. Because I cannot believe that a defense attorney as experienced as Brendan Sullivan is could have thought that allowing journeyman prosecutors a chance that he did not have to give to them to put his client's my-way-or-the-highway bellicosity on display for the jury could have resulted in anything other than it did. Disaster.
The headlines "Senator Spars With Prosecutor" and "Stevens Bristles Under Cross-Examination" tell the story. And this from the Anchorage Daily News: "Throughout his four-week trial, Senator Ted Stevens has sat quietly, listening to testimony from tradesmen about free home repairs and gifts, silent as a star witness told jurors that the Alaska Republican was merely 'covering his ass' when he asked for bills. But by late this afternoon, jurors had gotten a taste of the cranky 84-year-old senator who once called himself 'the meanest man in town.'"
In the same vein, after interviewing several of the jurors, the Washington Post reported that the jurors said "Stevens did himself no favors by taking the stand, where he destroyed the grandfatherly image his lawyers had carefully crafted. For most of the trial, the 84-year-old senator sat hunched over the defense table listening to testimony through court-issued headphones. He fit the part, some jurors said, of an elderly gentleman who left many of life's details - including his house renovations - to others. But the jurors' empathy vanished the moment Stevens came under cross-examination. Stevens, the jurors said, came off as evasive, arrogant and combative, and his answers did not jibe with the evidence."
The week after Ted testified, I had lunch with a friend who has known Ted Stevens as long as I have, and who had sat through Ted's direct and cross-examinations. His eye-witness report was that Ted's performance was worse than the Washington Post reported. He also said that Catherine Stevens, who testified before Ted did, had come off as even more arrogant and unpleasant than her spouse had.
There is a last speculation about the disastrous consequences that flowed from Ted Stevens's decision to put himself on the stand that merits mention.
At the beginning of the trial, the prosecution and the defense gave U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan (no relation to Brendan), who presided at the trial, their witness lists. Judge Sullivan melded the names and then read them to prospective members of the jury without identifying which witness was on which list. Individuals like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Senator Daniel Inouye, who testified as character witnesses, obviously were names on the defense's list. Another name that logic suggests was on the defense's list was Bambi Tyree, the 27-year-old daughter of one of the employees of VECO, the oil field services company that Bill Allen owned, who had worked on the Girdwood house.
But Bambi Tyree did not testify. And the reason why has not been explained.
In 2004 an Anchorage businessman named Josef Boehm pleaded guilty to providing crack cocaine to underage girls in exchange for sex. One of those girls was Bambi Tyree, a drug-addled runaway from Wasilla, Sarah Palin's hometown. When she was 15 years old, Bambi was apprehended at the Anchorage airport with 12 pounds of cocaine. During the Boehm investigation, a former boyfriend named Vincent Blomfield told police that Bambi had told him that when she was 14, she also had begun having sex with Bill Allen. Allen and his attorney denied that. And, so far, nothing has come of it.
But what if it was true?
In an interview, a reporter conducted with her shortly before the Ted Stevens's trial began, an Anchorage prostitute known only as Marie related that she had begun having sex with Bill Allen when she was 15 and that over the years Allen had given her more than $20,000 in cash and gifts. That squares with Vincent Blomfield's statement to the police that during the time he was with Bambi Tyree "his [i.e., Bill Allen's] name came up constantly" and Bambi "would leave me and go get money from him."
What does any of that salacious gossip have to do with Ted Stevens?
Stevens has owned his house in Girdwood since 1983. But since his appointment to the Senate in 1968, he really has lived in Washington, D.C. First in row houses on Capitol Hill, and since 1982 in a two-story colonial on a bucolic side street in the fashionable Upper Northwest neighborhood. At best, Ted Stevens used his Girdwood house a month a year. Occasionally during Christmas, more regularly during August congressional recesses during which the senator would summon constituents who had requested an audience to motor down from Anchorage to meet with him.
So what if Ted really did not know the full extent and value of the improvements Bill Allen made to the Girdwood house because Allen made those improvements not to benefit Ted Stevens, but to benefit Bill Allen?
When he is in Anchorage, Bill Allen lives in a house he built several years ago at the corner of S Street and Eleventh Avenue at the top of the hill that divides Inlet View from Bootleggers Cove, two of Anchorage's most primo neighborhoods. Kiddy-corner across the street from Bill Allen lives Ted Stevens's brother-in-law, Bill Bittner, a prominent attorney. Almost directly across the street from Bill Allen lives Jack Sedwick, the senior judge of the U.S. District Court. Next to Jack lives Steve Haycox, a University of Alaska professor and well-known local public intellectual. And next to Steve lives former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles.
