Ted's tomb raiders

By now, you've all heard or seen something about the joyous news that FBI and IRS agents raided the home of corrupt idiot Alaska Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens.

Agents from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service raided the Alaska home of Sen. Ted Stevens (R) yesterday as part of a broad federal investigation of political corruption in the state that has also swept up his son and one of his closest financial backers, officials said.

Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, is under scrutiny from the Justice Department for his ties to an Alaska energy services company, Veco, whose chief executive pleaded guilty in early May to a bribery scheme involving state lawmakers.

Contractors have told a federal grand jury that in 2000, Veco executives oversaw a lavish remodeling of Stevens's house in Girdwood, an exclusive ski resort area 40 miles from Anchorage, according to statements by the contractors.

Now, buried within this report is a rather odd detail, which Eric Muller at Is That Legal picked up on:

Stevens said in a statement that his attorneys were advised of the impending search yesterday morning.

As Muller says,

I spent nearly 9 years as a federal prosecutor. I'm not aware of a single instance when any prosecutor or agent told anyone outside the Justice Department that a search warrant was going to be executed later in the day. Telling outsiders -- especially lawyers for the person whose property will be searched -- defeats one of the principal purposes of a search warrant: SURPRISE to ensure the integrity of the evidence field.

Nonetheless, news of the raid of the Alaskan mafioso don is excellent. Ted Steven's, though, urged Alaskans

not to form conclusions based upon incomplete and sometimes incorrect reports in the media.

Because, he added further, the media "is not a dump truck. It's a series of tubes."

For background on some of the other shady dealings of the Alaskan Cosa Nostra, see Alaska Abridged.