A federal judge today split the pending corruption trial of two former Republican legislators to allow the trial of one to go ahead while the government appeals a ruling made this week favoring the other.

The decision means a slight delay in the bribery, extortion, fraud and conspiracy case against Pete Kott, the former House speaker, with opening arguments scheduled now for Monday rather than this week.

But the trial of Bruce Weyhrauch, a former representative from Juneau, will await the outcome of the government’s appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and perhaps longer. Weyhrauch’s attorney, Doug Pope, said he’d try to take the case to the Supreme Court if the 9th Circuit reverses the decision in Anchorage.

U.S. District Judge John Sedwick made his ruling in a hastily called hearing at 8 a.m. today, just before jury selection was to begin. With 86 potential jurors from around Southcentral Alaska cloistered in a meeting room across the lobby and down a hall, Nicholas Marsh, a trial attorney from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, told Sedwick that his superiors in Washington agreed an appeal was justified.

They were challenging a ruling by Sedwick on Tuesday that said the government couldn’t present evidence that Weyhrauch and Kott were duty-bound to report they were seeking employment with Veco Corp., the politically active oil-field service company, in 2006, when they were voting on oil-tax legislation heavily lobbied by Veco’s chair, Bill Allen. Sedwick held that state law had no such requirement.

In this morning's hearing, Marsh told Sedwick the government still had ample evidence against Kott and was prepared to go to trial. But for Weyhrauch, a lawyer who never landed the Veco job, the evidence is crucial, Marsh said.

At issue is whether Weyhrauch used mail fraud to cheat Alaskans of honest service as a state legislator. Pope said Weyhrauch did nothing wrong in sending a personal advertisement for legal services to Veco.

With the trial set to begin, expenses for lawyers and the court tolling, and potential jurors cooling their heels, Marsh proposed that Sedwick revisit a request made in August by Weyhrauch’s attorneys to split the trial. At the time, Pope argued that the stronger evidence against Kott could prejudice the jury against his client. The government opposed the motion then, and the judge kept the defendants together.

But now, Pope told Sedwick, the situation has changed. He was fully prepared to go to trial. It would be an undue financial and emotional burden on Weyhrauch and his family to delay any longer. He argued the government’s points of appeal were thin and unlikely to succeed.

But Sedwick said federal appeals courts around the country were split on the issue, while the all-important 9th Circuit, governing courts in Alaska, “hasn’t spoken.” Sedwick said he followed a line of reasoning adopted by the 5th Circuit in New Orleans.

James Wendt, Kott’s attorney, opposed the split, mainly because he had prepared a case theory and line of questioning for witnesses based on having a co-defendant. The government acceded to two of his requests: it promised to tell him by Friday whether Allen and former Veco vice president Rick Smith would be called to testify and to reveal the approximate place in the trial they would take the stand.

Following a 90-minute recess to review the law and rulings in related cases, Sedwick called the parties back to his courtroom and announced he would sever the co-defendants so the government could pursue the appeal. He said he government clearly had that right.

After packing up boxes of documents on a cart and clearing the courthouse, Pope stopped to talk with reporters and expressed outrage at the government. He said prosecutors realized late in the pretrial phase that their case was weak and responded by inventing a new case theory that relied on an improper application of federal law.

He said Weyhrauch’s day in court may be delayed for more than a year by the appeal.

Marsh said it would be inappropriate to respond to Pope’s out-of-court criticism.