JMM:
Stevens is 85 years old. He was tried and convicted. He lost his senate seat and ended his 40+ career in disgrace. Whatever the prosecutors did wrong -- and it seems like they did a lot wrong, which we'll get to in a minute -- that doesn't erase the fact that Stevens got a freebie home renovation from a wealthy contributor whose interests Stevens repeatedly and habitually service in Washington.
In this case, though, the prosecutorial misconduct appears to be of a non-trivial sort. So given his age, the disgrace he's already suffered and the fact that future prosecution may be fatally undermined by the earlier prosecutorial wrongdoing, setting this whole effort aside makes sense. At least that's how it seems to me on first blush.
Yeah, the Bush Justice Department was so incompetent, it couldn't even do right the things it was trying to do right. Really, as if we needed more examples of the disaster that Bush was.
Still, does anyone seriously believe that Alberto Gonzales would've done the same if the situation had been reversed? Of course not, given the lengths he took to use his agency to further the political goals of the Republican Party. But we finally have a Justice Department that takes the law seriously as opposed to wielding it like a club against the GOP's political enemies, like former Democratic Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, prosecuted by corrupt prosecutors on charges trumped up by Karl Rove and his pals.
That will hopefully be the next case tossed by the grownups back in charge at Justice.