Even a guy as dumb as Bill Allen can figure out that, in that neighborhood, regularly bringing home women like Bambi Tyree and Marie to allow them to do coke (while he drinks red wine) and "service" him in the hot tub that sits in plain view from the street on the deck above his garage would be a bad idea. But Ted Stevens's house in Girdwood, nestled in the trees off the main road 30 easy minutes down the highway from Anchorage, is a perfect location.
Brendan Sullivan headed in that direction when he called Ted's daughter, Susan Covich, who lives south of Girdwood on the Kenai Peninsula, as one of the last defense witnesses. Susan testified about the circumstances that surrounded Bill Allen arranging for VECO to hire her son (and Ted Stevens's grandson) for a roughneck job in the Alaska oil patch. But Sullivan also took her through testimony in which she told the jury that when she traveled back and forth to Anchorage she would occasionally spend the night at the Girdwood house. When she did she frequently found when she arrived that there were cars parked in front of the house and people in the bedrooms. On one occasion all of the bedrooms were occupied and she had to sleep on the living room couch until morning when Bill Allen roused her to let her know that a bed had opened up. And another time "there were lights on, cars in the parking lot," and "it just got too creepy, so I just drove on."
But there it stopped. As the Anchorage Daily News reported: "There was no testimony about why Allen was there."
Could that testimony have come from Bambi Tyree? Did Bambi know what use Bill Allen made of the Girdwood house?
If she did know, why didn't Brendan Sullivan have her tell what she knew to the jury? Could it have been that, once Ted Stevens decided to testify, Sullivan could not call her? Because if he had and Bambi had told the jury that she had personal knowledge that Bill Allen had remodeled the Girdwood house to improve its utility as a sex-pad for Bill Allen (rather than just to benefit Ted Stevens) and Ted then had testified, during cross-examination he might have been grilled by the prosecutors about what he knew about what Bambi knew. Since Bill Allen was their witness, Brendan Sullivan knew that the prosecutors knew whatever Bill knew about what Ted knew. Could Ted have known more than Sullivan would have wanted the jury to know that he did? If that was the situation and Ted had been compelled during cross-examination to admit that he knew what use Bill Allen was making of the Girdwood house, as someone who sat through the trial responded when I asked his opinion, "What would that have said about Ted and Catherine? What kind of new questions would it have put in the minds of jurors?"
My speculation is a conjecture. An overly dramatic one at that. And it might be completely wrong. But if it is, why did Brendan Sullivan waste the jury's time by having Susan Covich testify about what she saw when she overnighted at the Girdwood house? And why was Bambi Tyree on the defense's witness list to begin with?
In any case, on Tuesday, January 6, Vice President Dick Cheney swore in Mark Begich as Alaska's new junior United States senator. It has been more than two months since the November election but, as of the last time I checked, Ted Stevens has not written to, or telephoned or otherwise spoken with, Mark to congratulate him. Nor has Ted thanked the more than 147,000 Alaskans who, like my friend who stood out in the cold on election day with her children waving one of his signs, voted for him when they knew when they did so that their candidate was a convicted felon. Instead, Ted has been hunkered down at home in Upper Northwest working on the appeal of his conviction that, knowing Ted, he has convinced himself will vindicate him.
Maybe it will. Throughout the trial there was significant prosecutorial misconduct. But Emmet Sullivan has been a trial judge since 1984, and federal trial judge since 1994. He knows the difference between misconduct and reversible error. And he didn't see reversible error during Ted's trial.
If the appeal doesn't work, Judge Sullivan can send Ted Stevens to prison for up to five years for each of the seven felony counts on which he has been convicted. But no one I know thinks that will happen. Even Democratic Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader who is no fan of Ted Stevens, has said that he does not think Ted should go to jail because "he's been punished enough." Senator Reid also mused that "it's a different world we live in, and Ted Stevens did not understand that."
I think Harry Reid got it not quite right.
What Ted Stevens did not understand until the jury and Alaska voters explained it to him was not that the world had changed. It was that after forty years as a senator living surrounded by sycophants terrified of his temper and fawning for his favor he had changed. Absolute power really did corrupt absolutely. It's as simple as that.