The prosecutors will not be prosecuted.

A special counsel in Washington, D.C., says charges should not be brought against U.S. Justice Department attorneys who illegally withheld evidence in the corruption trial of the late Sen. Ted Stevens.

The trial judge, Emmett Sullivan, appointed Henry Schuelke to investigate whether criminal contempt of court charges should be brought against six government lawyers who handled the ill-fated Stevens prosecution.

Schuelke finds “systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence” that would have corroborated Stevens' defense and testimony.

Nevertheless, Schuelke says the attorneys should not be prosecuted because Sullivan did not explicitly order them to follow the law on sharing evidence that is favorable to the defense.

The judge issued an order describing the six-week process for determining what portion of Schuelke's 500-page report should be made public.

As part of that order, the judge revealed Schuelke's conclusion: that no charges should be brought against the DOJ attorneys in the Ted Stevens case because the violation of an explicit order would be needed to establish criminal contempt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sullivan wrote: “The court accepted the repeated representations of the subject prosecutors that they were familiar with their discovery obligations, were complying with those obligations and were proceeding in good faith.”

Cliff Groh, a former prosecutor who has blogged about the public corruption probe for years, says it might have been too hard to assign individual responsibility in a section of the Justice Department that long has been accused of bending the rules on sharing evidence.

"The key word there is systematic. There apparently is a belief that there were so many people involved, and the collapse of the Ted Stevens case led to an orgy of finger-pointing among government attorneys that continues to this day, that's gone on for well over two and a half years now."

Groh noted that Schuelke offered no opinion on whether the lawyers could be charged with obstruction of justice.

"That is saying to the department of justice, 'if you want to prosecute these prosecutors, these government attorneys, for some other crime, go ahead.' "

For Ray Metcalfe, who has been pushing federal and state officials to pursue corruption cases against politicians for years, the lack of prosecution is a setback.

"I kind of hoped that DOJ would take the attitude, 'ok, now we've cleaned up our mess, back to the investigations.' and there were some very serious investigations out there, in addition to what the public knows about, that were dropped, or as near as I can tell were dropped."

And Groh says some “what if's” remain.

"One of the questions here, that a lot of Alaskans have, is what would have happened if the department of justice had played this case completely straight. Would Ted Stevens have been convicted anyway?"

But the attorneys who blew their own case apparently won't face juries themselves.

Similar defects were found in the justice department's cases against former state lawmakers Pete Kott and Vic Kohring, who each had their convictions overturned, as did Stevens.

Kott and Kohring recently pled guilty to a single felony count each, and will serve no more jail time.

The link among the three cases is Bill Allen, former CEO of the former Veco Corporation, who pled guilty to bribing lawmakers.

Allen has been accused of sexual abuse of minors and soliciting prostitution, which was not made known to the juries who returned guilty verdicts against the politicians.

Deputy State Attorney General Rick Svobodny, who says the Department of Law spent considerable time and effort investigating whether Allen could be prosecuted under state law for the alleged sex crimes.

Svobodny says that based upon Anchorage Police Department files, there was a viable case against Allen for violating the federal Mann act, which prohibits transporting someone across state lines for illegal purposes.

According to Svobodny, the justice department refused to turn over its files on Allen’s alleged sexual misconduct, and further refused to grant state attorneys permission to bring charges.

Svobodny says there were impediments to bringing state charges against Allen, either for public corruption or for sexual encounters with teenage girls, who were older, according to Svobodny, than media accounts indicated.