John Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Committee who was considered one of the most corrupt members of Congress, died today.

The Defense Appropriations subcommittee is perhaps the most powerful in the House, funding not just the world’s biggest military, but the U.S. intelligence community as well.

President Obama signed the $636 billion 210 Defense appropriations bill into law in December. In it, Taxpayers for Common Sense counted 1,720 earmarks totalling $4.2 billion.

As chairman, Murtha cleaned up with 23 earmarks worth $76.5 billion.

With so much power and money flowing through it, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has become fertile ground for corruption on both sides of the aisle. One of its more infamous members was another Vietnam war hero like Murtha, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif.

With Murtha gone, the lobbyists and defense contractors who fed at his trough for so many years are in mourning. At the top of that heap is lobbyist Paul Magliochetti, a former Murtha aide whose PMA Group was raided last year.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania will also need to find another sponsor for all the pet projects nurtured for years by Murtha, the representative since 1974. Things like the National Drug Intelligence Center. Or the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. Or the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.

The FBI captured Murtha’s bare-knuckled performance on videotape in 1980 during an undercover sting aimed at exposing corrupt lawmakers. Murtha turned down 50,000 cash from the representative for a phony Arab sheikh, but not before adding, “After we’ve done some business, I might change my mind.”

Murtha was never charged with a crime, and in Congress, Speaker Tip O’Neill protected Murtha, as George Crile revealed in Charlie Wilson’s War. Wilson shut down the House Ethics Committee’s probe before a special prosecutor could move on Murtha.

When Murtha was in the running for majority leader in the fall of 2006, someone leaked a copy of the FBI videotape to The American Spectator. (See here.)

President Obama has nominated Ronald C. Machen Jr. to be U.S. Attorney in Washington DC.

Machen, 40, was part of the team at WilmerHale that defended defense contractor Mitchell Wade, briber of Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

Thanks to WilmerHale’s efforts, Wade is serving a 30-month sentence. That’s not bad, considering that Cunningham is serving more than eight years and Wade’s former boss and Cunningham briber, Brent Wilkes, is appealing his 12 year sentence.

Machen also represented another corrupt former congressman, Democrat William Jefferson and Christopher Ward, former National Republican Campaign Committee treasurer accused of stealing funds.

The U.S. Attorney is DC’s top law enforcement official, overseeing  the largest federal prosecutors office in the country.

Machen served as an Assistant US Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, US Department of Justice, from 1997 to 2001.

Remember Brent Wilkes? The formerly high-flying San Diego defense contractor was sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribing former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, but it will be a long time before Wilkes is behind bars.

Wilkes has been free since January on $2 million bail while he appeals his conviction.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently delayed the appeal for the third time this year after Wilkes’ court-appointed attorneys argued that they needed more time.

All the paperwork in the case is now due April 9, 2010. Unless there’s another delay.

According to the court, it takes on average 4-5 months for the 9th Circuit to hear oral arguments, and then three months to a year for the court to decide, so Wilkes likely won’t have a decision before 2011.

By then, Wilkes’ former consultant and fellow convicted Cunningham briber, Mitch Wade, will be nearing the end of his sentence, as will Wilkes lifelong best friend, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the CIA’s former executive director.

Cunningham has a 2013 release date.

Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the imprisoned former top CIA official, has given an interview to The New York Times, which published his claims last week in a front-page story titled, “A Window Into CIA’s Embrace of Secret Jails.”

From behind the walls of a Kentucky prison where he is serving more than three years for fraud, Foggo says he was given a special assignment to help build secret prisons for suspected terrorists.Foggo “went on to oversee construction” of three prisons — one in Bucharest, Romania, one in Morocco (that went unused) and a third in an unnamed Eastern European country, the Times reported.

A review of the story and the background of the case shows there is evidence to believe Foggo’s account, but ultimately, there’s more reason to doubt he’s telling the whole truth.

First a bit of background:

Foggo pleaded guilty last year in a fraud scheme involving a defense contractor named Brent Wilkes. Foggo admitting using his influence at the agency to steer $2 million in contracts to Wilkes, who paid for lavish overseas vacations for Foggo and his family. Wilkes was separately convicted of bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with cash, travel and hookers.

The scheme centered around Foggo’s time as chief support officer of FRANSUPT, the agency’s crucial regional support terminal in Frankfurt, Germany from July 2001 to November 2004. In that position, Foggo had control over millions of dollars in government funds.In November 2004, CIA Director Porter Goss picked Foggo to run day-to-day operations at the CIA, as the agency’s executive director, the No. 3 job. Foggo says he was promoted in part because of his work on the prisons.

The Times story paints a picture of Foggo as a lovable rogue, “a cigar-waving, burbon-drinking operator” who could get things done. The job of building prisons was “too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” Foggo said.  “I was proud to help my nation.”

One problem lies with what isn’t in the story. Missing from the Times account is any comment from federal prosecutors, who have a strikingly different view of Foggo. To them, Foggo is a man who is motivated not by patriotism but by “narcissism and deceitfulness.”

