Washingtonian Profile of DOJ Leaks Prosecutor

Shane Harris of Washingtonian magazine has a lengthy profile on the magazine's web site of William Welch, who is the Justice Department's point man on leaks cases. It's a hard-hitting and unflattering piece that suggests that Welch is over-aggressive and may have played a larger role in the misconduct associated with the prosecution of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens than he has acknowledged.

Welch has earned a reputation among fellow prosecutors and defense attorneys as a tough-as-nails, determined litigator. But many of those same people also say he is often overly aggressive in deciding which cases to bring and how to prosecute them, and that his ambition has sometimes blinded him to the weaknesses in his cases. “There’s a fine line between being zealous and overly zealous,” says one defense attorney who has lost to Welch in court. “He crossed that line on several occasions.” Welch is now the administration’s point man in its historic anti-leaks campaign. He is prosecuting a former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, and he has subpoenaed James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter, to testify about whether Sterling was the source for the journalist’s book State of War, which revealed that the CIA may have botched classified operations against Iran. A federal judge is expected to rule soon on whether Risen will have to testify, and her decision could have broad implications for freedom of the press and journalists’ ability to protect the identity of their confidential sources. But while the cases now in Welch’s portfolio are among the Justice Department’s most high-profile, chasing leakers isn’t what he’s best known for: Currently, Welch is under criminal investigation for his handling of the prosecution of the late Alaska senator Ted Stevens. Welch oversaw the Stevens corruption trial as chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. Stevens was convicted in October 2008 for failing to report gifts on his financial-disclosure forms. But the case fell apart five weeks later when an FBI agent who’d helped investigate the senator alleged ethical and legal violations on the part of federal prosecutors. An investigation revealed that the government’s lawyers had failed to turn over information to Stevens’s attorneys that could have aided in his defense. In April 2009, attorney general Eric Holder dropped the charges against Stevens, and the judge in the case ordered a criminal contempt-of-court investigation into Welch and five other lawyers. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility also began an ethics probe. Neither inquiry has been concluded. And while it has been reported that Welch merely oversaw the team of lawyers on the case, new information suggests he was directly involved in decisions about what information to turn over to Stevens’s attorneys and what to withhold. Welch stepped down as the Public Integrity Section chief in October 2009 and moved back to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he’d worked as an assistant US Attorney before coming to Washington. It could have been the end of his career in government. But one month later, Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, put Welch in charge of some of the most politically sensitive of the government’s leaks cases.