Following Monday’s sentencing of defense contractor Mitchell Wade, Sen. Dan Inouye’s spokesman responded to my reporting that the senator was one of the Wade five:

“Senator Inouye has not been contacted by the FBI or any other investigative authority in connection with the cases involving Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade. Speculation and suggestions that a cloud of wrongdoing hangs over him and that he engaged in similar misconduct have no basis in fact.” — Inouye Press Secretary Mike Yuen.

Reader Jim A. writes to say that Mitch Wade’s fitness reports in 1989 and 1990 and  1992 from supervisors including future Director of National Intelligence John McConnell aren’t so impressive when you take a closer look:

 Naval Reserve officers who came on board active duty commands for two-week annual training periods usually got this very same (or very similar) fitrep, year in, year out as long as they managed to stay out of trouble and not set the place on fire. This sort of inflated fitness report is also a major reason why the Naval Officer Fitness Report system was overhauled a few years later (didn’t work out very well, but that’s a different story). With everyone a superlative water-walker, it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and I saw way too much chaff promote up during the 1990’s.

When I read his write-ups (the textual portion on page 2), it appeared to me he didn’t really do all that much during those two training periods. Morocco and Somalia weren’t all that “hot” in July, 1989 (Somalia was not too much later, though). By Dec, 1990 the Pentagon wasn’t “the” place to be for an aspiring junior officer. This was during the final phase of Operation Desert Shield, the buildup to Desert Storm, the first Iraq War, which kicked off the next month. Guys really looking to promote up were out in the fleet or elsewhere in the Middle East, most typically Saudi Arabia. Mitchie-boy was in the rear with the beer. Myself, I was more than happy to be at a small Naval facility in the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina state line at the time.

I guess what I really wonder is didn’t he think someone out here wouldn’t recognize his fitreps for what they are? They’re simply attestations that he spent some time at a particular command on annual training and managed not to incur the wrath of the Chain of Command.

How do I know all this? I was in the Navy from 1973 to 2006, both as an enlisted sailor and as an officer. Not so long after Wade’s visitation there, I also served at that very same JCS/J2, only for two years, not two two-week training periods. I’ve seen more than a few Mitch Wades in my time.

You can read his full comment here. And here’s another comment from someone who knows quite a bit about Wade’s charitable venture,  the Sure Foundation:

I notice Mitchell Wade’s attorneys left the Sure Foundation off the list of his good deeds. It only took fourteen directors and four advisors to spend a grand total of $390k on the Sure Foundation’s “worldwide projects” over a four-year period.I wonder what happened to the $100k grant for Marion Barry’s wife, Effie, to promote art for children in DC.

As far as I know, no one ever questioned why the Sure Foundation sponsored a White House Fellows trip to an Irish resort which was advertised on the official White House website. The trip was supposed to be for orphans but I don’t know how many orphans, if any, ever made it to camp.

Two former directors and one former deputy chief of staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency served on the foundation’s board of directors and the president was the head of an obscure, loosely monitored, give-away program at the Department of Energy.

I’m “sure” they all enjoyed a lovely day of racing and picknicking at the Foxfield Races in Charlottesville and the “elegant and lively black-tie gala” held in the garden at historic Seven Oaks Farm in Greenwood that followed.

And I’m “sure” the taxpayers picked up the tab for this so-called charitable event.

Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., who’s giving up his powerful post on the House Appropriations Committee and retiring after 14 years, says that he’s leaving with his head held high. By the abysmally low standards in Congress, his tenure was a smashing success. Apparently, a member of the Appropriations Committee is doing well if he or she doesn’t end up in prison.

“I’m going out on top. I’ve seen colleagues voted out or carried out or prosecuted out. It’s a pretty good time to leave,”  LaHood told the Peoria Journal-Star in a story published Sunday.

One of LaHood’s colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee was Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Others include Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.; Allan Mollohan, D-W.Va.; and Virgil Goode, R-Va., all of whom have come under scrutiny from investigators for their ties to Cunningham’s briber, Mitch Wade, who’s back in the news as his sentencing next month approaches.

Sometimes departing congressmen give us a rare glimpse of truth. Not LaHood. He says that Randy “Duke” Cunningham “poisoned the well on earmarks.” He has it backwards: the well is poisoned, and it’s making Congress sick.

“I’ve never been embarrassed by an earmark; they all came from people in my district who had a good idea,” LaHood said.

The Man from Peoria has to defend earmarks; he’s one of the biggest porkers in the House. Citizens Against Government Waste scored LaHood at the bottom of all House Republicans in 100 votes that would have reined in government spending in 2007. (Two Democrats scored even lower.)  LaHood was also selected by the non-partisan group as “porker of the month” two years earlier

Appropriators protect each other. When Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., dared to try and kill then-Speaker Denny Hastert’s $2.5 million earmark for the Illinois Technology Development Corp. because it was inappropriate for a defense bill, LaHood reminded him — on the House floor — “Do you know who earmarked this money?”

The Journal-Star ran a more insightful story Sunday headlined “LaHood showed 18th District the money.” He sure did:

“The reason I went on the Appropriations Committee, the reason other people go on the Appropriations Committee, is they know that it puts them in a position to know where the money is at, to know the people who are doling the money out and to be in the room when the money is being doled out,” LaHood has said.

This perfectly encapsulates the attitude of the appropriators. They think in terms of getting money, not spending it wisely, and you can forget about saving it. So what if Congress wastes billions of dollars on planes that don’t fly, bridges to nowhere, defense systems the military doesn’t want, monuments to themselves or a hippy museum? Occasionally, an earmark actually helps someone, so that justifies the whole lot.

Through earmarks, Congress is frittering away its most important power of Congress — “the power of the purse.” Nothing comes out of the U.S. Treasury until Congress gives its assent. This is a deliberate check on the president and gives Congress “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers. So in Congress, especially the House, the appropriators are greater among equals: They hold the power.

In the 1980s, appropriators started to skim the cream off the federal budget and send it back home to their districts in the form of earmarks. Lobbyists saw it as a way to guarantee money for their clients, and they flocked to the appropriators like bears to honey. After the GOP takeover, earmarks rose from $31 billion in 1994 to more than $65 billion in 2006, according to Congressional Research Service.

The appropriators were getting high on their own supply, and like all addicts, they rationalized their self-destruction. Earmarks are chump change in the $3 trillion federal budget. And everyone else is doing it, right? It’s going to happen anyway, so “I gots to get mine.” It’s was no different on Wall Street, of course. This is what happens when you have hustlers and showmen running things.

LaHood had a reputation for reaching across the aisle, but it was an unmistakably partisan Ray LaHood who tried to minimize embarrassment to the GOP during the Cunningham scandal. LaHood, like Cunningham, also served on the House intelligence committee. (That’s CIA director George Tenet to the right of LaHood in the photo above.) Cunningham’s actions on the intelligence committee were and remain deeply embarrassing. The panel still hasn’t released an unclassified report detailing how Cunningham manipulated the committee to funnel millions of dollars to Mitch Wade and his company, MZM Inc. Committee members like LaHood didn’t want it to get around that they didn’t know what was going on, didn’t care, or both.

But Democrat Jane Harman, ranking member on the intelligence committee, had the temerity to release a five-page executive summary of the Cunningham report. LaHood was incensed. He got a Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee suspended, and suggested it was political payback. “If the ranking member wants to play politics,” LaHood told Fox News, “there are some of us on the other side that can play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.”

This is a different Ray LaHood than the one David Broder of The Washington Post tells us will be missed in Congress. LaHood’s decision to retire last year sent “shock waves through the whole chamber,” Broder says. LaHood “embodies the characteristics that make the House work as an institution” — he takes care of constituents, carries a heavier share of the legislative workload, and cultivates relationships on the other side of the aisle.

Broder says it’s a shame when the House lets go of a member like LaHood. I say it’s a shame that the standards of our polity as so low that a man like LaHood who succeeds by not failing may actually may be missed.

When defense contractor Mitchell Wade’s corrupt relationship with Randy “Duke” Cunningham was exposed in 2005, Robert McKeon saw opportunity.

McKeon heads Veritas Capital, a New York private equity firm that buys defense contractors, and Wade’s company MZM Inc. looked like a good candidate for acquisition. The company was in distress, but it also had potentially lucrative intelligence contracts and more than 300 employees with Top Secret and above security clearances.

In September 2005, Veritas bought MZM for a “full price” of around $20 million, according to BusinessWeek. The deal was swiftly approved. “Veritas is profiting from the spoils of congressional bribes,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense complained, to no avail.

So how has Veritas done on its investment? Quite well.

By getting rid of Wade and keeping 94 percent of his old firm’s contracts, Veritas unlocked MZM’s revenue stream. In its first fiscal year of operation under new management, the company — renamed Athena Innovative Solutions — posted more than $100 million in sales.Athena also boosted the size of the workforce and acquired three small Virginia companies, including Business Defense and Security Corp.

In September 2007, two years after acquiring MZM, Veritas sold Wade’s old company for $200 million to CACI Inc. For those keeping score at home, that’s an annualized return of 900 percent. 

(Update: Veritas also employs former Gen. Barry McCaffrey, which has gotten them in some trouble.)

As I first revealed here last week, defense contractor Mitchell Wade aided the government in its investigation “of at least five other members of Congress” who were the subject of government investigations into whether they had engaged in “corruption similar to that of Mr. Cunningham,” according to a defense sentencing memo.

Wade is to be sentenced next month for providing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with $1.8 million in bribes. He’s asking for a year of home detention in return for the extraordinary cooperation that he provided the government in its investigations of Cunningham and other current and former members of Congress (none of whom has been charged with a crime). They include:

• Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hi.
• Rep. Alan B. Mollohan,  D-W. Va
• Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.
• Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va.
• Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla.

The Inouye and Lewis connections involve Wade’s former employer, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, who introduced Wade to Cunningham.

During his trial, Wilkes testified that it was a “total misrepresentation” to say he relied on the Congressman Cunningham to do everything for him; Jerry Lewis, along with Rep. John Porter of Ill., were far more important, Wilkes said. (There’s excellent background on Lewis’ lobbying operation here.) The U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles reportedly opened an investigation into Lewis back in 2006.

By contrast, Inouye, the Senate’s third-most senior Democrat, hasn’t yet been linked to an investigation of “corruption similar to Mr. Cunningham.” Wilkes was seeking the veteran Senate  appropriator’s help in lining up military and government contracts for his Honolulu document conversion subsidiary, Akamai Info Tech. Inouye was also one of more than a dozen members of Congress Wilkes unsuccessfully attempted to subpoena for his trial last year.

Mollohan’s ties to Wade are more direct. He received $23,000 in campaign contributions and gifts to a family foundation from Wade’s company, MZM Inc., and another firm that did business with MZM. In October 2002, MZM gave $20,000 to Mollohan’s Summit PAC. As Roll Call reported:

One of those who created Summit PAC for Mollohan was Robert Hytner, vice chairman of Information Manufacturing Corp. of Rocket Center, W.Va. — a company that had a close but apparently troubled business relationship with MZM.

In 2002, IMC paired with MZM on what was to be the initial round of a $12 million Defense Department contract. The contract was issued for support work for the Pentagon’s Joint Counter-Intelligence Assessment Group, Congressional sources said. Mollohan, who serves as ranking member on the Appropriations subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, Commerce and related agencies, said he had no role in securing any funding for that program.

How IMC and MZM came to share the $12 million DOD contract is unclear. IMC was to open a 70-person intelligence operation in West Virginia, and MZM would have filled 30 of those slots. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) issued a press release in October 2002 in which Wade thanked Byrd for helping secure the funds for the program.

But at some point in early 2003, IMC lost control of the contract to MZM, which took it over and then failed to open a West Virginia branch, according to a source familiar with the incident. Inquiries were made with the Pentagon by members of the West Virginia delegation about why Defense awarded the entire program to MZM. But since the work was classified, the Defense Department offered little insight into what happened, the source said.

The Defense contract eventually grew to be worth roughly $50 million over four years, all of which went to MZM, added the source.

