Judge Orders Probe of Ted Stevens Prosecutors

Judge Emmet Smith has ordered a review of the prosecutors in the Ted Stevens trial for possible criminal charges.

"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said in the opening moments of a hearing.

This is why Bill Clinton had Janet Reno clean house in the Justice Department the day he entered office in 1993. There are simply too many career holdovers that want to politicize everything that enters the department. President Bush finally woke up and fired a few of the most political lawyers, but it was too little, too late. And of course, Alberto Gonzales was excoriated by grandstanding Congressmen for doing so.

Unfortunately for Stevens, he's out of his job due to the indictments and there's no way to get his reputation (or job) back.

*Update*
This is pretty damning:

Sullivan appointed Washington attorney Henry Schuelke as special prosecutor to investigate the government prosecutors for possible criminal contempt charges. Sullivan said the matter was too serious to be handled internally by the Justice Department, which, he said, took too long to investigate misconduct allegations.

The judge doesn't trust the Justice Department to handle this itself.