So howbout that Sen. Stevens (R-AK)?
There’s a perverse dynamic being publisher of TPMmuckraker. There are only 100 senators. And the site’s business model depends on a good number of them being ridiculously corrupt. But it’s not every day that one of them is revealed not only in crooked dealings but also in the sort of lavish and easy to chronicle tale that really makes for a good story.
Now, for the moment and 
almost for the next two years, we have the Bush administration in place. So that means we’ll continue to get major scandals like the US Attorney Purge, pay-offs to crooked contractors, secret plans to stop African-Americans from voting and a lot of other stuff that will fill the site’s virtual pages.
Still, when a guy like Sen. Stevens gets into a scandal on the order of the one he seems to be involved in we really need to jump right on it because there just can’t be that many senators as crooked as he seems to be.
As we noted yesterday, not only is the already-reported grand jury in Alaska now looking into Stevens’ shenanigans. There’s also another grand jury impanelled in DC also looking into Stevens’ dealings with Veco Corp. and specifically how the crooked oil services company (two of its execs, including its CEO, recently pleaded guilty to bribing public officials) managed to end up renovating Stevens’ home.
The second grand jury in DC, which has no connection to the Veco investigation save for Sen. Stevens, is the pretty sure sign that Stevens is in the colloquial if not the technical sense a target of the investigation.
In any case, common sense tells me that you don’t come up with an MO like that that led to the shady house renovation deal thirty-plus years into your senate career. And we’re already hearing tales of lots of other at least borderline scams by Alaska’s senior senator. Indeed, since we started reporting in earnest on the Stevens’ story quite a few Alaska readers have come out of the wood with more helpful details about Sen. Stevens.
So here’s the deal. We’re interested in the Stevens story in a big way. If you’re from Alaska and you know some details about the story we should know, drop us a line. Confidentiality and anonymity of course assured. Maybe you’re a reporter from Alaska and you’ve got some new nugget on the invesigation and you want to make sure your story doesn’t get buried. Let us know. If you’ve got more details, context or insights on the Stevens story, don’t be a stranger.