Wade’s ties to Goode and Harris are old news. As I said last week, Wade wanted to open facilities in their districts and made $78,000 in “straw” contributions  to grease the wheels. To settle the charges, Wade agreed to pay  a $1 million civil fine to the Federal Elections Commission, the second-largest penalty in the commission’s history.

As I said earlier, neither Harris nor Goode nor any of the other three on this list has been charged with wrongdoing. Even so, I still love this letter that Harris wrote to Wade after the first of their two dinners at Citronelle, “the best dinner I have ever enjoyed in Washington.”

Repeating something I posted here last year. In a court affidavit (pdf), the FBI cited a document from Mitch Wade’s company, MZM Inc., that bragged of all the firm had done for a CIFA, the brand-new Counterintelligence Field Activity:

Wade boasted in 2002 that he could deliver money to CIFA from Cunningham and his other buddies in Congress (without mentioning that the money then came back to Wade in the form of contracts).

In a Nov. 8, 2002 presentation entitled “Benefits to CIFA from Congressional Mandates Initiative Support,” Wade trumpeted one item: “Delivery of over $67.62M in the last three fiscal years over budget – no other entity within the CIFA family has accomplished this task.”

On a page entitled “Election Impact on Congressional Mandates,” Wade wrote listed a number of politicians. The list included Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Duncan Hunter, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker Denny Hastert, Jerry Lewis, Allan Mollohan, John Murtha, David Weldon, and Bill Young; Senators Robert Byrd, Larry Craig, Orin Hatch, Daniel Inouye, Trent Lott, Jay Rockefeller, and Richard Shelby.

At the bottom, Wade wrote “Election enchanced MZM Inc….Thus CIFA position.”

Well, I was wrong about nobody caring about yesterday’s post about defense contractor Mitch Wade. The Washington Post ran a story today on the sentencing memo, highlighting the congressional corruption angle.

Wade is being sentenced next month for paying $1.8 million in bribes to former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in return for government contracts. He’s one of the more interesting, but least known characters in the whole sordid saga.

Wade was once at the top of D.C.’s social strata. As outwardly successful as he seemed, Wade was inwardly troubled. He had classic symptoms of mania — he was equally smart, gracious, and charming as well as ruthless, relentlessly ambitious and control-obssessed.

At MZM Inc., his defense contracting firm, Wade opened mail addressed to his employees, screened employee e-mails and railed about those who received personal messages in their MZM accounts. No detail was too small for him to obsess about and nothing got done without his say-so.  As I wrote in my book:

It occurred to more than one employee that Wade had deep psychological problems. His paranoia, his compartmentalization, and his secrecy were all traits that many of his employees recognized from their experience in the intelligence world. Suspicion and paranoia were a job hazard, particularly in the spy-vs-spy of counterintelligence that was MZM’s specialty. Too many much time spent wondering if your colleagues were really your enemies did tend to make people a bit loony.

In a wonderful essay in The New Yorker, writer John Le Carre, a former spy himself, says that madness is endemic to the intelligence world “hard to detect and harder still to eradicate.” The most famous case was James Jesus Angleton, a “deranged CIA inpatient,” in Le Carre’s words, who nearly destroyed the spy agency in his quest for a Soviet mole that he could never find.

There were rumors that Wade was connected to some sort of covert intelligence network, which might explain all the paranoia. I heard stories of secret passageways, safehouses and nasty covert ops, but it was never clear to me that this was anything more than a product of Wade’s massive ego, a fantasy that he was playing at the spy world’s “great game” and not just acting like a shabby huckster.

At the same time, I’ve been thinking about the glowing fitness reports (here and here) Wade received from John McConnell, the director of national intelligence. And I can’t help but wonder whether the attributes in Wade that I think might earn him time on the psychiatrist’s couch might actually be viewed as useful traits in certain corners of the intelligence world.

Mitchell Wade, the man who bribed Randy “Duke” Cunningham and then did much to speed the congressman’s spectacular fall, is asking a judge to sentence him to a year of home detention for all the help he provided the government. Prosecutors don’t dispute that Wade was helpful, but they believe that four years in prison is more appropriate for $1.8 million in bribes.

Would Cunningham ultimately have been convicted without Wade? Probably, but Wade made it happen much, much faster.  He was debriefed 23 times by government investigators and supplied them a searchable electronic database of 150,000 documents, including the infamous “bribe menu.” And Wade’s cooperation didn’t stop with Cunningham. He provided damaging evidence against several others, including his testimony at the bribery trial of his former boss, Brent Wilkes, who’s now serving time in prison.

A 42-page sentencing memo filed by Wade’s attorneys says he aided the government in its investigation “of at least five other members of Congress” who were under investigation for “corruption similar to that of Mr. Cunningham.” These no doubt include Virgil Goode and Katherine “Pink Sugar” Harris. Wade wanted to open facilities in their districts and made $78,000 in “straw” contributions  to grease the wheels. Neither Harris nor Goode has been charged with wrongdoing.

Prosecutors drop tantalizing hints about an even bigger, ongoing investigation. Wade was debriefed in 2006 and provided “moderately useful” background information in another “large and important corruption investigation” that also has not yet resulted in any charges.

Wade ran a mid-sized defense consulting firm, MZM Inc., and was very well-connected in military intelligence circles. After college in 1985, he started out as program manager for a highly-secret Navy program, supporting Central American counterinsurgencies and counterintelligence work in Europe and Asia. He joined the Naval Reserves as an intelligence officer and was assigned to the Middle East/Africa desk at the DIA’s National Military Intelligence Center.

During the 1990 Gulf War and again in 1992, Wade’s supervisor was John McConnell, the current Director of National Intelligence. McConnell recommended Wade for accelerated promotion. “LTJG Wade is an outstanding officer, who will excel in the most demanding positions,” McConnell wrote. (Fitness reports 1 and 2) In 1992, McConnell was named NSA director. Wade started MZM Inc., his solo consulting firm, the following year, providing what his attorneys called “technical and programmatic assistance” to McConnell’s NSA.

So how did such a smart guy go so wrong?  In a letter to the judge who will be sentencing him next month, Wade wrote that he “lost sight of the concepts of integrity and fair play” and started cutting corners to get ahead. “I realize that it was my pride, ego, and desire for power that led me down this terrible path,” he wrote.

Wade has lost his job, his career, his reputation and his marriage, and his $2 million legal team at WilmerHale has done a tremendous job of making him seem like a man who is trying to pick up the pieces of his life. It’s quite a contrast to Cunningham’s sentencing memo, which was a portrait of a war hero who had deteriorated into a man who couldn’t even buy himself a friend.

Wade’s sentencing is set for Dec. 15. Will it even make the news? I doubt it. Look at what just happened to our financial system. These guys are amateurs.

The Pengtagon has made it official: The Counterintelligence Field Activity is no more.

It’s being rechristened the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and put under the authority of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Effective August 3, all CIFA personnel and its contractors will start reporting to DIA. CIFA was run by a civilian, but the DCHIC will be run by a  two-star general who reports to Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the head of the DIA.

In the business world, this would be called a merger and there would be all sorts of talk of synergies. The DIA has its own human intelligence or HUMINT service, which brought us the infamous Iraqi informant known as Curveball who sold a bunch of bs in the hopes of getting a Green card.

But the truth is that CIFA’s days were numbered ever since its director and his deputy resigned in the wake of the Randy “Duke” Cunningham scandal. Duke helped create CIFA, and then allowed it to become a playground for his Rolls-Royce supplier and personal antiques shopper, Mitchell Wade.

But that’s not to say that CIFA is a bad idea. DoD counterintelligence is an important job. Just look at all the spy cases that came out of the Defense Department like the Walker spy ring, Jonathan Pollard, Ronald Pelton, and so on. Somebody needs to guard the henhouse.

It appears that the new agency has authority that CIFA never did. It is being granted “administrative and management oversight of national security investigations (e.g., espionage) and related activities conducted by DoD CI organizations.” Contrast that with CIFA, which was a “single coordination focal point” for these matters. Whatever that means.

Just got back from court. For the Cunningham junkies: The judge shot down Brent Wilkes’ request to have his secret admirer bail him out of prison.

For the rest of you: Wilkes, a former defense contractor, was sentenced in February to 12 years for bribing former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham with hookers, cash, and meals at DC’s Capital Grille. But Wilkes has been eating daily specials at Terminal Island FCI in San Pedro for weeks because he can’t come up with $1.4 million in collateral to secure release.

Some unnamed person was willing to bail Wilkes out, but only if he or she can shield their identity from the public. The judge, Larry Burns, said no. Either you step up and say “I’m with Brent the consequences be damned” or Wilkes stays in the clink. Larry stressed that he’s not trying to make Brent’s life hell, even though he did call him a lying sack of shit who’s an “economic danger” to the community. Whatever that means.

The reporters there asked me if I knew who this person is. I have no idea.

Wilkes’ attorney did offer a clue. He talked about how a person at a “publicly-traded company” might have obligations that go beyond him or herself. Such a person has “fiduciary” duties. Here’s the legal definition of a fiduciary duty:

A fiduciary duty is an obligation to act in the best interest of another party. For instance, a corporation’s board member has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, a trustee has a fiduciary duty to the trust’s beneficiaries, and an attorney has a fiduciary duty to a client….

A person acting in a fiduciary capacity is held to a high standard of honesty and full disclosure in regard to the client and must not obtain a personal benefit at the expense of the client.

Any ideas out there?

Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana who looks like Radar O’Reilly from M*A*S*H*, has just introduced a bill with the noble goal of preventing another Duke Cunningham.

Souder wants members of Congress, federal candidates, and top admininstration officials to disclose the mortgages they hold on their castles, mansions, compounds, and beach homes. “Transparency,” Souder says, “is fundamental to public trust.”

He took the first step by disclosing that he has eight years left on his mortgage, owes $75,000 and is paying 6.875 percent interest.

As insanely greedy as Duke was, even he would have thought twice before listing that he owed $0 on a $2.55 million mansion he had bought the previous year. But what prompted this wasn’t Duke, but the low-cost loans two senators got from the “Friends of Angelo” program. Souder and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, one of the wealthiest representatives, are calling for a House investigation.

It’s a good first step, but the bill doesn’t go far enough. A survey by Politco.com found more than one of four senators have no mortgages.

How about requiring members of Congress to disclose the values of their homes?

The story of Duke’s clemency application seems to have  touched a nerve. I was on KUSI-TV this morning to discuss the Cunningham pardons. People seem to be outraged at the possibility that Duke might wriggle off the hook.

Well, I don’t think there’s much chance of that. George W. Bush has granted clemency a total of SIX times since he took office. Yes, one of those cases was Scooter Libby. But the rest were nobodies, small-time drug dealers you’ve never heard of. By contrast, Clinton granted clemency 61 times — half of which came on his last day in office.

But the bigger problem — and the more meaningful one for Duke — is the huge backlog of 2,300 cases that is overwhelming the system. The Justice Department’s Office of Pardon Attorney, which has to review and make a recommendation on each request, is drowning in paper. There are thousands of people equally, if not more deserving of clemency than Cunningham.

So, who’s representing Duke? It’s not Cunningham’s criminal attorneys at the firm of O’Melveny & Myers, as I’ve previously noted. But who is? And why?

I’m assuming here that Duke didn’t file his own application. It’s possible, but unlikely. As Duke’s former commanding officer pointed out, the man can’t write a simple declarative sentence.

Hiring an attorney at $500/hour is tough for an ex-congressman who had to forfeit all his ill-gotten gains and owes a $1.8 million fine. Then again, he is still collecting his congressional pension.

Gen. Wesley Clark got in a lot of trouble for comments he made on Face the Nation about Sen. John McCain’s qualifications for office.

SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean —

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

(Transcript here)

Eve though Clark had earlier called McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, a hero for his service as a prisoner of war, his comment above — stripped of its context — became fodder for the crude, overly simplistic tit-for-tat world of American politics today.

Clark is a former Democratic presidential candidate who has endorsed Barack Obama, so he must have been speaking as a politician, not a retired general.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers saw the angle right away and pounced:

“Let’s please drop the pretense that Barack Obama stands for a new type of politics. The reality is he’s proving to be a typical politician who is willing to say anything to get elected, including allowing his campaign surrogates to demean and attack John McCain’s military service record.”

