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.