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After several sessions with the agents, Hogge began to worry that she had become a target herself. She decided she'd better get herself an attorney, so she contacted DeGuerin. "She was giving [the FBI] the names of people who knew about various things that were going on at Automaker," says DeGuerin. "It got pretty complicated, and she got kind of worried dealing with these folks. They kept telling her nothing was going to happen to her, but she was worried. So she comes to me, and I tell them that either she gets immunity or all bets are off."

Following DeGuerin's ultimatum in September 1996, a federal grand jury indicted Hogge along with Dan H. Stinger and James B. Morris, the former Automaker chief executive officer and operations manager, respectively. The essence of the 11-count indictment was that the trio had defrauded the government by billing the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy for work on robotics projects that hadn't even started yet. If convicted, Hogge faced up to 40 years in prison and $2 million in fines.

Key to the prosecution's case was its contention that Automaker had billed for mechanical drawings that didn't exist. The defense insisted the drawings did exist, and that they had been seized by the FBI. By the time the trial started, the blueprints still had not been produced. In fact, a former employee of Automaker testified -- under threat of prosecution -- that the drawings had never been done, but that he had been instructed by his bosses to say that they had.

One day, after returning from a lunch recess, attorney Dan Cogdell, who represented Stinger, noticed something interesting on the prosecution table. "There was this big roll of blueprints," says DeGuerin. "So Cogdell goes over there and unrolls it, and there they are! The very plans that the prosecution had denied existed."

DeGuerin says he doesn't often buy in to conspiracy theories, but in this instance, he believes someone familiar with the case -- with either the FBI or the U.S. attorney's office -- did not approve of the government's conduct and deliberately placed the blueprints where they would be discovered by the defense.

No matter how the drawings surfaced, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt apparently didn't care much for the government's case, either. Shortly after Assistant U.S. Attorney Martinez -- DeGuerin's nemesis from Brown's trial -- rested his case, Hoyt entered an oral judgment of acquittal for Hogge and her two co-defendants. So weak was the government's case, DeGuerin didn't even have to mount a defense. He believes that Hogge should never have been under investigation, much less brought to trial.

DeGuerin doesn't know if this type of law enforcement is "a huge conspiracy by everybody in the FBI," he says. "But I think the FBI engenders an attitude of arrogance and infallibility that encourages some individual agents and supervisors to make their own decisions. They've got an attitude that, 'By God, we are the FBI, and we write the rules.' "

DeGuerin, of course, was the attorney for the late David Koresh, and he still seethes at the thought of the fiery conclusion to the Branch Davidians' deadly standoff with the FBI outside Waco, one of McVeigh's motivating factors in deciding to commit mass murder. DeGuerin thinks federal prosecutors are often at the mercy of FBI agents, who decide what to reveal to the U.S. attorney's office. While DeGuerin reserves most of his venom for the FBI, Cogdell spreads his criticism equally between the bureau and the U.S. attorney's office. Indeed, the case of the missing blueprints is not the only one in which Cogdell witnessed questionable conduct by federal prosecutors.

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In 1994 Cogdell represented Lawrence H. Ramming, one of ten defendants in a 27-count federal bank fraud indictment. In a ruling reminiscent of the one he made in the Hogge trial, Judge Hoyt dismissed the case on the grounds of insufficient evidence and prosecutorial misconduct. In his 34-page order, Hoyt accused prosecutors Julia Hyman and Michael Schwartz of withholding exculpatory evidence and coercing a witness with the threat of prosecution into altering his testimony to fit the government's theory.

"It is the only case I've ever been in where every day not only did the government engage in misconduct, they were caught engaging in misconduct," says Cogdell. "It got so bad that Judge Hoyt held the prosecutor in contempt and threatened to empanel a grand jury to inquire into criminal wrongdoing in the U.S. attorney's office."

Ramming eventually filed a civil suit against the government for wrongful prosecution. The case was settled out of court, reportedly for around $500,000.