The media, smelling blood, dove right in.  CNN’s Rick Sanchez said “Wesley Clark tried to Swiftboat John McCain today.” BANG! The Washington Post’s ubiquitous Howie Kurtz said Clark had used his appearance on Face the Nation to “strafe” McCain. Politico.com called it “one of the more personal attacks on the Republican presidential nominee this election cycle.” CRACK!

Clark’s remark may be an inartful snap judgment, but it also happens to be true.

Like McCain, Randy “Duke” Cunningham was shot down over North Vietnam in May 10, 1972, the day he became the first fighter ace of the Vietnam War. He avoided capture because U.S. forces came to his rescue.

Cunningham was by no means qualified to be a congressman, let alone president, and yet, he served for 15 years until he was finally revealed as the most corrupt congressman of all time.

It’s what Cunningham and McCain did after they were shot down that proved their mettle as men.

McCain spent six years in a prisoner of war camp. When he was offered release, McCain refused. The son of a Navy admiral would not allow himself to be used for enemy propaganda. As a result, he was routinely tortured and beaten.

And what did Cunningham do? Well, that’s  exactly what my book Feasting on the Spoils is about.

Cunningham became a professional “war hero. He came to resent his commanders when they tried to hold him accountable. He grew envious of other pilots and remained bitter that he never got the Medal of Honor. He believed the rest of his life should be an extended coronation. His ego grew to a monstrous size that always wanted more and more, and Cunningham bullied his way to power.

Getting shot down alone isn’t a qualification. It’s what we make of ourselves and how we respond when tested that matters.

Just got off the phone with the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. The office confirmed what the NY Times reported over the weekend:  imprisoned former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham has applied for a commutation from President Bush. (Hey, I had to make sure!) In addition, his application was submitted sometime in 2007. They wouldn’t answer any other questions. More soon.

Who’s the attorney/firm handling Duke’s clemency request? It’s not Lee Blalack and the folks at O’Melveny & Myers, who represented Duke through his plea and sentencing and continue to represent him regarding his cooperation agreement with the government. If anybody knows who’s behind this, please let me know.

According to the Department of Justice website,

Generally, commutation of sentence is an extraordinary remedy that is rarely granted.

The statistics bear out that it’s easier to get a pardon than a commutation. Clinton  granted 396 of the 2,001 pardon requests he received, but granted only 61 of more than 5,400 requests for clemency. In the previous 12 years of Bush and Reagan, clemency requests were granted only 16 times.

Again, from the DOJ:

Appropriate grounds for considering commutation have traditionally included disparity or undue severity of sentence, critical illness or old age, and meritorious service rendered to the government by the petitioner, e.g., cooperation with investigative or prosecutive efforts that has not been adequately rewarded by other official action.

During his sentencing, defense attorneys made much of Duke’s history of prostate cancer. And the former congressman has cooperated with the investigation, even though prosecutors never called him as a witness at the trial of Brent Wilkes, for reasons that remain unclear.

Seems like Brent Wilkes isn’t the only one who wants out of jail.  The New York Times reports that Duke is seeking a pardon from President Bush:

In addition, prominent federal inmates are asking Mr. Bush to commute their sentences. Among them are Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from California; Edwin W. Edwards, a former Democratic governor of Louisiana; John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban; and Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter.

The requests are adding to a backlog of nearly 2,300 pending petitions, most from “ordinary people who committed garden-variety crimes,” said Margaret Colgate Love, a clemency lawyer.

In 2002, when Duke was in Congress, he tried to get a pardon for Tommy K., the Greek businessman and convicted felon who had purchased the honorable gentleman’s yacht. Today, the 66-year-old Cunningham is in a federal prison “camp” in Tuscon with an expected release date of 2013.

Jimmy Hoffa, Richard Nixon, Marc Rich, Patty Hearst all got pardons, so maybe Duke’s got a shot.

So, a secret admirer of Brent Wilkes wants to help him get out of prison.

The former defense contractor was sentenced in February to 12 years for bribing former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham with hookers, cash, and meals at DC’s Capital Grille. But Wilkes has been eating daily specials at Terminal Island FCI in San Pedro because he can’t come up with $1.4 million in collateral to secure relase.

A few days ago, his attorney said that some unnamed person was willing to bail Wilkes out, but only if he or she can shield their identity from everyone but Judge Larry Burns. Mr. or Mrs. X was concerned that public disclosure would impact his or her ability to make a living.

This seems a bit odd. If you can plunk down the couple hundred Gs Wilkes needs (his family has pledged the rest) your livelihood would seem to be fairly secure, no?

Not surprisingly, prosecutors don’t like this. According to them, Wilkes has misled the court with “false affidavits and questionable dealings” over his assets:

…the government believes that the sealing of traditionally open proceedings, which may prove crucial to securing the defendant’s release, will only raise the specter of undue influence and favoritism being exercised on behalf of a formerly well-heeled, white collar criminal that would not be afforded to his less-advantaged fellow felons.

The government only likes secrecy when it suits its own interests. Prosecutors bent over backward for fellow Cunningham briber Tommy K., who pleaded guilty in a secret hearing and then flew off to stay at a 5-star hotel in Greece.  We still don’t know why that happened because … the government is still keeping secrets!

A hearing is set for later this month. I think Wilkes will be wearing his jumpsuit and plastic sandals for a while longer. Judge Burns doesn’t seem to like Wilkes very much. Burns said he “doubts Mr. Wilkes’ trustworthiness” because Wilkes testified he had never seen the prostitute who screwed him in Hawaii. Twice.

Thanks to former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA has become synonymous with waste and graft in the intelligence community. The agency was created after the Sept. 11 attacks to bring order to the confused world of military counterintelligence. One of its contractors happened to be bribing the greedy and insecure Congressman Cunningham to the tune of more than $1 million.

That was bad enough but CIFA also blundered badly at the outset by gathering information on U.S. citizens in its Talon database, a big no-no. Bloggers like R.J. Hillhouse Ph.D cheered when The New York Times reported in April of this year that the Pentagon would be shutting it down. I’m sure all the little petty bureaucratic rivals CIFA had in the intelligence world were pleased as well. But R.J. Hillhouse Ph.D, like me, really had no idea what CIFA was up to.

Last week’s report by the Senate Intelligence Committee shows that CIFA actually was doing important work, but was prevented from its mission by senior civilian leaders at the Defense Department.

According to the report, CIFA was given the job of investigating a mysterious meeting in Rome between Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar (right) and U.S. Defense Department officials in Rome and Paris. One of the DoD officials at the meeting was Larry Franklin, an Iran analyst who is in prison for passing classified information relating to Iran to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The meetings were arranged by a civilian named Michael Ledeen, a conservative analyst with the American Enterprise Institute who had close ties to the Bush administration. Ledeen had help, reportedly, from the Italian government and its intelligence service. Italian government officials attended the meeting in Rome.

CIFA concluded that Ghorbanifar may have been used by “agents of a foreign intelligence service” to reach and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government. During the Rome meeting in December 2001, Ghorbanifar passed word that he could sow the seeds of discontent in Iran for $5 million by causing traffic jams at key intersections in Teheran. The report also mentions a $25 million price tag for other operations.

After the press found about the Rome meeting, Stephen Cambone (left), the Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence, gave CIFA the job of conducting a “thorough complete and expeditious” inquiry into the Rome meeting. Cambone said the tasking was requested by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.

CIFA took the job seriously and conducted 19 interviews that are cited in the Senate report. About a month later, on October 21, 2003, CIFA, acting on Cambone’s orders, halted its investigation.

In its final report, CIFA noted that it had blocked from conducting interviews of key DoD personnel involved in the Rome meeting, including Larry Franklin. Cambone and the DoD General Counsel, William Haynes prevented CIFA from interviewing CIA personnel.

Even so, CIFA was able to get to the heart of the matter:

The most significant matter raised in the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s report was the possibility that Mr. “Ghorbanifar or his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government.” The report noted that there were multiple occasions where information from Mr. Ghorbanifar entered U.S. government channels via Mr. Ledeen. These channels included personnel from the FBI, CIA, DoD, the White and Congress

From the Senate report:

Conclusion #6: The actions of Cambone and Haynes “prevented a full understanding of the contacts between Mr. Ghorbanifar and U.S. Government officials and a thorough assessment of the counterintelligence issues related to these contacts.

Conclusion #7: Cambone’s decision to halt the CIFA inquiry was “premature.”

Conclusion #8: The DoD leadership failed to implement CIFA’s recommendation to conduct an inter-agency analysis of the counterintelligence implications of Mr. Ghorbanifar and his ability to directly or indirectly influence U.S. Government officials.

No doubt there was waste and abuse at CIFA, but there were also some people there who stirred up a hornet’s nest of trouble by simply doing their jobs.

If you’re looking for insight as to what is was like in the courtroom when the jury pronounced Brent Wilkes guilty on all counts, I’m not the one who can give it to you. The Wilkes jury reached its verdict just as Judge Burns was sentencing a major Tijuana drug kingpin, so all the reporters were already in place. I rushed downtown, and I was a disheveled mess when I got there, but it was all over. Then I left too soon and missed the jury forewoman.

So I had a pretty bad day. But Brent Wilkes had a far worse one.

The 53-year-old defense contractor was found guilty on 13 counts of fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and bribery. The jury found that Wilkes plied Cunningham with more than $700,000 in bribes in exchange for millions of dollars in government contracts.

Wilkes gambled everything on the only hand he had to play, and lost. He figured that if he could tell the jury his side of the story of his relationship with former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, he could clear everything up. Then everyone would see how badly the prosecution had twisted things. But the prosecution just had too much evidence that contradicted him. Even if the jury wanted to believe the charming and funny defense contractor, they just couldn’t.

What bounces around and around in my head is the fact that Wilkes is no fool. He’s been a poker player since high school and he knew exactly what cards the government was holding — they included Cunningham, the prostitutes, and Wilkes’ own nephew — and he had to have known that the odds weren’t good. Once the government has you in its sights, it just will not quit. Far wealthier and more powerful men have pleaded guilty rather than take their chances before a jury.

So why didn’t Brent Wilkes?

I’ve posted what I think are some interesting exhibits from the trial of Brent Wilkes, but by any standard exhibit 60-01 is extraordinary. This is the photo lineup federal agents presented to an escort in Hawaii for the purposes of identifying her client on the night of August 15, 2003:

During his closing argument to jurors, defense attorney Mark Geragos asked jurors to keep one question in mind. If the government prosecutors believed Brent Wilkes had plied Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham with more than $600,00 in bribes, why didn’t they put the ex-honorable gentleman on the witness stand?

It’s a good question. As the jury enters its third full day of deliberations, they may be wondering the same thing, and it remains to be seen whether keeping Cunningham off the stand will hurt the government’s case.

In his closing argument, Geragos told jurors the government didn’t call Duke because he would never, ever admit that Brent Wilkes’ contracting work was bad for the country. Prosecutor Jason Forge countered that in rebuttal by saying that he didn’t want to call the most corrupt congressman in history and ask jurors to rely on his testimony.

So why didn’t Geragos call Cunningham ? Geragos said the government had the burden of proof. When I reminded him that he had told jurors he would call Duke, Geragos replied that Wilkes was a better witness. It’s not too hard to believe that he was worried that Duke would admit that Wilkes had bribed him. And that would be something no amount of brutal cross-examination could undo. You might as well send the jury out right then.

The statements from both sides leave a bit to be desired; something’s missing here. We’ll find out someday, but for now, it’s clear that both prosecutors and the defense felt there was more harm than good in calling the Duke to testify. Was anybody really sure what he would say? Cunningham has a history of instability and, more importantly, he’s not the smartest fellow, so there’s no telling what someone as smart as Geragos could get Cunningham to concede. Just look at what he did to other, more intelligent witnesses. And sitting next to Geragos at the defense table was a man who knew Duke better than almost anyone.