In sworn declarations filed by prosecutors, a former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center director described Foggo as a “con man” who was “seriously flawed, ethically and morally.” Former CIA Director Porter Goss says Foggo left him feeling “deceived and betrayed.”  A CIA attorney recounted how she became convinced that Foggo was “effortlessly lying” to her.

Is it possible Foggo is telling the truth? As chief support officer, he quite likely knew something about the prisons. Before securing his guilty plea, prosecutors complained that the defense wanted turn the case into “a referendum on the global war on terror” and a debate over sensitive “CIA programs and methods.”

Foggo’s attorneys asked to be read into areas of sensitive compartmented information — the most closely guarded class of secrets. One pertained to the CIA’s terrorist detention and interrogation program. The request was denied. Shortly before he went off to prison, Foggo spoke with a prosecutor investigating the CIA’s destruction of videotaped interrogations.

Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe and ABC News have reported that Romania (as well as Poland) served as locations of CIA prisons. The most detailed of these investigations (pdf) by the Council of Europe’s rapporteur Dick Marty found evidence that Romania’s “black site” was located near in a secure zone around an airbase near the Black Sea — a ways from Bucharest.

The choice of a busy street for a location of a secret prison, however, strains credulity, since the changing of guard shifts, supplies and transport of detainees could attract unwanted attention.

As James Risen wrote in State of War, “The CIA wanted secret locations where it could have complete control over the interrogations and debriefings, free from the prying eyes of the international media, free from monitoring by human rights groups, and, most important, far from the jurisdiction of the American legal system.”

The story lacks some internal consistency, something interrogators look for when evaluating truthfulness:  Foggo says he was given the task secret prisons because it was “too sensitive for headquarters.” Nevertheless, his work on the CIA’s so-called black sites helped him win a promotion back at headquarters, suggested that headquarters was well aware of his sensitive mission.

And finally, while the Times doesn’t rely on Foggo alone — it cites anonymous “former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter.” One of these sources may be Brant Bassett, who is quoted later on in the piece speculating that Foggo was taken down because of his “fast rise and blunt approach.”

Regardless of whether Bassett is a confidential source or not, The Times didn’t fully explain his connection to the story. Bassett was a friend of both Wilkes and Foggo, part of their poker playing D.C. social circle. Bassett also served under Porter Goss the House Intelligence Committee and may have played a role in getting Foggo named executive director.

We owe a great deal to reporters like The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, who helped expose the CIA’s network of secret prisons with the help of agency insiders who were troubled by what was going on. It’s an important story, perhaps too important for the Times to give such credence to a man like Kyle “Dusty” Foggo.

Sharp-eyed reader Oskar points out a little nugget buried in the Foggo documents:

I was reading the Foggo appendix and found something pretty interesting. Om page 60, we learn that Wilkes and Foggo apparently dined with Lewis and DeLay(!). Of course, a dinner is just a dinner and doesn’t prove anything. But, still, it’s pretty interesting given Lewis’ claim that he had not seen Wilkes for 10 years or so…

This blog is lucky to have such astute readers.

The dinner for four at the Capital Grille that Oskar is referring to took place on Monday, May 16, 2005. Foggo, then the CIA’s executive director, and his old friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, had two impressive guests. The government’s appendix  states: “Assumes DeLay and Lewis also dined on the bill,” which came to $1,423. Wilkes, as always, picked up the tab.

Fast-forward to today. Wilkes has been sentenced to 12 years prison for bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with cash and hookers. (He’s out on appeal) Foggo was sentenced to more than three years for illegally steering CIA contracts to Wilkes.

At the time, Reps. Jerry Lewis and Tom DeLay were two of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives. Lewis was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and the House was set to take up its annual appropriations bills.  DeLay, of course, was the majority leader.

One year later, Lewis was apparently suffering from memory loss, according to this 2006 story in The New York Times:

In recent months, Mr. Lewis has said that he barely knew Mr. Wilkes and that he did not remember seeing him in nearly a decade. But Mr. Wilkes says their relationship was closer than that. (emphasis added)

Ever since they went on a scuba-diving trip together in 1993, he said, Mr. Lewis had referred to him as his “diving buddy.” They occasionally dined together or met at political functions, Mr. Wilkes said. At a Las Vegas fund-raiser in April 2005, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lewis greeted him as “Brento” and hugged him as Mr. Wilkes surprised the lawmaker with $25,000 in campaign contributions.

As for DeLay, he had flown three times on a jet owned by one Wilkes’ company. Another Wilkes company gave $15,000 to TRMPAC, a political action committee DeLay founded to establish a Republican majority in the Texas legislature. (See my AP story here for more.)

Wilkes and Foggo were regulars at the Capital Grille and shared a well-stocked wine locker there. In 2005, documents show the two old high school buddies dined together at the pricey D.C. steakhouse about once a month.