Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), caught on tape

Given the Republican corruption scandals of the last couple of years, it’s easy to get inured to the seriousness of the controversies. After a while, names like DeLay, Cunningham, Ney, Foley, Lewis, and Burns start to blur together. Which one was Abramoff’s buddy? Which one took bribes from defense contractors?

But as ongoing corruption scandals go, let’s not lose sight of the world of trouble Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is in. An executive from oil company has already admitted to offering Stevens bribes, and today we learn that the senator’s calls were being secretly taped by FBI investigators.

An Alaska oil contractor cooperated with the FBI by tape-recording phone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) as part of a public corruption investigation, a source familiar with the probe said last night. The recordings done by former Veco Corp. chief executive Bill Allen mean that Stevens, who is the longest serving Republican in the Senate, was under scrutiny by the FBI much earlier than June, when the senator first acknowledged publicly that he was a subject of FBI inquiries.

The central focus of all of this stems from Veco Corp., an oil-services company, remodeling Ted Stevens’ house in an exclusive ski resort area. After the lavish renovation was complete, Stevens steered $170 million in contracts to Veco, which, wouldn’t you know it, looked suspicious to the FBI.

So, Stevens appears to be in fairly big trouble. The next question, of course, is why reporters don’t seem to care.



A TPM reader hammered this point home:

Last night, news broke that the FBI had been taping phone calls placed to the senior Republican in the United States Senate as part of a bribery investigation stretching back more than a year. In fact, the man alleged to have bribed the senator is cooperating with investigators, and the calls recorded included some he placed at the FBI’s behest. The Washington Post, always eager to cover political stories of national import, ran the news on page A10. Most papers gave it similar prominence, if they ran the item it at all. Contrast that to the (admittedly lurid) tale of Norman Hsu, fronted by papers around the nation. That was a case of a major donor to Democratic figures who turned out (unbeknownst to the politicians to whom he donated) to be a crook and a fraud. That’s big news. But when a businessman who is a major donor to Republican politicians turns out to be a crook and a fraud, and some of the nation’s senior legislators are revealed to have knowingly accepted his bribes and funneled him earmarks in return, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Where’s the outrage?

That’s hardly an unreasonable question. I got an email recently from a right-wing reader who was outraged that I haven’t been covering the Hsu scandal. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure why Hsu is such a huge deal in the first place. As far as I can tell, the story, in a nutshell, is this: Hsu is accused of being a crook, who happened to raise a lot of money for Dems. Now those Dems don’t want his money. And Hsu is probably going to jail.

This is a huge political story, why? It’s not as if anyone had ever heard of Norman Hsu up until a few weeks ago.

But his trial is on the front page, while Stevens’ sting operation is an afterthought. The prior is some random crook who allegedly ran a Ponzi scheme; the latter is a sitting member of the U.S. Senate, who appears to have taken bribes.

If it were some unknown GOP donor and a Democratic senator, would the circumstances be reversed?