In the final analysis, it bears noting that for both sides the least reliable witness wasn’t Mitch Wade, the double-crossing greedy cheat who admitted paying Cunningham $2 million in bribes. Nor was it Brent Wilkes, who is awaiting to hear whether jurors thought he was lying on the witness stand and will convict of bribery, money laundering, fraud and conspiracy.

No, the most unreliable witness happened to be one of the most highly decorated pilots of the Vietnam War, an eight-term congressman from San Diego who never lost an election, the former member of the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee, Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

Duke shot a 92 at Coeur d’Alene on this day (but still won with a 30 handicap)!

The Federal Election Commission announced today that it will be receiving a check for $1 million from Cunningham briber Mitchell Wade and his former company MZM Inc. It’s the second-largest fine in the agency’s history. Wade broke the law when he used company funds to reimburse $78,000 in contributions that his employees and their spouses made to GOP Reps. Virgil Goode, and Katherine Harris.

The FEC’s investigation found that while some MZM employees felt pressure to contribute the company PAC, the pressure was created by the nature of MZM as a “highly-compartmentalized company run by a tempermental boss,” not any specific actions of Wade. MZM employees were motivated to make contributions “in part because of what they described as their fear of Wade’s volatile personality.”

This is something I drew out in my book. Wade had an unstable, paranoid and manic personality (He read his employee’s mail, among other things). It’s unclear whether keeping everything secret and constantly scheming was the result of this personality defect or the cause.

Also, here’s what former employee Roger Swinford was doing while at MZM, according to a letter his lawyer provided to the FEC:

“Roger was heavily involved with the intelligence planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In January 2003, he learned that he was going to be deployed with the Central Command Deployable Headquarters to Qatar. While in Qatar, General Kimmons placed Roger in charge of the Iraq High Value Targets Cell, which was responsible for executing high value targeting against the Iraqi senior leadership, also known as the “Deck of Cards.”

 

 

 

While the jury deliberates please enjoy this interesting flight manifest:

netjets.pdf

If Brent Wilkes is acquitted, and that’s a big if, it’s because of what happened Tuesday and Friday when he took the witness stand to defend himself from charges of bribing former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

You’ll recall that the government’s lawyers had believed defense attorney Mark Geragos when he assured them that his client would be sitting it out. After Wilkes took the stand Friday, prosecutor Phil Halpern bumbled his way through two hours of cross-examination based on documents he gathered over the lunch break.

When trial resumed at 9 a.m. today, it seemed, at first, that Halpern hadn’t used the time to regroup, as he started out nervous and apprehensive. Halpern must have felt that the entire case, everything he and countless agents had done over the past two years, was in his hands — and in truth, it was. Wilkes, ready as ever, continued making speeches from the witness stand. He refused to let the government impose its narrative upon him.

Less than an hour had gone by before jurors were checking watches, yawning and playing with pens. Wilkes cracked the jurors up when he explained he bought a box at Coors Amphitheater because it was the only way to get Spice Girls tickets for his daughter.

Around 10:15 a.m., Halpern started landing punches. He zeroed in on the bribes, in particular the $100,000 in checks that Wilkes wrote to Cunningham in 2000. Wilkes claimed the money was payment for the Duke’s yacht, a converted shrimp boat named the Kelly C, but the congressman kept both the boat and the money. So why didn’t Wilkes demand his money back?

A: At some point you have have to rely on important people like a congressman to have some instinct for self-preservation….

Wilkes then went on about how it was a “total misrepresentation” to say he relied on the congressman to do everything for him. In fact, Wilkes said, Reps. John Porter of Illinois and Jerry Lewis of California were far more important. Halpern pressed on

Q: At the time you wanted the money back you were seeking Cunningham’s support?
A. Yes, that’s true.

After recess, Wilkes threw some jabs of his own. “Lawyers are sneaky sometimes,” he remarked. (Cue jury laughter) And then later “I’d be happy to go through it. You haven’t been paying attention.” If the last one sounded arrogant to you, it did to me as well.

Then it was back to the government’s best friends in this case, the prostitutes. Wilkes continued, amazingly, to deny it all, and Judge Burns sustained defense objections to these oh so juicy questions:

Q. Didn’t you use the services of prostitutes many times?
Q. Isn’t it true you lied to your about your use of prostitutes?

It was now 11:20 a.m. Wilkes had been on the witness stand for a day and a half, and we returned to the muck. “Cash forecast…difficult cash flow position…steps that would be taken during the unlawful detainer process….small businesses encounter cash flow problems.” My notes at this point indicate that my rear end was hurting. It seemed as germane an observation as anything else that was going on.

But Halpern managed to end strong.

Q. Did you ever pay the mortgage for another congressman?
A. No
Q. Did you ever get in a hot tub with another congressman?
A. No
Q. Isn’t it true that having Cunningham indebted to you was far more valuable than getting your money back?
A. No

Closing arguments began at 2:45 p.m. Prosecutor Sanjay Bhandari gave a very succinct, calm and, I thought, effective closing argument. He said the case boiled down to a question of whether Wilkes gave Cunningham things of value for influence and then tried to hide it. Wilkes friendship with Cunningham, Bhandari said, was a cultivated one, motivated by an attempt to get something back from the congressman. Every time Wilkes wanted something from Cunningham, a bribe changed hands. Wilkes’ defense was a cover story concocted long ago. For him to be telling the truth, a long list of people have to be lying.

A very animated Mark Geragos told jurors that the only lies they have heard were ones the government had been telling them, based on the testimony of admitted felons like Mitch Wade. The prosecutors had been misleading them. According to Geragos, the government didn’t want to hear the truth, namely that Washington isn’t a “pristine place.” Wilkes had struggled for years to succeed in government contracting and for a reward, he got indicted, paid $2 million bail and had the government say in essence we’re going to crush you. And why had jurors never heard from Cunningham? The reason, according to Geragos, was Duke was never, ever going to say that what Wilkes was doing wasn’t good for the country.

Jurors will get the case tomorrow after both sides finish up.

Update: Deliberations are underway. Prosecutor Jason Forge gave a devastating rebuttal this morning. Just brutal. There were so many great lines but my favorite was when Forge said Wilkes’ defense reminded him of a children’s book called David Gets in Trouble. Forge then read the book to the jury. “When David gets in trouble, he always says No! It’s not my fault.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this man was the architect of a multi-million dollar corruption scheme and he has the defense of a 5-year-old.

Ouch.

No one in Judge Burns’ courtroom was more surprised when Brent Wilkes marched up to the witness stand this morning than the government prosecutors. I would have been pretty nonplussed if I, too, had been given assurances that Wilkes would not be testifying. But it was an effective bit of legal strategy by defense attorney Mark Geragos, and Wilkes scored points while the government fumbled its hastily-prepared cross-examination.

Unlike the government, Wilkes was ready. He had waited two years for this day, maintaining his innocence in the face of enormous pressure to plead guilty and be done with it, and this was finally his chance to tell his story and confront his accusers. His children were in the gallery to watch dad testify (except for the part about the prostitutes).

Wilkes insisted that he never bribed anybody. He never asked anybody to support a project unless they believed in it. No, he didn’t ply Duke with food and drink to get him to do his bidding. Yes, he did try to buy the congressman’s yacht for $100,000, but he made no secret of it.

The $525,000 payment on Cunningham’s mortgage? That was an investment, which he even tried to get back. As for the two escorts that the government brought from Hawaii to testify about their night with Wilkes and Duke, well, Wilkes said he had never seen them before. He had an answer for every dirty charge the government had made against him.

For his testimony to be true:

1. Mitch Wade must be lying.
2. Joel Combs, Wilkes’ nephew, must be lying.
3. The escorts must be lying.

So Wilkes was essentially making a huge wager that jurors would believe he was taken advantage of by a double-crossing Mitch Wade, his incompetent nephew, and a corrupt congressman, not to mention the overzealous government investigators who ruined Wilkes’ career and his marriage.

We were all curious what the government would do on cross, but Geragos’ maneuvering left Halpern with less than an hour to prepare. It showed. His questions were argumentative and off the mark. Several attempts to impeach Wilkes failed because Halpern couldn’t get the documents he needed admitted as evidence.

Halpern did elicit this bit of CIA humor when he asked whether Wilkes told his employees to cover up the wrongdoing with Cunningham. (Remember Wilkes’ best friend was Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the former executive director of the Central Intelligence Agency.)

I believe you’re referring to the phrase, ‘Admit nothing, deny everything and make counteraccusations. It’s a CIA saying. It’s a joke.

At other times, the prosecutor lost control of his witness. He allowed Wilkes to trash the government’s witnesses and deliver a ringing endorsement of earmarks:

Earmarks are not dirty things and earmarks are an alternative to a bureaucracy being in complete control of the budget.

Instead of challenging this (bridge to nowhere, anyone?) Halpern only rolled his eyes in disbelief.

It dawned on me that Halpern was trying to run out the clock, stalling until the end of the day so he could regroup and prepare for a proper cross. But in the meantime, he afforded Wilkes a prime opportunity to connect with the jury at the government’s expense.  Jurors were cracking up at Wilkes’ jokes and smiling when he shook his head at Halpern’s questioning.

Halpern will resume his cross on Tuesday.

Readers of my book will recall that when the FBI searched Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s mansion in 2005 they came across a copy of a letter that defense contractor Brent Wilkes had sent the congressman. Enclosed with the letter was a video of all-day drive trip in the waters off the Big Island that Wilkes had arranged for Cunningham, who is now serving more than eight years in prison for accepting millions of dollars in bribes.

Wilkes is now on trial in San Diego for supplying Cunningham with more than $600,000 in bribes. In court, prosecutors showed a bit of the video last week as they wrapped up their case against him. (Note that it’s silent until the end)

It was one of the most powerful pieces of evidence presented in court. There’s something so surreal about this video, from the self-referential joke at the beginning to the Rodgers and Hammerstein reference at the end. It’s about a clear a portrait of corruption as I’ve ever seen. The dive trip cost more than $2,000, which was a fraction of the $50,000 cost of the trip. Wilkes put Cunningham up in the $6,600-a-night Hapuna Suite. There was a golf outing. Kona lobster was served on the suite’s private lawn. And on consecutive nights, prosecutors say that Wilkes paid for two different escorts for Cunningham. Continue reading →

Almost every day, Brent Wilkes’ defense attorney, Mark Geragos, has been complaining about how hard he’s been working on his client’s defense. Your honor I was up till two in the morning last night. Your honor I need another day to prepare. Your honor, the prosecution dumped all these documents on me. And so on.

The prosecution wrapped up its case on Wednesday. The judge made it clear that Geragos had to start his defense the following day. So what was he doing the night before?

Talking to Dr. Phil about how to defend accused child rapist Chester Stiles, WHO’S NOT EVEN HIS CLIENT. See for yourself:

And I thought I heard him say during jury selection how seriously he takes the responsibility of having a man’s life in his hands. Wilkes is facing 14 counts of money laundering, fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. C’mon, Mark! Brent, are you reading this?

Mitch Wade would write these little notations on his checks to Duke like this one, which mentions something about advertising:

He explained the reason for this in court.

It was so he could deduct the bribe as a business expense!

Not long after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Randy “Duke” Cunningham redirected $4 million in terrorism dollars at the request of Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade, the two guys who were bribing him (allegedly, in Wilkes’ case).

The money went to pay for a bullshit document-scanning program called Global Data Infrastructure Capture.

Mitch Wade boasted about it in Dec. 31, 2001 status report to Wilkes, who was then paying Wade hundreds of thousands of dollars for this kind of work:

This was Wade’s solution to the problem of a DoD official had been “playing games” with the money. In other words, it went to somebody else, for something more worthwhile.

There’s been a lot of testimony about The Capital Grille in D.C. As I mentioned earlier, one of the first trial witnesses was a waiter, who said Duke’s 15 percent tips made him a “typical congressman.” Yesterday, one witness estimated, conservatively, that Brent Wilkes spent $150,000 dining with the Duke at the congressman’s favorite restaurant.

