Muck accusations are flying the other way up in Alaska these days. A lawyer for former state Rep. Vic Kohring (R-AK) said the FBI had another former lawmaker who was secretly cooperating in the ongoing Veco probe pressure Kohring into pleading guilty to bribery.
From the AP:
Investigators normally are prohibited from contacting defendants once they have a lawyer.
Kohring has pleaded not guilty to bribery and extortion charges despite what defense lawyer John Henry Browne contended was persistent pressure from the Justice Department to change the plea.
That pressure culminated recently, Browne said, when Kohring’s former aide received a call from an aide in state Sen. Fred Dyson’s office. The message, Browne said, was to take a plea deal.
It was only last week that Browne learned Dyson had been working with investigators since 2006. Details about the cooperation emerged in a related trial and showed that Dyson helped prosecutors persuade oil contractor Bill Allen to cooperate in the overarching investigation.
In July, Kohring’s lawyers asked to push back his corruption trial for three months because it was going to take them that long to get through the mountain of physical and digital evidence the FBI collected against Kohring. The trial is slated to start on October 22.
