WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder replaced the Justice Department’s top ethics watchdog Wednesday, one day after a federal judge criticized the agency for moving too slowly in probing alleged government misconduct in the prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
Holder named Mary Patrice Brown, a lawyer in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, to take over the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations of unethical conduct by the department’s attorneys.
The department said the move had nothing to do with the Stevens case. A jury returned a guilty verdict in the then-senator’s corruption case in October, but on Tuesday, the federal judge who presided over the trial voided the verdict, citing prosecutorial misconduct by the government.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington said that prosecutors held back potentially exculpatory evidence from Stevens’ lawyers.
Allegations of such conduct had led the Justice Department’s ethics office to open a probe of the trial team that prosecuted Stevens. And upon taking office in February, Holder replaced the team with a new set of lawyers who discovered more undisclosed exculpatory information. That moved Holder to abandon the Stevens prosecution.
But Sullivan on Tuesday expressed his displeasure with the pace of the department’s ethics investigation and signaled that he wasn’t certain the department could be counted upon to investigate its own misdeeds.
“The events of this case are too numerous and serious to leave to an internal inquiry by the Justice Department,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said he was appointing a prominent lawyer in Washington, Henry Schuelke, to help the court conduct its own criminal contempt investigation.
