The changing of the guard at the sensitive ethics office comes just after embarrassing revelations of federal attorney misconduct in the prosecution of former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan earlier this week went so far as to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter, and Holder announced last week that he would dismiss the indictment. Stevens was convicted last fall of ethics violations for accepting about $250,000 worth of gift he never declared from an oil services company executive.

The Office of Professional Responsibility is also in the hot seat now as observers — and some senators — eagerly await a review it has reportedly prepared, analyzing and harshly criticizing the conduct of former lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, including John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who is now a federal judge. Those lawyers are accused of manipulating the law to draft memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques that include waterboarding, a form of torture. That report is still under review by Holder and others. According to Newsweek, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey objected to the report and blocked its disclosure during his tenure.

Mary Patrice Brown, Holder’s pick, now leads the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. She will become only the third chief of that unit since it was established in 1975, after the Watergate scandal.

H. Marshall Jarrett, the current head of the ethics office, has been tapped to lead the executive office of U.S. attorneys, which sets policy and handles disputes among the Justice Department in Washington and the 94 U.S. Attorneys around the country.

Jarrett will replace Kenneth Melson, who has been named acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The judge in the corruption trial against former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has filed criminal contempt charges against the team of government lawyers who prosecuted Stevens.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan scolded the prosecution in agreeing to dismiss charges against Stevens. “In nearly 25 years on the bench I have never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct in this case,” Sullivan said.

Meet the Justice Department: The new DMV.

[Alaska GOP Chairman Randy Ruedrich] thought Begich should step down “so Alaskans may have the chance to vote for a senator without the improper influence of the corrupt Department of Justice.”

Gov. Sarah Palin concurs with Ruedrich and believes a special election is appropriate, said a spokeswoman for Palin’s political action committee, Meg Stapleton. “I absolutely agree,” Palin said in a statement.

All you really need to know is that Begich led Stevens in the polls long before the corruption verdict came down, and that Begich won because absentee voters — many of whom voted before the verdict — chose him over Stevens.

But campaign finance watchdogs, while praising the attorney general’s acknowledgment of prosecutors’ wrongdoing, want more information about why Holder said he’s not going to re-try Stevens on the charges of failing to disclose gifts worth about $250,000 from an Alaska energy firm.

“The motion filed by the Government in the case today and other allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in the case are gravely serious and must be fully addressed,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center, in a statement released today. “But the outright dismissal of an indictment rather than agreeing to a new trial is such an extreme measure that it warrants additional explanation. What is it about the information that now justifies outright dismissal of the indictment with prejudice?”

To be sure, the government’s motion filed with the District Court gives no clue. It says only that the interview notes of a key witness were not provided to Stevens or his lawyer when they should have been. “The Government believes that granting a new trial is in the interest of justice. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 33(a).”

But the Government goes on to say that it’s “further determined that, based on the totality of circumstances and in the interest of justice, it will not seek a new trial.”

Why not? As Hebert notes, “a prior inconsistent statement, even of a key witness, is likely not the only reason that our nation’s chief law enforcement officer would authorize prosecutors to seek a dismissal of an indictment after conviction, especially in a high profile case like this.”

Sure, Stevens is 85 years old, and some, like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), have said that he just didn’t understand today’s rules, and putting him in prison won’t do any good. But as Hebert points out, “he was prepared (if he won re-election) to serve another 6-year term,” despite strong evidence that he lied and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in valuable gifts that he never reported.

The attorney general ought to provide more information, then, about why he’s dropping the case, said Hebert, who also wants “assurances that the public integrity section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is now being supervised to a degree that pending investigations (e.g., arising out of the Abramoff scandal, Rep. Jefferson, Rep. Doolittle, etc.) are not at risk of being thrown out for similar prosecutorial misconduct.”

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An FBI whistleblower claims that the lead FBI agent on the Stevens case, Mary Beth Kepner, was having an affair with the prosecution’s star witness, Bill Allen, who admitted under oath to giving the longest-serving Republican senator some $250,000 in gifts that Stevens never disclosed on his Senate disclosure forms.

Stevens’ case is winding through the appeals process at the moment, on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct — separate from today’s revelations. If it’s true that Stevens’ conviction hinged on a sexual relationship between an FBI agent and an oil services company CEO, well, maybe it won’t matter that President Bush passed him over in the end.

Stevens, who maintains his innocence, has reportedly not asked for a pardon himself.

It isn’t too shocking that Murkowski — who inherited her Senate seat from her father, Frank Murkowski, when he became governor of Alaska — would ask for a pardon for Stevens. She is part of the state Republican elite that mingles with many of the same mega-donors and special interests, like local rainmaker Bob Penney, who landed Murkowski in the middle of a Senate ethics investigation just a few years ago when news broke that she failed to mention having purchased some choice riverfront property from Penney on her Senate disclosure forms.

