Stevens faces challenge to win case

Politico | October 18, 2008

If he’s going to walk, Ted Stevens needs the jury to embrace two contradictory ideas as his corruption trial wraps up early next week.

First, he needs the jurors to believe he constantly requested invoices and bills for the renovations of his now infamous Alaskan chalet, even citing Senate rules when doing so. Stevens testified that he’s so fastidious about Senate ethics that he always pays for his own lunch, even with friends.

At the same time, Stevens needs jurors to believe that he had nothing to do with money in his house – that he never wrote the checks and left such duties to his wife. Stevens portrayed himself as so removed from the situation back home that he was surprised to find an extra porch and a steel staircase added to his house – and that he had no idea how a large, stainless steel gas grill came to be on his deck.

It would also be helpful if the jurors believe that Bill Allen – the prosecution’s star witness – is, as Stevens calls him, a “liar.”

Prosecutors think Stevens is the one lying, and they took after him on Friday afternoon, even mocking the venerable senator’s claim that he didn’t know how certain gifts, furniture and renovations ended up at his chalet in resort area of Girdwood, Alaska.

“You were a lion of the Senate but you didn’t know how to prevent another man from putting items in your house?” lead prosecutor Brenda Morris said.

Stevens accepted a risk in taking the stand Thursday and Friday, and he appeared flustered under cross-examination. His testimony will continue Monday, and the jury should get the case Tuesday.

“You’re making a lot of assumptions that are unwarranted,” Stevens told Morris, revealing his frustration with the rapid-fire questions. “There are no gifts there, ma’am.”

The cross examination, coming in the final hour of the week, was what Stevens’ attorneys must have feared. He is known for having a temper – he even wears an Incredible Hulk tie on the Senate floor during big debates – and several times on Friday afternoon he talked back at Morris, criticizing her questions. At one point, he declared: “I’m not going to get into the middle of this game with you.”

Stevens has been charged with seven counts of failure to properly disclose more than $250,000 in renovations and gifts for his A-frame chalet.

Much of his defense has centered on the idea that he requested bills for all the work in question, and that his wife paid them.

In one e-mail to an engineer working on his house – sent in the fall of 2000, when renovations were under way — Stevens wrote : “I appreciate all the work you have done … now I want you to give us a bill for the work. Under our Senate rules, I must pay you for what you have done.”

Stevens also read out loud a 2002 e-mail to Allen, the Veco Corp. CEO at the center of the Alaska corruption scandal. In that e-mail, Stevens insisted that “you owe me a bill. Remember Torricelli, my friend.” It was a reference to former Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), who was under investigation at the time for taking improper gifts. Stevens followed up in an e-mail, saying “it just has to be done right” under Senate rules.

Later in his testimony, Stevens showed that he had written to a neighbor, Bob Persons, who was overseeing the renovations, and said that Catherine Stevens “is prepared to pay the bills.”

“She got all the bills and paid all the bills,” Stevens said under direct examination.

The senator’s testimony also highlighted the strange relationship he seemed to have with Allen.

Stevens and Allen used to take trips to the desert in Arizona for what they called “boot camp,” when they would hike in the desert and try to lose weight — all while enjoying fine wine at night.

Stevens aid that Allen put a bunch of his own furniture in the chalet during the renovations, and put the Stevens family furniture elsewhere, all while the Stevenses were back in Washington.

The senator complained of an “enormous ottoman” plopped down in the chalet, and his wife apparently screamed when she saw Allen’s furniture in their house.

It’s not clear how this testimony substantively affects the case, but it seems designed by the defense team to show that Allen was a corrupt businessman who took advantage of the Stevenses’ property, had workers cut corners on the construction and even added hundreds of feet of Christmas lights to the house without permission.

“It was here, and here, and there, and up there,” Stevens said, using a telestrator and projector on the witness stand to draw where the Christmas lights were strung up.

Stevens said he didn’t ask for the lights.

Stevens also went into detailed descriptions of a large fish sculpture that was sent to his house by the organizers of the Kenai Classic, a salmon fishing tournament. The heavy metal sculpture has been sitting in a wooden box, half open on the chalet deck, for four years. Stevens wanted to send it away, but never got around to it, and now this fish sculpture is part of the evidence because it may constitute an improper gift.

As for the big stainless steel grill on his deck? Steven says he never asked for it and never paid for it – but that Allen put it there anyway.

“I told him, ‘I don’t want it. If you keep it there, that’s your business,’” Stevens said. “It wasn’t mine. It’s his and not ours. We’ve never used it.”