Duke loved Silver Oak wine, which ran for about $100 a bottle. He kept his own private wine locker at the restaurant. So did Mitchell Wade, Wilkes and Wilkes’ best friend, Kyle Foggo, the executive director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Capital Grille diners worship wine, as seen by the restaurant’s “Wine Kiosk:”

Almost every witness has been asked about Duke Cunningham’s intelligence or the lack thereof. Cunningham’s main briber, Mitchell Wade, (no dummy himself) described the Duke as a man of below average intelligence. When Wade had to write out scripts for Cunningham so the congressman could bully Defense Department officials he had to spell everything out precisely even Duke’s name. Here’s an example: I (Duke)

The prosecution wrapped up its case against Brent Wilkes with testimony from Joel Combs, Wilkes’ nephew and right-hand man, followed by the coup de grace: the two prostitutes who serviced Wilkes and the congressman in Hawaii. Federal prosecutors had lulled the jury to sleep at first, but they ended with a devastating blow to the defendant, and I’m not sure how or if he’ll be able to recover.

Joel Combs had just gotten out of college when he went to work for his uncle’s startup company in 1995. Combs became his uncle’s man in Washington, and it wasn’t long before he was flying on private jets with Majority Leader Tom DeLay and House Speaker Denny Hastert back when they were two of the most powerful men in Washington.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Combs had to tell all to save his own skin. He did so with a great deal of composure, speaking mostly in one or two-word responses to questions about his uncle’s relationship with Duke Cunningham.

Q. What would Duke do for your uncle?

A. Anything.

or this…

Q. What type of access did your uncle have to Duke?

A. Essentially unlimited.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. He could get Duke on the phone anytime, any place.

Q. What did he do to get this access?

A. He treated him really well.

Combs effectively brought the government’s case full circle, tying together all the strands that prosecutors had laid out for the jury. He cleared up the issue of intent I alluded to in my previous post and he gave jurors a glimpse of Wilkes with his guard down.

Through Combs’ testimony, Wilkes emerges as a savvy operator who had Cunningham’s number. Duke’s limited intelligence was something of a joke to Wilkes, Combs said. Wilkes instructed his employees to laugh at the Duke’s jokes, to find him interesting and pretend to be in awe of him. Wilkes told his employee to lose to Duke at poker and he yelled at one man who wasn’t losing enough.

Prosecutor Phil Halpern skilfully led Combs through bribe after bribe: a jet dock, a laptop computer, computer software for Duke’s boat, hundreds of meals at The Capital Grille restaurant, a ticket to the 2003 Super Bowl, golf, charter jet flights, machine gun lessons, and finally a pair of prostitutes.

The prostitutes came during a lavish 2003 Hawaii vacation, which was intended to get back in Duke’s good graces. Mitchell Wade had double-crossed Wilkes by going behind his back to develop his own corrupt relationship with Cunningham. In Wilkes’ words, “Mitch was upping the ante,” Combs said.

Wilkes flew Cunningham to Hawaii’s Big Island where the contractor had rented a private, beachside guest cottage for $6,600 a night. Upon arrival, Wilkes told Combs to get two girls. Combs dialed up a local escort service.

The women arrived with their driver around 11 p.m. that night. Combs answered the door, paid the driver $600 as arranged, and led the women to the back of the suite. There, Wilkes and Cunningham were lounging in the hot tub, smoking cigars.

Wilkes’ attorney, Mark Geragos, did what he could with Combs, but his wounds were all superficial. Yes, Combs had lied when FBI agents first questioned him, but that’s not much of a surprise. And some details of his story about the hookers had changed (i.e. he first said he called the escort service from the hotel phone, and then said he used his cell phone). The plain fact is I think Combs was telling the truth in court.

After Geragos spent a few hours tearing into Combs, the prosecution brought out the icing on their cake: the two prostitutes and their driver. I’ve written up an account of their testimony for the political blog, Wonkette, which you can find here.

Sorry for the delay in blogging. The trial had been a snooze-fest (The judge’s clerk passed him a note Thursday that read “Mayday, mayday, jurors are falling asleep”) but things got pretty interesting Friday. Family and friends kept me busy this weekend so I’m just now getting a chance to set my thoughts down.

The prosecution at the trial of defense contractor Brent Wilkes began Friday morning by calling one of its star witnesses, a man by the name of Mitchell Wade. Wade has pleaded guilty to supply Cunningham bribes that total more than $2 million, including a Rolls-Royce and the infamous Duke-Stir yacht. He spent most of the day in the witness box, testifying in hopes of a reduced sentence, or as Cunningham himself put it, trying to save his donkey.

I was very interested to hear what Wade had to say. Aside from a brief apology during his plea hearing last year, Wade has kept silent. When I went to his Great Falls, Virginia the estate (named “Windy Knoll”) to try and interview him, Wade waved at me through the window and then made his wife answer the door. Wade’s DC law firm WilmerHale has shielded him the way the Patriots offensive line protects Tom Brady.

Wade was the government’s best witness so far. He was completely honest and frank about his own greed and treachery, and that made for some pretty compelling testimony. The jurors seemed pretty interested, too. Wade seems to have lost weight from the time the above photo was taken. He spoke precisely, in a hushed voice, almost like he didn’t want everybody to hear. If Wilkes walks, it won’t be Wade’s fault.

Part of the credit goes to prosecutor Jason Forge, who did an excellent job leading the direct examination. His questions were simple and straightforward and he kept things moving right along. There was none of the awkwardly phrased questions or the avalanche of boring detail that has characterized much of the government’s case.

Wade has clearly given the prosecutors a lot to work with. He was introduced to Duke by Brent Wilkes, who hired Wade as a consultant in 1998. Wade described Cunningham, accurately, as a man of below average intelligence. He testified that he and Wilkes came to dread dinners with the Duke and hearing him tell the same stories over and over.

Part of Wade’s job was to take care of Defense Department officials who got in Wilkes’ way, and he often used Duke to do it. One of the pieces of evidence he testified about was a script he wrote for the congressman to put pressure on a Defense Department official. To keep things clear, Wade wrote out “I (Duke)…”

What Wade learned from Wilkes convinced him he could expand his own business and he began to cultivate his own relationship with the congressman in 2001, without telling Wilkes. When Duke asked him for $50,000 at the end of 2001, Wade viewed it as an opportunity. “I wanted to solicit the same favors and benefits that Brent did,” he said.

Wade soon had his own stash of blank stationery from Cunningham’s congressional office upon which he could write missives in Duke’s name to bully whomever he wanted. And Duke started the appropriations flowing to Wade’s company, MZM Inc. The one-man consultancy grew into a sizable defense contractor headquartered near DuPont Circle in a few years.

Amazingly, Wade was still working for Wilkes while this was going on. Eventually, Wilkes’ government contracts started going to Wade, and the game was up. But Wade was raking it in. He and Wilkes delivered worthless crap like off-the-shelf computer equipment to the government and then marked it up as much as 600 percent. The bureaucrats who knew what was going were too scared to stop it. “It was not my finest hour,” said one.

Wilkes’ defense attorney, Mark Geragos, pointed out that most of the bribes that Wade knew about were paid for out of his pocket. Wilkes did buy the congressman a lot of expensive dinners at The Capital Grille, as well as a trip to the Four Seasons in Las Vegas in 1999 (although Wade paid the hotel bill himself.) Wade also overheard Duke on the phone with Wilkes in 2004 and heard Cunningham demanding that Wilkes deliver $500,000 “right away.”

As effective as Wade was, I was still left hungry for more. What did Wilkes do for Cunningham besides buy him dinner? Is that even bribery in Washington? As several of the prosecution’s witnesses have pointed out, when congressmen dine with lobbyists at The Capital Grille they don’t reach for their wallets.

I’m not a lawyer (I can almost see the prosecutors reading this nodding their heads in agreement) but I think the government hasn’t established a crucial element of the charges against Wilkes: intent.

It’s clear that money and favors went from Wilkes to Duke; Wilkes wrote checks and the money wound up in the congressman’s bank accounts. It’s also clear that Duke went around pounding his chest every time a DoD bureaucrat questioned the job Wilkes was doing. What’s missing is evidence linking the two.

Prosecutors in my view haven’t yet shown that Wilkes gave Cunningham money with the intent of corrupting him, the quid pro quo. Yes, Wilkes was buying dinners and writing checks, but were these payments intended to corrupt the congressman? So far, the evidence is circumstantial: Wilkes bought dinners and wrote checks; Duke went far out of his way to help him.

In other words, they have shown that Wilkes had a gun and someone got shot, but haven’t yet proven that he pulled the trigger.

Day Three was deadly boring. Even Judge Burns thought so. One juror fell asleep listening to testimony that took about three times longer than necessary. There was a mountain of detail about the history of Pentagon document scanning and what Wilkes did or didn’t do in the 1990s. Burns warned prosecutors to move things along or he would cut them short. I chatted with one witness outside court and he was unsure why he was there He hadn’t seen Wilkes in more than a decade. At least he could retreat to the Westin when he was off the stand. Isn’t this a bribery case? With hookers?

Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s favorite restaurant was The Capital Grille, a high-end steakhouse six blocks from the Capitol. At day two of the trial of alleged Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes in San Diego, jurors were shown a series of photo exhibits of the Grille’s interior with its faux columns and its “wine kiosk,” a gilded monstrosity that looked something like the ark where you find Torah scrolls in synagogue.

Prosecutors called Clifford Horsfall, a Capital Grille waiter. Horsfall was as disheveled a witness as I’ve ever seen. He showed up unshaven with sunglasses perched on his head in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a pinup girl that read “Cocktails.” He wasn’t classy, but he was a good witness.

• In the 13 years that he has waited tables at The Capital Grille, Horsfall said he could never remember a congressman ever picking up the tab while dining with a lobbyist.
• Horsfall never saw anyone take a congressman out to dinner more than defense contractor Brent Wilkes and his ex-compadre, Mitch Wade.
• Duke’s favorite wine was from Silver Oak Cellars in California, which ran $100 to $150 a bottle.
• Duke was a “typical congressman” when it came to tipping on the rare occasions he actually paid for his own meals. That means 15 percent.

Another Washington eatery mentioned at the trial was La Colline, a now-defunct French restaurant on Capitol Hill. In 2004, Duke was invited to dine there along with his defense appropriations staffer, Nancy Lifset. Other guests included Jennifer Thompson, a staffer working on the House Armed Services Committee; Erica Stribel, another appropriations staffer; and Defense Appropriations subcommittee staffer Sarah Young and others.

The La Colline event was organized by NorthPoint Strategies, a lobbying firm whose three principals are all former Cunningham chiefs of staff. In an e-mail, NorthPoint said the event wasn’t a fund-raiser but rather a “fun raiser.” Picking up the dinner tab was Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, a real estate investment trust or REIT. Why an REIT would want to cozy up to defense appropriations staffers wasn’t explained.

The subject of La Colline was very discomfiting to a witness named Frank Collins, Cunningham’s first chief of staff who went on to found NorthPoint. Collins was grilled by Wilkes’ defense attorney, Mark Geragos, about the dinner and he started squirming a bit in the witness box. Things went downhill for him from there. Geragos made him seem like a liar for changing his definition of an earmark.

Before Geragos tore into him, Collins testified that he had warned Duke when the congressman joined the uber-powerful Defense Appropriations Subcommittee that he would suddenly have new best friends show up at his doorstep. One of those new friends was Brent Wilkes. A few weeks after Collins left Duke’s office, Wilkes FedExed him an unsolicited check for $5,000, which Collins mailed back.

In 2001, Collins learned that Duke was selling his yacht Kelly C to Wilkes. Collins said the sale didn’t pass what he called “The Washington Post test.” In other words, it would be bad if the newspaper found out about it. Duke cried when confronted about the sale, which the congressman admitted he knew was the wrong thing to do. What Collins didn’t know was that Cunningham had already pocketed $100,000 for the boat.

Geragos and prosecutor Phil Halpern continued to go at each other as Collins was testifying. Their jousting had Judge Larry Burns wagging his finger at them to behave themselves. Halpern, however, was less shrill than last week. Maybe he’s one of the four people reading this blog?

