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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has decided to drop all charges against former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens amid charges of prosecutorial misconduct, NPR reported on Wednesday, citing Justice officials.
Stevens Cleared
All criminal charges against former Senator Ted Stevens will be dropped later today, the Department of Justice has announced. Attorney General Eric Holder said that he decided to drop the case because of the severe misconduct committed by Justice Department prosecutors.
Ted Stevens: Feds drop charges, but can he get his Senate seat back?
When the U.S. Justice Department brought charges during last year's election season against Alaska's political patriarch, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, some wondered if the feds were over-reaching.
Sure, Stevens had apparently neglected to report hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from a prominent businessman who renovated the Stevens' home in Anchorage without charging him. And true enough, a jury in virtually-all-Democratic District of Columbia convicted the 85-year-old Stevens on seven counts of falsifying his Senate financial forms.
Palin calls for new Alaska vote after Stevens case collapses
WASHINGTON — Gov. Sarah Palin and the head of the Alaska Republican Party said Thursday that Sen. Mark Begich should give his Senate seat up to a special election now that prosecutors have abandoned their case against Ted Stevens. "Alaskans deserve to have a fair election not tainted by some announcement that one of the candidates was convicted fairly of seven felonies, when in fact it wasn't a fair conviction," Palin said in a Thursday interview with the Daily News.
The governor said she does not want to "split hairs" on whether Begich should resign or not but agrees with the Republican Party's call for a special election.
The Republican Stevens represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate for 40 years before Begich, a Democrat, narrowly beat him last fall. The election came just a week after a Washington, D.C., jury convicted Stevens of lying about gifts that he'd received.