Leaders of Olympic Bid Scandal Must Stand Trial

A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the criminal case against the two leaders of Salt Lake City’s scandal-tainted bid for the 2002 Winter Games, proclaiming that “denouncing corruption” in the bid process for the Olympic Games is manifestly a matter of keen interest to the United States government.

The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, reversing a ruling made in November 2001 by a lower-court judge in Salt Lake City, reinstated the case against Tom Welch, who headed the bid, and Dave Johnson, Welch’s chief lieutenant.

The ruling raises the prospect of a full airing, in a federal courtroom in Salt Lake, of the allegations that accompanied the worst corruption crisis in International Olympic Committee history. It may yet also play a role in New York’s bid for the 2012 Games -- with numbers of IOC members even now feeling resentful still about the Salt Lake affair. The 2012 host city will be picked in 2005.

A trial date was not set.

Ten IOC members were expelled or resigned, and the IOC undertook a 50-point reform plan, amid disclosures in 1998 that Salt Lake had won the Games three years earlier after wooing IOC members and their relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements.

The Games of February 2002 have since been widely hailed as perhaps the best Winter Olympics ever -- despite extraordinarily tight security occasioned by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Amid other highlights from the Salt Lake Games, the U.S. Olympic team won a record 34 medals.

Prosecutors seeking to convict Welch and Johnson must thus do so in a community that basked in the glow of the national and world spotlight for 17 days -- a spotlight brought to Salt Lake largely by the efforts of Welch and Johnson.

“Our clients have not done anything wrong and if we need to have a jury say that, we’ll be glad to,” Welch’s attorney, Washington lawyer William W. Taylor III, said Tuesday evening.

Richard N. Wiedis, long one of the lead prosecutors in the case, said upon reading the decision, “The Justice Department is gratified.”

The government spent 19 months of intense investigation before filing an indictment. Federal prosecutors are known in high-profile matters to bring only those cases that top U.S. Department of Justice officials feel confident of winning.

Tuesday’s decision by a three-judge panel reinstates all 15 counts of the indictment -- charges that include interstate travel in aid of racketeering, fraud and conspiracy.

Through a complicated bit of legal maneuvering, the federal racketeering charges had relied on the use of a Utah state bribery misdemeanor statute. State authorities had declined to prosecute, and defense attorneys had argued that there was no “federal interest” in making sure the Olympic bid process was clean.

Without a “federal interest,” there can be no federal case.

The court on Tuesday made plain its belief that the prosecution of Welch and Johnson was “very much a matter of federal concern,” even though no other country in the world has chosen to prosecute Olympic officials in the wake of a number of other revelations involving inducement-laced bids.

The court said, “The 2002 Winter Olympic Games were an international event hosted by Salt Lake City, Utah and the United States.” The U.S. Olympic Committee, it declared flatly, “on behalf of the United States and through the Justice Department, has an undeniable interest in denouncing corruption in the selection process for the host city of the Olympic Games.”