On March 15, 2012, Schuelke's long-awaited Stevens report was released in unredacted, unabridged form, after several government prosecutors were unsuccessful in keeping it under seal with the Court.
It is now no surprise why the Department of Justice wanted to keep this report away from the public.
Just a cursory read of the report reveals a devastating pattern of persistent prosecutorial misconduct - and a rogue team led by William Welch, hell bent on destroying the life of a sitting Senator.
Reading this report brought back the nightmare of Thomas Drake's case--also led by William Welch--one of six under the Espionage Act against whistleblowers for allegedly mishandling classified information.
This report details the deliberate and pervasive misconduct by Welch's team in the failed corruption case against the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. According to the Stevens report written by Henry Schuelke,
The investigation and prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens were
permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence, which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens' defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.
This is precisely what happened in Drake's case, where under the leadership of Welch significant exculpatory evidence was withheld and concealed for many months during the pendancy of his trial. Welch even claimed that key exculpatory whistleblower evidence Drake had provided to the DoD IG as a material witness was supposedly destroyed.
Instead of being a career-killer, Welch returned quietly to Springfield, Massachusetts (where he kept his government job), before his career was magically resurrected by his patron, Lanny Breuer, who handed him the serious portfolio of "leak cases." NSA whistleblwoerTom Drake's collapsed after ("years of hell" in the words of Judge Bennett) and CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling's case is on a similar path. Welch has since left the Justice Departnment, but has left many ruined lives in his wake.
Why do people like William Welch and John Yoo still have their licenses to practice law--and were not even referred to their state bar associations by the Justice Department--while my bar license remains in suspended animation at the D.C. Bar after nearly 10 years because, as a Justice Department ethics attorney, I blew the whistle on government misconduct in the case of so-called "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, America's first terrorism prosecution after 9/11.
Oh, silly me. I get it. If you cheat and perpetrate illegalities like torture and warrantless wiretapping, you suffer no repercussions, but if you blow the whistle on it, you face prison.
.
Comments are closed on this story.