Northampton native William Welch II comes under fire at Senate Hearing.

"If she was failing, wasn’t it the responsibility of her supervisor (Welch) to fix that? (Senator Grassley of Iowa)

“Yes” Special Prosecutor Henry Schuelke III

Brenda Morris was the chief prosecutor at the Ted Stevens trial, William Welch was her supervisor and head of the elite Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice. This Wednesday, March 28, the Senate’s Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Department of Justice’s handling of the Senator Ted Stevens case. A trial in Washington D.C. in the fall of 2008 found the Senator guilty of failure to declare the full costs of the work done on his house in Girdwood Alaska. He was found guilty, but in January of 2009 a FBI agent, Chad Joy, filed a whistleblower complaint that lead the judge, Emmet Sullivan to dismiss all charges, and order an investigation to see if criminal contempt charges should be brought against the prosecutorial team.

William Welch II made his name through winning a whole series of high profile courses here in Springfield, including the so-called killer nurse, Kristen Gilbert, and a series of public corruption cases involving the Springfield Housing Authority and other agencies. His successes meant he went to Washington, advanced rapidly, and between 2007 and 2009 headed up the elite Public Integrity Section (PIS) of the Department of Justice that supervised, or rather failed to supervise the Stevens prosecution team.

Appearing before the committee was Special Prosecutor Henry Schuelke III, who worked two years on the case and produced a 525 page report. I have read most of it, and all the rebuttals that came in from people named. In this Youtube video, Schuelke put the case in a witty nutshell. It is regrettable that the chairman had to cut him off because of time constraints, because he just seemed to be warming up to describe as seamy a case as could imagined, a case with teen-aged prostitutes, crack cocaine, Alaska wheeling and dealing and something that came close to legal blackmail by federal prosecutors, who had evidence, but suppressed that evidence that their chief witness, Bill Allen, in the case consorted with 15 year old prostitutes during his heyday as chairman of one of Alaska’s biggest oil service companies, VECO.

Bill Allen

Schuelke presentation

I have to admit that the botched-up trial of Ted Stevens in the fall of 2008 never really registered on my radar screen. It was Alaska and of course Alaska is far away and I assume it is corrupt like Massachusetts is, only worse, and it occurred after the Department of Justice had already convicted four Republican Legislators, one lobbyist and two top executives of Alaskan businessmen of bribery and other corrupt activities, and I probably thought that the feds are just doing their job.

I didn’t know that Northampton native Bill Welch was involved in these prosecutions. Now I know. And the issues that we are confronted with, in this truly horrific scandal, are the same issues that caused a mistrial in the trial of Irving Labovitz back in 1997, where Welch was in the lead chair. Failure to disclose so-called exculpatory material. So-called “Brady” material has to be disclosed to the defense if it might alter the outcome of the trial or affect the sentence given a defendant. But in the Heritage Bank trial, the prosecution conduct went beyond so-called failure to disclose “Brady” material. Tape recordings went missing; a critical tape recording had its transcription altered in many critical aspects. I’ll talk about this in another posting. In a Washingtonian article on Bill Welch last year, Shane Harris had a lot to say about his reputation as a “tough-as-nails” oversealous prosecutor who is now going after whistleblowers.

What ensued in the Stevens affair has been a career breaker for almost everyone who was involved in trying the case. Welch is now back in the Springfield office, and living under a cloud. The team of DOJ lawyers has been scattered to the winds, A young very capable DOJ lawyer, Nicholas Marsh, hung himself in his home after he was transferred into the backwaters of the DOJ working in the international affairs section.

Stevens’ lawyers and the judge, Emmett Sullivan didn’t trust what the federal attorneys were telling them back in 2008. They weren’t getting the so-called “302s” that FBI agents are supposed to fill out when they interrogate suspects or witnesses. They were getting short summaries. The initial report to the court by Henry Schuelke tended to focus its ire on the trial attorneys, and not their supervisors. In the two year investigation ordered by the trial judge, investigators looked at well over 128,000 pages of documents, FBI 302s, and interviews with prosecutors and FBI agents. Its release was fought in court by members of the prosecutorial team, including Welch. But then some of the attorneys hauled over the coals fired back, and said some interesting things. What they said, I’ll post on later. Here is a link to an Anchorage News article about Welch by Matt Apuzzo, and here are some links to the history of the case, great reportage by Richard Mauer and other writers for the Anchorage News.




VECO men sparked Stevens Remodel
Allen Sex Case Reopened
Sources contest whistleblower
Alleged cover-up cuts into Allen credibility
Gridwood Neighbors stick by "Uncle Ted."

Uncle Ted's Chalet