Stevens has powerful friends outside of Alaska pushing for him, too. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that he hopes Stevens is not forced to serve jail time, even though Stevens himself was caught on an FBI wiretap predicting he would be jailed for his behavior.

So far, Bush has been rather frugal in granting pardons. With just 24 hours remaining in his presidency, it will be interesting if he makes an exception for Stevens.

Just a few weeks ago, a whistleblower came forward reporting that the Justice Department had “intentionally schemed” to relocate a witness in the trial against Stevens. The whistleblower turned out to be an FBI agent, and wrote a lengthy complaint alleging various areas of government misconduct.

Now, the Anchorage Daily News reports that a U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is taking the whole mess right to the top. Sullivan has demanded an accounting from Attorney General Michael Mukasey to answer for the “several attorneys in this matter — in multiple departments within the Department of Justice — [who] may have intentionally withheld important information from the court.”

Seemingly stunned by the conduct of the Justice Department in the weeks following former Sen. Ted Stevens’ trial, the judge in the case today ordered U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to provide an accounting for how his prosecutors handled a whistle-blower complaint last month.

By 5 p.m. Saturday, Mukasey or his designate must turn the so-called “declaration” about who knew what and when about the whistle-blower status of an FBI agent who criticized the government’s handling of the case, ordered U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Friday.

Keep in mind that this was the same crack-squad of government prosecutors whose missteps forced key evidence to be excluded — and had a major typo in their federal indictment against Stevens, which the jurors found during deliberations. Stevens has filed a motion seeking a new trial.

Reid explains that Stevens, 85, is a throwback from another era who didn’t get the upper-chamber’s tougher new rules that have tightened in recent years.

“It’s a different world we live in,” Reid told Politico, “and Stevens did not understand that.”

That’s pretty generous on Reid’s part. While technical rules may have changed, the underlying problem here is that Stevens allowed a local rainmaker with political interests to remodel his home at — at best — a steep discount. He also took other gifts from him, like a high-end massage chair and a new car for his daughter.

Even if Stevens didn’t know that there’s a rule about disclosing this unethical behavior, he should have certainly known the underlying behavior was unethical, if not illegal.

And by all accounts Stevens did know it was illegal. A telephone call caught on an FBI wiretap from 2006 between Stevens and Veco CEO Bill Allen captured the longest-serving Republican saying if the men were ever caught “we might have to pay a fine and serve a little time in jail.”

If there’s an argument why Stevens shouldn’t go to jail, it’s not that he was clueless.

You know Jefferson. He’s the guy discovered to have $90,000 in cash stored in his freezer — wrapped in aluminum foil no less. In June 2007, he was indicted on 16 charges of bribery and influence peddling, although he has yet to be tried. In the meantime, it’s been much tougher for Democrats to condemn scandal-ridden Republicans like Rep. Rick Renzi and Sen. Ted Stevens, knowing that Jefferson is in a similar boat.

Democrats lost that baggage over the weekend, when Republican Anh Cao shocked New Orleans by defeating the nine-term Jefferson, thus becoming the first Vietnamese American to hold a seat in Congress.

That left Democrats generally free of any high-profile embarrassments in their ranks — for three whole days.

Now they have Blagojevich instead. Go figure.

Murkowski, appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father when he took office as governor of Alaska, is up for re-election in 2010. (Murkowski won her seat the old-fashioned way in 2004.) In an interview with Politico, Murkowski warned Palin that she shouldn’t even consider a short stop in the Senate as a means to the White House. But what if Palin does anyway?

“I can guarantee it would be a very tough election,” Murkowski said in an interview.

Murkowski isn’t kidding. The two arctic pols have a turbulent history. In 2006, Palin knocked Murkowksi’s father out of the Republican primary by essentially accusing then-sitting Gov. Frank Murkowski of corruption, lumping him in with more dubious characters in the state legislature. The message was appealing to voters who were sick of Murkowski’s tone-deaf moves, including appointing his own daughter to his Senate seat and flying around the state in a private jet.

While Lisa Murkowski might have beef with Palin, Palin’s got her own problems with Murkowski. When Lisa got the nod from her father to take his Senate seat, Palin was reportedly miffed.

But who would win in a match up?

Both women have high approval ratings in Alaska. Murkowski is particularly popular in rural parts of the state, while Palin has done well in the more highly-populated area surrounding Wasilla, her hometown.

The race would be close, one Republican consultant told Politico.

A key factor to keep in mind: seniority. Alaska depends on federal money to survive. That money tends to come easier the longer you’re representatives have been around Capitol Hill.  Stevens and Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) are famous at home and infamous nationally for their incredible ability to bring home billions worth of bacon.

With Stevens out, Alaskans might not want to replace Murkowski with Palin, knowing that Palin would likely be eager to move on in just a few years:

“My feeling is that Alaskans wouldn’t respond to that very well, especially Republicans, if she takes on Lisa and she starts seniority all over again,” [David} Dittman, [a Republican pollster] said. “I think it would be tough for Sarah to do that and justify it.”