The trial of Brent Wilkes finally got underway here in San Diego. I thought that by now everyone in San Diego had heard of Wilkes, who’s accused of bribing former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Most people in the jury pool said they had not, and some knew only vaguely of the Duke’s downfall.

As saturated as this city has been by news of Cunningham, I find that hard to believe. I think prospective jurors were chomping at the bit to get at the trial. How many other trials feature a disgraced congressman and his hookers? I thought I saw a winner’s smile cross the face of a few of the lucky seven women and five men.

Representing Wilkes is Mark Geragos (of Michael Jackson/Scott Peterson/Winona Ryder fame). I didn’t really understand why he represents so many celebrities until yesterday. Geragos is a treat to watch in court. He’s engaging, funny, and he’s done this so many times he stays completely relaxed and avoids being rude.

Geragos is facing what he referred to as the “Gang of Four,” a quartet of dark-suited federal prosecutors. What is it with the feds and dark suits? The agents who investigated the case formed a blue wall in the back of the courtroom. Geragos with his lavender ties and grey suits, looks like a peacock by comparison.

Prosecutor Phil Halpern made the opening statement for the government. He began with these words: “Lies. Deceit. Greed. Most of all greed. In many respects, this case is all about greed.” Wilkes, he said, had gotten rich by corrupting Duke. Sitting at the defense table, Wilkes literally got redder and redder as Halpern went on.

It was a strong opening, but then Halpern lost steam. He veered into a civics lesson on the appropriations process followed by a history of Wilkes’ career in the automated document scanning business. Zzzzzzzz.

Worse, Halpern overplayed a strong hand with a PowerPoint presentation littered with tabloid-style bullet points. Wilkes had “a congressman in his pocket.” Members of the House Appropriations Committee have their hands “on the piggy bank.” Getting on the committee is like being the first kid on the block to have a new Nintendo, he said.

He kept putting his little twist on things, insulting the jury’s intelligence. I don’t know why he didn’t just let the evidence speak for itself. He’s got hookers in Hawaii and $700,000 in bribes to buy a yacht and pay off a mortgage on a mansion for a congressman who is as corrupt as you can get. Plus, he’s got an arrogant defendant. No need to overdo it, Phil.

Geragos repeatedly objected that Halpern was not stating the facts like he was supposed to but arguing them, which is what you do at the end of a trial. When the jury went home for the day, Geragos asked for mistrial.

Now, Judge Larry Burns had spent most of the day picking a jury, so there was no way he was going to go for that. I’d bet Geragos himself knew there was no way the judge would say agree. Even so, Halpern lost his cool. He started laying into Geragos for missing filing deadlines and other assorted sins. Judge Burns said it reminded him of arguments he has had with his wife.

Halpern will pick up his opening on Tuesday. We’ll see if he tones things down a bit then.

There’s a piece running in the Talk of the Town section of the Oct. 1 issue of The New Yorker about the unusual linkes between three members of Congress much in the news lately: Ted Stevens, Larry Craig, and Duke Cunningham. Check it out here. Or you can read Wonkette’s colorful take here.

If you happen to be in LA, I’ll be speaking at Dutton’s Brentwood Books at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27. Hope to see you there.

As I noted here August 10th, Cunningham briber Tommy Kontogiannis was working with the U.S. intelligence community on a terrorism-related manner. Freshly released court transcripts now confirm this.

As I said a while back, Kontogiannis’ cooperation had nothing to do with the Cunningham case. He was cooperating in an ongoing terrorism case in some other jurisdiction, and most of the transcripts involve a discussion of how to keep the public from finding out what was going on.

Kontogiannis pleaded guilty in February behind closed doors at U.S. District Court in San Diego. No one objected in the 20 hours that a generic notice to seal unspecified proceedings was posted at the court. That justified locking the doors in Judge Larry Burns’ mind.

According to the heavily redacted transcripts of the proceedings, Judge Burns makes reference to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Kontogiannis himself says he wanted to help out beause of the “2001 situation.”

At another sealed hearing in May, Burns heard from an FBI special agent and a Mr. X, possibly a CIA agent, who were running the case. Kontogiannis was allowed to travel outside the United States accompanied by a government agent.

It’s worth noting here that in the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community, terrorism trumps public corruption. In the FBI’s priority list, combating terrorism is No. 1 while public corruption is No. 4.

So if Kontogiannis had something to offer the intelligence community in a terrorism investigation, as it appears he did, they were almost obligated to offer some sort of inducement to secure his cooperation.

He’s not Jack Bauer, he’s just using whatever he can to save his own hide.

The Justice Department’s guilty plea with a Greek-born businessman and convicted felon who happened to be a friend of Randy “Duke” Cunningham is extreme even for an executive branch that is not known as a model of openness.

Thomas “Tommy K” Kontogiannis secretly entered a guilty plea on February 23, 2007. Tommy K ran a New York mortgage business (among other things) and admitted paying off Cunningham mortgages in Arlington, Virginia and Rancho Santa Fe, California with what he knew were illegal bribes from Duke and others.

Fairly straightforward, but…the transcript of that plea hearing has been sealed ever since and is the subject of an ongoing battle between prosecutors who want it to stay that way and Larry Burns, the judge in the case who thinks the public is entitled to know more.

This week, the dispute was the subject of a unusual closed-door hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Prosecutors apparently didn’t like the way the winds were blowing in that hearing so they have agreed to release most of the transcripts at issue.

So what is going on here? There’s a lot of speculation in the blogosphere about a trip to Saudi Arabia that Cunningham made with Tommy K. But I think the truth is that all this secrecy has nothing to do with the Cunningham case.

The court documents help clear the fog a little bit. Following his guilty plea, Tommy K wasn’t fingerprinted for security reasons. (They already have them on file from Tommy K’s guilty plea years earlier to passport fraud)

More interesting, as part of the conditions setting his release, Tommy K was allowed to travel outside the United States in the company of “agents.” The court’s order setting release says: “Surrender passport to specific agents w/in 2 weeks. Dft can travel w/agents.”

Hmmm. There’s a lot of “specific agents” at a certain three-letter agency that does all its work (we hope) overseas. Bear in mind that while trying to keep the information about the plea secret, prosecutors invoked a law dealing with the handling of classified information, a law that almost always applies to CIA work. At least one transcript of a hearing was stamped “classified” by the government.

Given the extraordinary precautions in this case, it’s apparent that Tommy K had something to offer the U.S. intelligence community in this case. Since the intelligence community is all about rooting out terrorists, I would suspect that, unlikely as it may sound, he had something to offer in that department.

We’ll see what the transcripts say when they’re released. Judge Burns was out of town this week, so we’ll have to wait.

Democrats on the House intelligence committee who joined with Republicans to keep secret a 23-page unclassified report detailing Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s misdeeds on the panel:

1. Silvestre Reyes, Chairman, Texas
2. Leonard L. Boswell, Iowa
3. Robert E. (Bud) Cramer, Jr., Alabama
4. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, Maryland (No profile in courage award here for the first Democratic freshman ever appointed to the committee)
5. Mike Thompson, California. Wine country, to be precise.
6. Jim Langevin, Rhode Island
7. Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania

Democrats voting in favor of releasing the report:

1. Rush Holt, New Jersey
2. Anna Eshoo, Palo Alto
3. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois
4. Alcee Hastings, Florida (In 1988, the House impeached Hastings, a federal judge, for bribery and perjury.)
5. John Tierney, Mass.

The Hill has the details. Jane Harman of California is no longer on the committee, but she’s still pissed about the way the panel dealt with it. “We still don’t know the whole story,” she told The Hill. “I felt that we should have subpoenaed [Cunningham].” Thank God Nancy Pelosi took her off the panel!

I have been fascinated, some would say obsessed, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose employees have been dropping by this site of late. Setting aside the Talon fiasco for the moment, I feel sorry for you guys. I really do.

You had the unfortunate luck of having Randy “Duke” Cunningham as your congressional sugar daddy. That’s like having Boris Yeltsin as your AA sponsor. And then the Pentagon refused to give you operational control of military counterintelligence. So your legs were hobbled from the very start.

For those of you who have never logged on to Intelink, CIFA was created after the Sept. 11 attacks to bring order to the confused world of military counterintelligence. The Air Force, Navy and Army each have their own CI shops. The thinking was someone needed to see the whole picture or clues to an unfolding terrorist plot could once again get lost in the bureaucracy. There was a bureaucratic turf war, which CIFA lost. The Pentagon failed to give CIFA authority over the other military CI folks. So the Air Force, Navy and Army could keep doing whatever they wanted.

What CIFA lacked in authority, it made up for in money. Since it’s part of the intelligence community, CIFA’s budget is classified but I heard it got up as high as $1 billion a year. That’s a great deal in the world of counterintelligence. With that much money getting thrown around, it was only a matter of time before someone like Mitchell Wade showed up.

Alternatively controlling and paranoid and charming and generous, Wade ran a solo consultancy named MZM Inc., but he dreamed of life as a big shot. Through fellow (alleged) Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes, Wade met the Duke and stole Wilkes’ act. He outbribed Wilkes and spent a million bucks to buy himself a congressman on the defense appropriations subcommittee. While Wade and Cunningham were shopping for antiques, CIFA was being stood up.

Wade apparently boasted in 2002 that he could deliver money to CIFA from Cunningham and his other buddies in Congress (without mentioning that the money then came back to Wade in the form of contracts). On a page entitled “Benefits to CIFA from Congressional Mandates Initiative Support,” Wade trumpeted one item: “Delivery of over $67.62M in the last three fiscal years over budget – no other entity within the CIFA family has accomplished this task.”

On a page entitled “Election Impact on Congressional Mandates,” Wade wrote listed a number of politicians. The list included his buddy Duke, and Duke’s buddy, Dunk, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker Denny Hastert, Jerry Lewis, Allan Mollohan, John Murtha, David Weldon, and Bill Young; Senators Robert Byrd, Larry Craig, Orin Hatch, Daniel Inouye, Trent Lott, Jay Rockefeller, and Richard Shelby. At the bottom, Wade wrote “Election enchanced MZM Inc….Thus CIFA position.”

A note of caution here: Wade said a lot of things, many of which were products of his vivid imagination.

What is clear is that CIFA didn’t want to risk hurting Wade or Cunningham, its sugar daddy, even when its own employees were making their concerns painfully clear. CIFA’s Chief Technical Scientist, Theodore Wiatrak, objected over $12.5 million going to MZM, which had performed poorly on a previous contract. “I believe this is wrong and respectfully decline to participate,” he wrote in a 2005 e-mail. Similarly, Amy Dall, CIFA’s chief information officer, also opposed the choice of MZM.

Wiatrak and Dall worked for people who lacked the same courage of their convictions. There were rumors that a new car and a plasma TV screen had been supplied, courtesy of contractors, to CIFA bigwigs. CIFA employees were calling the DoD inspector general’s hotline. To no avail. In response to complaints, CIFA’s Deputy Director, Joseph Hefferon, directed that CIFA stay with MZM. (Hefferon announced his retirement last year after 30 years of federal service.) The sad truth is that Hefferon, and Director David Burtt (who also suddenly resigned), were willing to look the other way at corruption because of the money that Cunningham brought their agency.

Sometimes it seems that al-Qaeda can’t do as much damage to us as we can do to ourselves.

Democrats regained control of Congress last year in large part by promising to end the “culture of corruption” that sent Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Bob Ney and lobbyist Jack Abramoff off to prison. More than a year later, however, Congress continues to hide the truth about Cunningham’s misdeeds. Why? Because the truth hurts.

Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times has managed to get his hands on a 23-page unclassified report by the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on the Intelligence that helps flesh out the picture. That in itself is an amazing feat, since the committee has refused to release the report to other members of Congress. Democrats joined Republicans two weeks ago to make sure the report remained hush-hush, after Rep. Pete Hoekstra (right), the GOP’s ranking member, insisted it stay that way. (Cunningham has written Hoekstra from prison and invited him to come have a chat.) The report was narrowly constrained to focus only on Cunningham’s actions, not those of any other member. Even so, it was bad enough to shame the committee into silence.

