No subpoenas have been issued yet, but the AP isn’t waiting. The news agency has already filed a motion to supress them.

But as Michael Corleone said: “they keep pulling me…BACK…IN!”

So defense attorney Mark Geragos wants Judge Larry Burns to subpoena me to testify at a December 11th hearing about the sources for my book, Feasting on the Spoils.

Here’s what the subpoena would look like (Click for larger image):

Here’s his explanation for why:

Seth Hettena is a journalist, who authored “Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy Cunningham, History’s Most Corrupt Congressman.” Mr. Hettena called defense counsel and inquired regarding the investigation into Mr. Wilkes and his alleged role in wrongdoing with former Congressman Cunningham. Mr. Hettena claimed to have a draft(s) indictment prior to its issuance and revealed portions of the proposed charges to defense counsel. Mr. Hettena had to have received the draft(s) of or any substance of a proposed indictment(s) from someone on the prosecution team.

Just finished up an excellent interview on The Monitor on KPFT, a Pacifica station in Houston, Texas. Check it out here.

Brent Wilkes’ testimony yesterday wasn’t all about Duke. He also spent a bit of time talking about his dealings with other members of Congress.

In Washington, Wilkes said, you’re always better off if you have consensus. If you want something done in Congress, you need to go out and build support. Members of the Appropriations Committee, like Cunningham, were key for earmarks, but they had hundreds of colleagues. “They listen to them,” Wilkes said.

Between 1992-2005, Wilkes said he received probably in excess of 1,000 letters from members of Congress. “We never tried to keep what we were doing on Capitol Hill a secret from anybody,” he said.

On the witness stand, Wilkes identified letters written on his behalf by Ron Dellums, John McCain and Lynn Schenk, a former San Diego representative. Other documents introduced by prosecutors show he flew Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Speaker Denny Hastert on his private plane.

One member in particular with whom Wilkes dealt often was Congressman Jerry Lewis. Like Cunningham, Lewis a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Lewis chaired the Defense Appropriations subcommittee from 1999-2005.

Wilkes said he was introduced to Lewis in the early 1990s by former Rep. Bill Lowery, who showed him how Washington works. Wilkes was then trying to sell software to the military. “He explained to me that the way to meet the demand I had determined there was … was to get an earmark,” Wilkes testified.

Lowery helped him set up a series of meetings with appropriators at the Hyatt Hotel — Wilkes rattled their names off on the witness stand — that resulted in a $14 million earmark. (Wilkes neglected to mention that Lowery’s way often involved the blurring of lines; Wilkes, Lowery, and Lewis all went scuba-diving in Belize in 1993.)

When he was having trouble getting paid for his work in Panama in 1999, Wilkes contacted Lewis’ staffer Jeff Shockey, who dashed off a letter. And a $25 million earmark for a program Wilkes’ company handled was funded in full, Wilkes said, because “the chairman” — Lewis — was a big believer in the program and had been supporting it for years.

I’ve been busy with freelance assignments of late, but a Q&A I did with Freakonomics, the bestselling economics book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, is posted online today at the website of The New York Times, which bought the blog last month. I highly recommend the book, as it is a novel way of looking discovering hidden relationships through economics (it’s the reason why the old swimming pool at my house is buried under a few tons of dirt). The online discussion takes a look at Congress through the framework of corruption, along some of the interesting history of congressional graft.