WASHINGTON - Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000. In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.
US Senator Ted Stevens R-Alaska and his son former state Senate president Ben Stevens R-Alaska, along with another legislature member are concurrently under investigation by the justice department, and the FBI. The FBI is conducting a wide ranging investigation into public corruption in Alaska, in an ongoing bribery for influence in oilfield legislation scandal with Republican state legislators. There are now bribery and conspiracy charges against four current and former state legislators. The Senator in the photograph is Ted Stevens R-Alaska. (Photo: By Lauren Victoria Burke — Associated Press)
The other two charged were Pete Kott R-Alaska and Bruce Weyhrauch R-Alaska.
An Alaska oil contractor, former Veco Corp. chief executive Bill Allen, cooperated with the FBI by tape-recording phone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens, and the other legislators. Senator Ted Stevens profited from these conversations by receiving a large-scale renovation of his house in the resort town of Girdwood. The FBI recorded thousands of conversations between Allen and another Veco executive, Rick Smith, and videotaped meetings between legislators and contractors at a hotel suite. The conversations were taped by the FBI between Stevens, a Republican up for re-election in 2008, and Bill Allen, then chief executive officer of VECO Corp., an oilfield services firm.
Allen also admitted in testimony last week that he bribed three other Alaska state lawmakers, including Stevens’s son, former state Senate president Ben Stevens. The younger Stevens is also under scrutiny by the Justice Department.
Allen and another VECO executive pleaded guilty to paying more than $400,000 in bribes to public officials in Alaska. Also VECO employess admitted that they helped run the Senator’s fundraisers by raising money for him while they were on company time. This could violate campaign finace rules which would be another scandal all by itself.
All Stevens’ office could say beyond no comment was “not to form conclusions based upon incomplete and sometimes incorrect reports in the media,” CNN said.
WASHINGTON - Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000. In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
US Senator Ted Stevens R-Alaska and his son former state Senate president Ben Stevens R-Alaska, along with another legislature member are concurrently under investigation by the justice department, and the FBI. The FBI is conducting a wide ranging investigation into public corruption in Alaska, in an ongoing bribery for influence in oilfield legislation scandal with Republican state legislators. There are now bribery and conspiracy charges against four current and former state legislators. The Senator in the photograph is Ted Stevens R-Alaska. (Photo: By Lauren Victoria Burke — Associated Press)