Last year, Rep. Jane Harman, then the Democratic ranking member, had the temerity to release an executive summary of the report last year, which revealed that the committee approved $70 million to $80 million of Cunningham’s requests for his cronies. Republicans were outraged by the release. Hoesktra, then the committee chairman, suspended a Democratic committee staffer, ostensibly over the leak of a National Intelligence Estimate. Asked if the suspension was payback, GOP Rep. Ray LaHood told Fox News “There are some of us on the other side who can equally play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.”

Most, if not all of the money Cunningham squeezed out of the committee went to the congressman’s new best friend, Mitchell Wade, president of defense contractor MZM Inc. Wade’s masterful manipulation of Cunningham over many a bottle of fine wine at The Capital Grille helped his company grow almost overnight from a one-man consulting firm into a mid-sized Washington defense contractor. In return, Cunningham used his position to help Wade by pushing for programs like Project Fortress.

Project Fortress was designed to get a handle on the foreign visitors who had been gathering intelligence on U.S. weapons systems. It was hatched by the Counterintelligence Field Activity and the U.S. Air Force to develop an analytical program that would provide an understanding of which foreign professionals visited which labs and bases to observe military exercises.

After Sept. 11, the Air Force and the Counterintelligence Field Activity decided to pay close attention to these visitors, especially during annual Air Force “Red Flag” exercises in Alaska and Nevada, which are attended by delegations from NATO, Germany, Sweden, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Mongolia, and the Republic of Singapore. In 2006, China was invited for the first time to watch U.S. wargames in Guam. In the photo below, a Chinese reporter and his military friends ask questions about the F-15, which the U.S. has sold to Taiwan (click here for link):

 

Over time, Fortress grew into a multimillion dollar program that involved dozens of people gathering human and signals intelligence at bases around the country. MZM employees ushered the foreigners around bases, while technicians sat in vans with equipment trying to pick up signals from laptops. The program is classified, which means there’s no real way to determine whether it served any value.

Cunningham has indicated he would have supported Fortress even if he had not received $1 million in gifts from Wade, who has pleaded guilty and admitted providing antiques, a Rolls-Royce, a yacht, a hunting video game the Duke installed his office and money that helped the congressman by a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. In a letter from prison, Cunningham wrote that Fortress “will today save lives” and he would have fought for it “even if Nancy Pelosi had started the program.” House intelligence committee staffers were not quite so deluded. In a staff e-mail about Fortress, Miller’s story notes, one aide wrote, “HOOAH! Another $5 million of taxpayer money wasted.”

Nor was Cunningham the only member of Congress who wasted money on Wade and his company. Rep. Virgil Goode inserted a classified earmark into a defense appropriation bill to fund the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center in his Virginia district. State officials described it as “Project Goode” in internal e-mails. What was Project Goode? According to documents I obtained under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, a former civilian Army official working for MZM said that the program had been specifically requested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. MZM intended to create databases on foreign companies and individuals that sought to supply equipment to the U.S. military. That way, the Defense Department could “track certain individuals” with a poor performance history. Subsequently, Project Goode – the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center – was revealed as little more than a cash cow. In June 2006, the Pentagon quietly closed the center.

MZM had many friends. It had people in the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Robb-Silverman Commission and the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. The White House turned to MZM for help scrutinizing e-mails for potential threats to the president. A team of MZM translators was on the ground in Iraq providing support to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional U.S. government in Iraq. One MZM linguist appeared in the company newsletter shaking hands with Sen. Hillary Clinton. Another translated for L. Paul Bremer and when he wasn’t translating, pulled duty with Bremer’s team of bodyguards.

Many of these contracts were and remain classified, shrouded from oversight under the rubric of national security. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the lingering secrets of the Cunningham scandal have more to do with potential embarrassment to members of Congress or the Bush administration. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle can play politics, as Congressman LaHood noted. But if they can’t even police themselves, how can they be expected to provide badly needed oversight of the intelligence community? By covering up its misdeeds, Congress is blocking the necessary disinfectant of sunlight from shining on the darkest corners of the “black budget” that funds secret operations. That is a far greater threat to our democracy than any revelations about Project Fortress, Project Goode or the other, unknown boondoggles that helped make a greedy Washington contractor like Wade into a wealthy man.

UPDATE: Apparently, what was left of Project Fortress was significantly scaled back in the last week or so, by as much as 75 percent.

 

A federal judge in San Diego has removed celebrity attorney Mark Geragos from the upcoming trial involving the former No. 3 official at the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason was Geragos’ stubborn refusal on principle to submit to a background check so he could review tens of thousands of top secret material.

I’m following the case because Geragos’ client, Brent Wilkes, is accused of bribing Randy “Duke” Cunningham with, among other things, prostitutes. In a separate case, Wilkes is accused of conspiring with his CIA buddy, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who lined up agency work for his friend in exchange for lavish vacations to Scotland and Hawaii the two men took with their families.

The judge, who had reviewed some of the classified material at issue in the Wilkes/Foggo case, practically pleaded with Geragos to get the background check, but he would not be swayed. He likened the security clearance process to something befitting a Soviet-bloc country. Sounding at times like a man running for office, Geragos summoned up outrages like the case of Scooter Libby to drive home the reasons for his distrust of the government.

The man who hired Geragos, Brent Wilkes, seemed crushed by the news he would lose his attorney. Wilkes told the judge he had lost his business, his reputation and much of his personal fortune, so losing his attorney was only the latest outrage perpetrated by the government. But Wilkes’ anger should be directed at his celebrity attorney.

Given his personal feelings about the intrusive nature of background checks, Geragos should never have taken a case involving the CIA’s former executive director. By putting his principles ahead of the man he represented, Geragos has left Wilkes swinging in the wind with his criminal trial set to begin in September.

I suspect that attorneys for Foggo aren’t exactly sad to see Geragos go. No doubt they wanted to have a concerted defense, not an ongoing sideshow about what is and is not classified. Geragos should stick to representing the Michael Jacksons, Winona Ryders and Nate Doggs of Tinseltown. For them, Geragos’ showmanship is a welcome distraction.

Why is Duncan Hunter running for president?

The issues that most concern the veteran El Cajon Republican are defense and national security, and those, he says, are more important now than ever. That may be so, but doesn’t he have a better chance of influencing them from his seat on the House Armed Services Committee? Surely he must know that the last representative elected president was James Garfield in 1880? In terms of fund-raising, he has raised less than Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, and Dennis Kucinich is closing in.

Readers of Feasting on the Spoils will recognize Hunter as the man who more than anyone else was responsible for Cunningham’s election to Congress. The two were so close that Democrats called them “Duke and Dunk.” They were cut from the same ideological cloth, although Cunningham had a lust for the trappings of wealth that Hunter did not share.

Hunter never put much stock in appearances; his rumpled suit was his trademark and his house looked like a rummage sale. Both Hunter and Cunningham served in Vietnam, but they dealt with their experience in different ways. Hunter didn’t speak about his time in the Army Rangers or his Bronze Star; Cunningham could only talk about himself. And Hunter was a better friend than Cunningham deserved. No one else in Congress would have been caught dead at his sentencing hearing.

Still, there have been persistent signs that Hunter was playing the same games with earmarks as his fellow representatives. One recently retired senior Appropriations staffer told me that the word about Hunter was that there wasn’t a deal too dirty for him to touch.

For someone who says the military budget isn’t big enough, Hunter has been all too willing to spend defense dollars on things the military didn’t want. There was DuPont Aerospace’s DP-2 , which has never flown and Project M, a magnetic levitation technology the military didn’t want. And Hunter has literally forced the Navy to make use of his pet project, L3’s Sea Fighter, which looks like one mean-ass ferry.

Dunk, however, is no Duke. While they were digging into Cunningham’s dirty secrets, federal investigators looked closely at Hunter but came up empty. And unlike most of the gasbags in Congress, what Hunter does to and for the military affects him personally. His son, also named Duncan, is a Marine officer serving in Iraq and is now running for his father’s seat in Congress.

Hunter may not have been lining his pockets as his friend was, but earmarks were the currency of power in Congress. Until recently, Hunter wielded that power as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Democratic takeover of the House cost him that plum assignment for which he had endured years as a member of the minority party. A few days before the 2006 midterm elections, Hunter announced his intention to bring his 26-year career in Congress to a close. But not before he went out with one final roar.

Some people have asked me how I can say that Randy “Duke” Cunningham is the most corrupt congressman in U.S. history. I put the question to official historians in both the House and the Senate. They told me they knew of no other, but left the research to me. Here’s what I found out:

In the wake of the Abscam scandal, the Senate created a select committee to study undercover activities of the Department of Justice. Buried in the report was a compendium of criminal prosecutions of members of Congress dating back to 1789.

Member of Congress accused of a crime that involved enriching themselves while in office:

1877

Rep. Robert Smalls, R-S.C., was arrested and subsequently indicted for accepting a bribe in 1872 while a state senator. Sentenced to five years in prison. Historians say Small was a victim of the racial politics of the time. (Note: This is but one interesting chapter in his life. Smalls was born a slave and escaped by stealing a Confederate steamship and sailing it into Union territory.)

1903

Sen. Charles H. Dietrich, R-Neb., indicted for accepting bribes for a government appointment, among other deeds. Accused of procuring a postmaster’s position for as much as $1,300. Directed verdict of not guilty entered at trial because Dietrich was not a member of Congress when acts were committed. Prosecutors dropped remaining counts.

1904

Sen. John H. Mitchell, R-Ore., indicted for conspiracy and bribery. Received $2,000 in 1902 to influence issuance of land patents based on false applications. Convicted, but died in 1905 while case was still on appeal.

.

1924

Rep. John W. Langley, R-Ky., indicted for conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act by allegedly receiving loans for using his influence to obtain permits for a whiskey selling scheme. Sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

1931

Rep. Harry E. Rowbottom, R-Ind., indicted and convicted for accepting bribes from Post Office applicants. Took $750 from one applicant and $800 from another. Sentenced to a year in prison and fined $2,000.

1934

Rep. George Foulkes, D-Mich., indicted and convicted of conspiracy to assess political contributions from postmasters. Sentenced to 18 months and fined $1,000.

1935

Rep. John H. Hoeppel, D-Calif., indicted (along with his son, Charles) and convicted for conspiracy to solicit payment for an appointment to West Point. Charles had promised that his father could secure an appointment for $1,000.

1940

Rep. B. Frank Whelchel, D-Ga., indicted for and acquitted of allegedly accepting money to obtain appointive offices for constituents.

1943

Rep. (and Boston Mayor) James M. Curley, D-Mass., (“The Rascal King”) indicted for fraudulently procuring war work and housing construction contracts for a business with which he was connected. Sentenced to 6 to 8 months in prison and fined $1,000. Sentence commuted by President Truman.

1947

Rep. Andrew J. May, D-Ky., indicted on four counts of conspiracy to defraud the government. Allegedly received $60,000 for using his influence with the War Department to promote the interests of a munitions company. Served nine months in prison during 1950 and received a full pardon from President Truman in 1952.

1948

Rep. John Parnell Thomas, R-N.J., indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government. Thomas, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, padded his congressional payroll and took kickbacks from his staff. Sentenced to 6 to 18 months in prison and fined $10,000.

1950

Rep. Walter Brehm, R-Ohio, indicted for accepting political contributions from government employees. The indictment charged that Brehm accepted cash contributions from two clerks in his office. He was found guilty of getting $1,000 from Clerk Emma Craven, but not guilty of taking money from a 74-year-old clerk in his Washington office. Received a 15 month suspended sentence and a $5,000 fine.

1953

Rep. Ernest Bramblett, R-Calif., indicted on 18 counts of making false statements. Bramblett put the wife of the House Clerk on his congressional office payroll for 16 months. Though she did not work for Bramblett, she kicked back to her “employer” at the rate of $3,300 a year. Suspended sentence of 4 to 12 months and a $5,000 fine.

1956

Rep. William J. Green D-Pa., indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government by allegedly accepting money and business from contracts in return for influencing decisions on construction of an Army Signal Corps depot in Pennsylvania. Acquitted.

