During the corruption trial of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, federal prosecutors were chastised by a judge for letting a witness leave town. They got in trouble for submitting erroneous evidence and were reprimanded for failing to turn over key witness statements. An FBI agent has since complained about the prosecution team’s alleged misconduct. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough. The Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to drop the case after learning that prosecutors had failed to turn over notes that contradicted testimony from their key witness. The discovery by a fresh team of lawyers and their acknowledgment that the material should have been shared with Stevens’s defense team led Holder, a former public corruption prosecutor, to conclude that the department’s biggest public corruption case in a decade could not be salvaged. Holder’s decision invites tough new scrutiny of a unit that polices corrupt officials, and it could foreshadow a shakeup in the way the government prosecutes those crimes, according to lawyers who work on such cases. Current and former department lawyers predict an overhaul that will sweep aside senior leaders in the Public Integrity […]