By Dana Milbank
Friday, October 17, 2008; A03

Catherine Stevens had much to be unhappy about as she took the stand yesterday at the corruption trial of her husband, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

The stairs that were built for the Stevens chalet, gratis, by a company seeking help from the longtime Republican lawmaker? "I was extremely upset because they were very, very dangerous," she testified.

The huge stainless-steel grill that magically appeared on their deck? "I was very angry," she said. The armchair and ottoman they were given? "I was very unhappy when I saw it." The chairs? "Very upset." The black leather sofa? "Not to my taste." The puppy? "I was very concerned." The bronze fish statue? "It's very big and heavy." The massaging recliner from Brookstone? A "stupid chair."

Now Mrs. Stevens has a couple of more reasons to be unhappy. Her husband's lawyers were happy yesterday to let her take the fall, in part, for the senator's failure to disclose the gifts he received from the pipeline company Veco. And prosecutors, in their cross-examination, portrayed her and her husband as abusers of the senator's official staff.

"Did Barbara Flanders" -- one of the senator's aides -- "walk your dogs?" prosecutor Brenda Morris demanded of Catherine Stevens. "Did Barbara Flanders feed your cats? Did Barbara Flanders pay your Saks Fifth Avenue bills? Didn't staff for your husband cut your grass? Did they pay for your parking tickets? Did Barbara Flanders pay bills to Blockbuster video for overdue amounts? Did she wrap Christmas gifts for your family? Did you send notes to Barbara Flanders to tell her you needed cash? So, in essence, she was your human ATM machine?"

Mrs. Stevens ran her hands through her hair and struggled for answers ("I don't know what you're talking about") but came up mostly empty. And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse for the Stevens family, Sen. Larry Craig walked into the courtroom after lunch and planted his wide stance in the audience to lend his support to his friend and colleague.

Ted Stevens, who succeeded his wife on the stand late yesterday and will give the bulk of his testimony today, demanded a rapid trial in hopes that an acquittal would allow him to win reelection next month to the Senate seat he has held for 40 years. But the strategy of the first sitting senator to go on trial in a generation has brought unwelcome consequences for his family, as the embarrassing details of a Washington power couple's private lives are detailed in the courtroom.

Catherine Stevens, a longtime power lawyer herself, described a life of hardship in Alaska. "We had no mail delivery," she told the jury. "We don't have trash collection. . . . We had really terrible rusty water." But for Stevens, dressed in a plain black outfit, the biggest hardship may well be her proud husband. How proud? The personal checks from the National Bank of Alaska that lawyers flashed on screens showed his name as "Senator Ted Stevens."

Stevens dutifully fell on her sword -- or attempted to -- for her husband. "I was going to be in charge of the renovations," she explained to the jury. "Ted was too busy. . . . He is the classic workaholic." But her story held together poorly. She claimed not to know that the people doing the work on her house were from Veco -- but she had one of her husband's Senate staffers send Veco the kitchen cabinet knobs she had bought at Restoration Hardware. Why didn't the Stevenses receive bills for the work being done? "We had a problem with the mail after 9/11," Catherine explained.

Prosecutors botched their case by withholding evidence from the defense and risking a mistrial. Now the defense is returning the favor by putting up witnesses more helpful to the prosecutors; a witness before Catherine Stevens railed about how he felt "waterboarded" by a "hateful" FBI agent, which explains why "so many innocent people are in prison."

In a sense, though, the legal back-and-forth became secondary to the intrigue about the senator and his wife. Catherine testified about her nickname for the 84-year-old lawmaker: "Oscar," from "The Odd Couple." "Sometimes he calls me Rosalee," she went on. "It's from a cowboy song." She went on to discuss their misadventures with Alaskan husky puppies, Taz and Kiely ("a lot of howling, a lot of pulling").

Defense lawyers tried to turn these homespun tales to the couple's advantage. Catherine took the jury through a map of Alaska and pointed out "a place called Chicken, because they couldn't spell the name of the state bird, which is Ptarmigan." She spoke of Ted's condo in Anchorage, "right above Bootleggers Cove."

But the folksiness did nothing to protect Catherine from a withering barrage from prosecutor Morris, who questioned her disdainfully about all the gifts the couple had received but Ted had not reported.

Why does the free furniture remain in the Alaska chalet? "Because I could not get Bill Allen to move his stuff out of there," Catherine explained, referring to Veco's former CEO, who pleaded guilty last year to bribing Alaska lawmakers. How about the massage chair they were given for their Washington home seven years ago? "It's still in Washington, D.C., to my great dissatisfaction," she answered.