Rep. Thomas J. Lane, D-Mass., indicted for evading $38,542 in taxes on his congressional income. Sentenced to four months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

1962

Rep. Thomas F. Johnson, D-Md., indicted on eight counts of conspiracy and conflict of interest. The indictment alleged that Johnson had received more than $20,000 for giving a speech in the House favorable to savings and loan institutions. Also accused of interceding with the U.S. Attorney General to obtain a dismissal of an indictment against a Maryland savings and loan association. Convicted of conflict interest and sentenced to six months in prison.

Rep. Frank W. Boykin, D-Ala., indicted for conflict of interest and conspiracy to defraud the government. Tried to get the Department of Justice to dismiss indictments against a Maryland savings and loan association. Placed on six months’ probation and fined $40,000. Pardoned by LBJ.

1970

Rep. John Dowdy, D-Tex., indicted on charges of conflict of interest, conspiracy, perjury, and interstate travel to facilitate bribery. Dowdy was accused of taking $25,000 from a Maryland home improvement firm accused of defrauding its customers in return for intervening in an investigation of the firm by the Justice Department. Convicted on all counts and sentenced to 18 months. On appeal, conviction reversed on conspiracy, bribery, and two perjury counts but affirmed on three other perjury counts.

1972

Rep. Cornelius Gallagher, D-N.J., indicted for federal income tax evasion, perjury and conspiracy. Gallagher evaded over $100,000 in income tax and concealed kickbacks. Pleaded guilty and received a two-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. (In 1968, Life magazine described Gallagher as the “tool” of a Mafia leader.)

1973

Rep. J. Irving Whalley, R-Pa., indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. Took salary kickbacks from his staff. Pleaded guilty and received a three-year suspended sentence and a $11,000 fine.

Rep. Frank Brasco, D-N.Y., indicted for conspiracy to commit bribery. Accused of conspiracy to obtain payoffs to help a truck company headed by a reputed Mafia member. Sentenced to five years (of which all but three months was suspended) and fined $10,000. (No relation to Donnie:-)

Rep. Bertram L. Podell, D-N.Y., indicted for conspiracy, bribery, perjury, and conflict of interest. Podell was accused of taking $41,000 in legal fees and campaign contributions to help a small Florida airline obtain a route to the Bahamas. Pleaded guilty to conspiracy and conflict of interest and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and fined $5,000. (Note: The federal prosecutor was Rudolph Guiliani, who subjected Podell to such a withering cross-examination that the congressman changed his plea to guilty.)

1974

Sen. Edward Gurney, R-Fla., indicted for conspiracy, perjury, and soliciting bribes. Gurney allegedly sought campaign contributions from Florida builders with business pending before the government. Gurney was acquitted of soliciting bribes and the jury failed to reach a verdict on conspiracy and perjury charges. Acquitted of final perjury charge in 1976.

1975

Rep. Andrew J. Hinshaw, R-Calif., indicted by a California grand jury for soliciting a bribe, accepting bribes, embezzlement and misappropriation of funds. Hinshaw accepted money and equipment from a stereo company to influence his official conduct. A jury found that he had solicited and received a $1,000 contribution in exchange for favors while he was assessor of Orange County. Sentenced to 1 to 14 years in prison.

1976

Rep. James F. Hastings, R-N.Y., indicted for mail fraud and filing false vouchers. Indictment alleged that Hastings had received kickbacks from the salaries of three staffers over six years. Convicted on 28 counts.

Rep. Henry J. Helstoski, D-N.J., indicted on 12 counts of bribery and conspiracy. Accused of soliciting and obtaining bribes from resident aliens in exchange for facilitating legislation on their behalf. Case was dismissed after a court ruled that the “Speech or Debate” clause of the Constitution prohibited the use of legislative acts as evidence.

1977

Rep. Edward A. Garmatz, D-Md., indicted for bribery and conspiracy following two-year probe of corruption in the shipping industry. Indictment alleged that Garmatz had accepted up to $15,000 in 1972 from shipping companies for facilitating legislation beneficial to them while he chaired the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries. Prosecutors dropped the case when it learned that a key witness had committed perjury and forgery. The federal courthouse in Baltimore was named for Garmatz.

Rep. Richard T. Hanna, D-Calif., indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government based on his dealings with Korean rice broker Tongsun Park. Received more than $200,000 in bribes for his services. Pleaded guilty; sentenced to 6 to 30 months in prison.

1978

Rep. Joshua Eilberg, D-Pa., indicted for illegally accepting $100,000 in legal fees for helping a Philadelphia hospital receive a $14.5 million grant. Pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation and fined $10,000.

.

Rep. Otto E. Passman, D-La., indicted for bribery, conspiracy, perjury and federal income tax evasion for allegedly accepting more than $200,000 from Korean businessman Tongsun Park. Case was transferred to Louisiana and Passman was acquitted.

Rep. Daniel J. Flood, D-Pa., indicted on 3 counts of perjury and bribery for taking $60,000 in bribes and using his influence as chairman of an appropriations subcommittee for political favors. Jury trial ended in a mistrial. Flood pleaded guilty to defrauding the government and received one year’s probation.

Rep. Frank Clark, D-Pa., indicted on 13 counts of mail fraud, perjury and income tax evasion following two-year FBI investigation. Charged with placing employees employees on his congressional staff to do private and campaign work for him. Pleaded guilty to mail fraud and income tax evasion. Sentenced to two years in prison and fined $11,000.

Rep. Charles C. Diggs, D-Mich., indicted on 35 counts of mail fraud and false statements. Accused of diverting more than $60,000 of his Sheriff’s salaries for personal use. Convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

1979

Rep. A. Claude Leach Jr., D-La., indicted for conspiracy, buying votes and accepting illegal campaign contributions in connection with his 1978 campaign. Acquitted.

1980

Rep. Charles J. Carney, D-Ohio, indicted on one count of accepting an illegal gratuity. Carney allegedly racked up $10,000 on gasoline credit cards that were paid by Lyden Oil Co in exchange for political favors. Case dismissed due to insufficient evidence.

Rep. John W. Jenrette Jr., D-S.C., indicted on two counts of bribery and one count conspiracy in the ABSCAM scandal. Accepted $50,000 from undercover FBI agent posing as Middle Eastern businessman. Convicted on all counts. Sentenced to two years in prison.

Rep. Richard Kelly, R-Fla., indicted for bribery, conspiracy and violation of the Travel Act in ABSCAM. Kelly was filmed stuffing $25,000 into his suit and asking the “sheik’s men” if it showed. Convicted in 1981, but his motion for dismissal of the indictment was granted on the grounds that the government violated due process in its investigation.

Rep. Raymond F. Lederer, D-Pa., indicted for bribery, conspiracy, accepting an illegal gratuity and interstate travel to aid racketeering in ABSCAM. Filmed taking a $50,000 bribe. Convicted and sentenced to three years in prison and fined $20,000.

Rep. John M. Murphy, D-N.Y., was also filmed taking a $50,000 bribe in ABSCAM. Convicted of conspiracy to demand and accept money to influence the performance of his official duties, acceptance of outside compensation for the performance of his official duties, and receiving an unlawful gratuity. Sentenced to three years in prison and fined $20,000.

Rep. Michael (Ozzie) Myers, D-Pa., was another $50,000 ABSCAM bribe-taker. Indicted for bribery, conspiracy and violation of the Travel Act. Sentenced to three years in prison and fined $20,000. House voted to expel him.

Rep. Frank Thompson Jr., D-N.J., was indicted and convicted of bribery and conspiracy in the ABSCAM case. Sentenced to three years in prison and fined $20,000.

Sen. Harrison A. Williams, Jr., D-N.J., convicted in ABSCAM of bribery, receiving an unlawful gratuity, receiving illegal compensation, interstate travel to commit bribery, and interstate travel to aid racketeering. Williams agreed to a scheme involving receipt of a loan and stock certificates from “Arab businessmen” for a titanium mine in return for political favors. Sentenced to three years in prison.

1988

Rep. Mario Biaggi, D-N.Y., convicted on charges that he illegally received about $900,000 in stock and cash from Wedtech, a Bronx defense contractor. Biaggi, a highly decorated New York City cop, was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $242,000. Served two years and two months when a judge ordered his release due to ill health. (Biaggi was also convicted in 1987 for accepting a vacation at a Florida resort in exchange for seeking to arrange government contracts. Served less than half of a two-and-a-half year sentence)

1990

Rep. Robert Garcia, D-N.Y., sentenced to three years in prison on charges of conspiracy and extortion. Garcia and his wife extorted $76,000 in payments, channeled through Mrs. Garcia’s business, and a $20,000 interest-free loan from Wedtech. The wife of the Wedtech chairman invested $77,500 in a Benetton clothing franchise that Mrs. Garcia bought in Puerto Rico, and gave Mrs. Garcia a diamond and emerald necklace.

1992

Rep. Nicholas Mavroules, D-Mass., indicted for extortion, racketeering, illegal acceptance of gratuities, the filing of false tax returns and the filing of false financial disclosure statements with the House. Pleaded guilty to charges that included failing to report the use of free cars as income and accepting a gratuity in the form of a low-rent beach house. Sentenced to 15 months and fined $15,000.

1993

Rep. Albert Bustamante, D-Tex., indicted on 10 counts of racketeering, conspiracy and accepting bribes totaling $340,000. Sentenced to 54 months.

1994

Rep. Joseph Kolter, D-Pa., accused of embezzling more than $44,000 in cash and merchandise, including 650 pieces of china, 40 timepieces and 30 fancy pens and two gold necklaces. Sentenced to six months in prison.

Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., indicted in 1994 on 17 felony charges, including the embezzlement of $695,000 in taxpayer and campaign funds. The longtime House Ways and Means chairman pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud. Served 15 months in prison. Clinton pardoned him in 2000.

Rep. Walter Tucker III, D-Calif., convicted of nine felony counts of extortion and federal income tax evasion while he was mayor of the L.A. suburb of Compton. Tucker, a former L.A. county prosecutor, accepted a $30,000 bribe from businessman-turned-informant and demanding $250,000 from an undercover FBI agent. Sentenced to two years and three months in prison.

1995

Rep. Donald “Buz” Lukens, R-Ohio, indicted on five counts of bribery and conspiracy. Lukens accepted $27,500 in payments from an Ohio businessman in return for political favors. He also accepted four bribery payments ranging from $2,500 to $15,000. Sentenced to 30 months in prison. Lukens had already been voted out of office following his 1989 conviction for having sex with a 16-year-old.

2001

Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, indicted on 10 counts of bribery, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to defraud the United States, filing a false tax return and racketeering. Required staff to do personal chores for him and kickback a portion of their paychecks. He also accepted cash bribes and various favors from businessmen who were seeking his help in Washington. Defended himself at trial and lost on all counts. Sentenced to eight years in prison. House voted to expel him.

2005

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and tax evasion charges. Admitted accepting more than $2.4 million (actual total closer to $3 million) in bribes from government contractors in exchange for political favors. Bribes included a mansion, a yacht, a Rolls-Royce. Sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison.

2006

Rep. Robert Ney, R-Ohio, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and making false statements. Ney accepted gifts from lobbyist Jack Abramoff that included meals, sports tickets, a golfing trip to Scotland and other travel valued at more than $170,000, and thousands of dollars in gambling chips. Sentenced to 30 months in prison.

2007

Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., indicted on 15 counts of racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice. Jefferson is alleged to have received over $400,000 in bribes through a company maintained in the name of his spouse and children. Jefferson was videotaped accepting $100,000 in bribes, $90,000 of which was found in his freezer. Case pending.

Thanks very much for stopping by, and for your interest in Feasting on the Spoils. The book is going to be published July 10th, and I aim to use this blog to keep tabs on developments in the Cunningham case and political issues of interest to California. I also intend to roam beyond politics into who I am and what interests me.

The Internet is slowly teaching journalists – myself included – of the importance of connecting with readers. I’m hopeful that you’ll find something on here that resonates with you (and I hope you’ll tell me if you do!)

Thanks again for visiting and I hope to hear from you!