Bishop's Endgame

An early GOP force could be savoring party triumphs -- from prison

A A A Comments By Steven Long Thursday, Dec 2 1999

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"He is described as a master in the courtroom and a mess in the office," he says.

Woods is willing to give Bishop the benefit of the doubt regarding whether he intentionally hid money from the IRS.

Bishop in happier times.

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"As a solo practitioner, I can certainly see how [sloppy accounting] could happen when you are trying cases all the time," he says.

Also, Bishop's bookkeeper quit to move on to another job. Bishop hired another, who later died. Eventually he got around to filing his tax returns.

"When the dust settled, some of the money didn't make it onto his return," Secrest says. "He should have put his money into one account and hired staff to take care of these things."

The trial itself was not unusual in the presentation of evidence. Rare, though, was the list of character witnesses to be called by the defense: a sitting U.S. district judge (David Hittner), a former U.S. attorney (Ron Woods) and, stranger yet, two current prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney's Office, Paula Offenhauser and Katherine Haden.

None of them was called to the witness stand.

Secrest decided against their testimony, he says, because in doing so, he could have opened up a new avenue of attack for the prosecutors.

"The government can go into character issues," he says. "Bishop has made enemies, ruffled feathers. He is an in-your-face litigator."

Some, including a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office who is familiar with the evidence, say Secrest made a mistake in not calling the character witnesses, even though the prosecutor thinks that the government would still have had a strong case against Bishop.

That assistant U.S. attorney, who asked to remain anonymous, says he can recall no other case in his career where assistants in his office were willing to testify for the defense. Haden says both she and Offenhauser are "friends" of Bishop's wife.

Secrest says that he will appeal the verdict and that he will call those important character witnesses to testify at the sentencing hearing. Under mandatory federal sentencing guidelines to be followed by Judge Ewing Werlein, Bishop could receive from 27 to 33 months in prison.

It will be a long fall for a man who helped move the local and state GOP from a political afterthought to a potent political force.

"It's tough to work all this hard for this," Bishop says, "and then to have it crash down."

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