Only one of the many gifts seemed to afford Catherine Stevens some much-needed happiness: a stained-glass window that hangs in the chalet. "Do you have any displeasure with that one?" Morris asked.

"I don't have any displeasure with it, no," she answered.

For a beleaguered power couple, it may have been the happiest moment of the day.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603616_pf.html

Senator Stevens Testifies About Disclosure Forms

WASHINGTON — Senator Ted Stevens took the witness stand in his own defense on Thursday, asserting that he had never engaged in any scheme to file false disclosure forms in the Senate.

In taking the calculated risk of testifying at his trial, Mr. Stevens, a Republican, made what should be a fateful decision to tell his story before two distinct audiences — the jury hearing the case and the Alaska electorate that will decide on Nov. 4 whether to return him to the Senate, where he has represented the state for 40 years.

Mr. Stevens, 84, is charged in seven felony counts with knowingly failing to list on Senate disclosure forms some $250,000 in gifts and services in connection with the renovation of his Alaska home.

Ending days of suspense in the courtroom about whether he would testify, he was called to the stand late in the afternoon by his lawyer, Brendan Sullivan.

“When you signed these forms, did you believe they were accurate and truthful?” Mr. Sullivan asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Stevens replied.

“Did you ever intend to file false statements?” the lawyer asked.

The senator’s response: “No, I did not.”

Mr. Stevens’s brief declarations of innocence came at the end of two days in which defense witnesses including Mr. Stevens’s wife, Catherine Stevens, were subjected to strong cross-examinations by Justice Department prosecutors. For the rest of his 20 minutes on the stand before court recessed for the day, Mr. Stevens recounted some of his personal and political history in Alaska.

It was what Mr. Sullivan said was a “warm-up” for a full bout of testimony Friday morning by Mr. Stevens before what is expected to be a critical cross-examination.

The heart of the case is whether Mr. Stevens knew that his longtime friend Bill Allen, an oil services tycoon, used his company, Veco, to rebuild a small A-frame house in Girdwood, Alaska. Beginning in 1999, the house underwent a makeover; it was jacked up, a new floor was built underneath, decks were added on two floors and various appliances and gifts were added, including an expensive gas grill and a stained-glass panel.

Mr. Allen, a rough-hewn entrepreneur who made a fortune in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields, testified for the prosecution this month that Mr. Stevens fully understood that he was getting the goods and services free.

Mr. Stevens’s defense has been that he and his wife paid about $130,000 to some contractors, which they believed covered the renovation. Although the Stevenses never paid Mr. Allen or Veco any money, defense lawyers argued that Mr. Allen had done lots of things on his own and never sent Mr. Stevens any bills.

Defense lawyers asserted that Mr. Allen, who had once been close friends with Mr. Stevens, had turned on him to win favor with the government. He needed the government’s agreement to sell his company for some $380 million and is also facing sentencing for his conviction in Alaska for a scheme to bribe state lawmakers.

The defense posture was put to the test for most of Thursday with Mrs. Stevens on the stand. She is a well-known Washington lawyer and is, in her own right, known as a formidable figure. Under questioning by Robert Cary, a Stevens lawyer, Mrs. Stevens was self-assured and straightforward.

Asked about some of the undisclosed gifts the family had received, Mrs. Stevens said they were unwanted. The grill was dangerous and scared her, she testified. The furniture provided in the house by Mr. Allen was tasteless, she asserted.

She said she never knew that Mr. Allen or Veco contributed heavily to the remodeling; she believed the general contractor was a man named Augie Paone, whose bills she paid.

“I believed that any work done on the chalet we’d be billed for, and we’d pay it,” she said.

But during cross-examination by Brenda Morris, a prosecutor, Mrs. Stevens wilted noticeably.

Ms. Morris challenged Mrs. Stevens’s assertion that she did not know that many of the laborers worked for Mr. Allen, not Mr. Paone. She also obliged Mrs. Stevens to acknowledge that she used staff aides in Mr. Stevens’s office to keep track of her personal accounts at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue.

Ms. Morris also questioned Mrs. Stevens closely about a massage chair in the Stevens home in Washington bought by a friend, Robert Persons.

Mr. Persons, who testified earlier about the chair, had initially tried to assert that the chair was a gift. But after learning that Mr. Stevens could not accept it without disclosing it, Mr. Persons then said it was a loan.

Mrs. Stevens tried to insist that the chair was Mr. Persons’ and was on loan even though she acknowledged it had remained in the Stevens home for seven years.

“What kind of loan is that?” Ms. Morris asked.