Cowdery Indictment

Here's the indictment itself:

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From the indictment we can see the key players and the charges. I'm pulling out excerpts from the first part of the indictment and posting the whole indictment below.


The Players:

JOHN COWDERY ("COWDERY") was an elected member of the Alaska
State Senate, having been first elected to the Senate in 2000. COWDERY represented
District O, located in Anchorage, Alaska. He was reelected to the Senate in November
2004.

"COMPANY A") was a privately held company that was incorporated in a State other
than the State of Alaska. COMPANY A was a multinational corporation that provided
services to the energy, resource, and process industries and to the public sector.
COMPANY A was comprised of multiple subsidiary companies and, collectively,
COMPANY A was engaged in interstate commerce in connection with the foregoing
projects.
[This has to be VECO]

"COMPANY CEO" was the Chief Executive Officer and principal owner
of COMPANY A.
[Bill Allen]

"COMPANY VP" was the Vice President of Community and Government
Affairs of COMPANY A.
[Rick Smith]

State Senator A was an elected member of the Alaska State Senate.
[Donny Olson]

STATE SENATOR B was an elected member of the Alaska State Senate.
STATE SENATOR B resigned from the Senate in 2006.

[Dillon at An Alaskan Abroad says this is Ben Stevens. But Stevens, in my recollection, did not resign from office, he simply did not run for reelection in 2006. The Feds are usually precise with details like this.]

The Charges

Conspiracy and Bribery

As I read this, the charge is that Cowdery conspired with Bill Allen and Rick Smith to bribe Senator A (Olson) to vote in favor of the version of the PPT tax that Veco was supporting. Then the same facts are used for the bribery charge. So count one is for conspiring to bribe and count two is for actually bribing. From the indictment (p. 10)

COWDERY also told COMPANY CEO that, when he had talked to State Senator A, COWDERY said, "Well, I could probably get some money, but we gotta get a commitment that you're gonna vote for the PPT and the . . . gas contract." COWDERY told COMPANY CEO that State Senator A said "he had
no problem with that."

NOTE: Some of the peculiarity of the language of the indictment itself is due to the need to match the indictment to the law. As I recall from the earlier trials, you need various elements:
a. “an elected public official”
b. to ‘knowingly and unlawfully conspire, confederate, etc…”
c. the government entity (State of Alaska here) has to receive more than $10,000 in federal funding
d. the ‘anything of value” “to influence or reward” has to be over $5000
Also, there has to be interstate commerce, thus the explicit mention of that in the description of Company A.