Former Senator Stevens- crook or innocent politician?

A little of both. The telephone recording of him talking about his political relations to contributers is largely dependent on your personal bias context in how you understand his guilt or innocence. I have not been a fan of Stevens for years. I think that when a person gets as much power as Stevens or even Byrd has without attempting to blow it all on a Presidential run, it is more than likely that the man is in office for the sake of personal power. Therefore, when I listened to the audio/ read the transcript, I was predisposed to think he was caught in an admission of corruption.

Thing is, while I think it is a good thing he lost his re-election, the more I read about the charges and the more that became public in the prosecution's case, the less I thought Stevens really was guilty of the charges presented against him. As someone else pointed out, many of the charges were based upon things that on consideration are pretty petty. It was more a situation where he was seemingly being prosecuted on the technical limits of the laws behind the charges instead of the spirit and intents of the laws behind the charges.

Someone here once commented that once a person achieves a political office beyond dog catcher, they become increasingly corrupt to the point that many choices they make may not be technical legal violations, but they certainly cross over into the realm of being violations in spirit. Stevens is undoubtably a text-book example of this process. The man was in power for so long that he rose up the Senate seating charts to the point that Alaska wielded far more senatorial clout than just about any other state in relation to its population. There is a reason Alaska got so many "Bridge to Nowhere" projects.

So while I think the charges that were actually prosecuted are in hindsight pretty trumped up, the reality is that Stevens has had so much influence for so long that undoubtably he has concealed far greater violations of the laws. The best the Department of Justice could come up with was technical violations. They certainly did a poor job of arguing their case. And their procedural choices were so bad that their argument has no basis on appeal.

When Capone was convicted of tax fraud, he was in technical violation of the law. And compared with the extent of his criminal actions, being convicted of failing to pay a federal tax seems almost amazingly petty considering that we routinely have famous and infamous people not paying far greater taxes. Capone got 11 years for not paying $215,000.00 in taxes. In today's money that doesn't even come close to sums owed by people like Nicholas Gage or Wesley Snipes even if you adjust for inflation. Capone was also so corrupt that he could almost flaunt his criminal status. Everyone knew he was a criminal, but no one attempted to prosecute him on the real activities of his enterprise because it would have been impossible. He was instead convicted of a concealed weapons charge, contempt of court charge for failure to appear in a timely manner, and tax underpayment.

Of course he never was charged with the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

So too I guess it goes with Stevens. I still think he is a crook, but even though his prosecution was realistically a accumulation of trumped up technical violations, the existence of "The Bridge to Nowhere" style pork projects to Alaska represents Stevens own personal Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.