More Soft Underbelly in the USA Scandal

Josh Marshall delivers some knowledge about Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor and Duke Cunningham briber whose first contract in government was to screen the President's mail for anthrax, despite having no real expertise in that arena.

This is a known briber receiving a sweetheart contract from the Executive Office of the President. And who's in the middle of it? John Doolittle and his wife. Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes worked closely together to bribe or otherwise give recompense to Duke Cunningham in exchange for contracts. They appear to have done something similar with Doolittle.

Julie Doolittle was working at (Ed) Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses.

One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

The project failed in the House Administration Committee but succeeded in the White House. The question is, did Doolittle have a role in introducing executive staffers to Wade and Wilkes? Did he receive any financial reward?

And the larger question, of course, is the fact that there are documented instances of Doolittle receiving money in contributions from Brent Wilkes, if not Wade. When Carol Lam opened her investigation into Wilkes and Dusty Foggo in May 2006, Doolittle was clearly likely to be implicated in that chain if the matter was investigated closely enough. And right at that time, the Justice Department made a deal to deny Lam resources and keep her on "a short leash." While she was able to indict Wilkes and Foggo, the investigation never went any further, and Lam was fired.

Two weeks after then-U.S. Attorney Carol Lam ordered a raid on the home and offices of a former CIA official last year – a search prompted by her investigation of now-imprisoned former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham – higher-ups at the Justice Department privately questioned whether they should give her more money and manpower.

“There are good reasons not to provide extensive resources to (Lam),” Bill Mercer, acting associate attorney general, wrote to Kyle Sampson, who was chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales until he resigned a couple of weeks ago [...]

The day after this Mercer missive, Sampson directed Mercer in an e-mail to have a “heart-to-heart” with Lam about “the urgent need to improve immigration enforcement in San Diego.”

“Put her on a very short leash,” Sampson wrote. “If she balks – or otherwise does not perform in a measurable way by July 15, remove her.”

A month later, Justice Department higher-ups were referring to Lam derisively, saying she “can't meet a deadline” that her production was “hideous” and that she was “sad.”

Five months later, Lam was told she was being fired.

There's good reason to believe that the resources were withheld somewhat deliberately, to make a plausible case that Lam couldn't handle her immigration workload. This is nonsense, and Paul Kiel does an excellent job of calling it nonsense. The truth is that immigration was a red herring; Lam was fired because of her investigations, which (if unchecked) would lead not only into the FBI but into the Executive Office of the President himself, and which would have picked up a lot of Congressional flotsam along the way.

And one of the chief pieces of flotsam was John Doolittle. He has disqualified himself for any future holding of public office. We need to continue to drain this swamp of corrupt sleazebags who view government as their own personal feedbag. Charlie Brown is a man of extreme integrity who would restore honor to that seat in Congress. He deserves our support.

Donate to him.

Purged Prosecutors Update

The continuing rash of developments in the Purged Prosecutors case:

• Adam Cohen takes a lot at the possible criminal violations of the DoJ's conduct. People who focus on the particulars of whether or not Carol Lam or David Iglesias were pushed out for political reasons neglect that Alberto Gonzales and members of his staff willfully lied to Congress, which is against the law. In addition, if Lam and Iglesias and the others were taken out to get them to stop investigating Republicans or to punish them for failing to indict Democrats, that's akin to witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

• The LA Times has a good roundup of the Lam case, and makes the point I've been making for a while, that there's not a lot of daylight between the investigations of Duke Cunningham and Jerry Lewis:

Lam spearheaded the case against Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from Rancho Santa Fe who pleaded guilty to bribery and income tax evasion. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison.

In a broadening of the Cunningham investigation, Feinstein said, Lam turned her sights on two of the former lawmaker's associates: Brent R. Wilkes, a Poway-based defense contractor, and Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, a top CIA official who abruptly resigned May 8. The two men, friends from childhood, were roommates at San Diego State University, served as best man at each other's wedding and named their sons after each other.

Feinstein said that on May 10, Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants sent in the case of Dusty Foggo and a defense contractor. The next day, an e-mail went from the Justice Department to the White House."

The May 11 e-mail was from D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, to White House Deputy Counsel William Kelley. "The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam … leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four-year term expires," it said.

Sampson, who resigned last week, may also have been referring in the May 11 e-mail to a report that morning in the Los Angeles Times concerning a parallel investigation by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), then the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and Bill Lowery, a former GOP congressman from San Diego who after leaving Congress founded a successful lobbying firm — one of whose clients was Wilkes.

The Los Angeles investigation, an outgrowth of the Cunningham case, focused on the close relationship between the two men, who had served together on the House Appropriations Committee. Clients of Lowery's lobbying firm had been awarded millions of dollars in earmarks authorized by Lewis, The Times reported, and members of Lewis' staff had been hired by Lowery's firm, where they worked as lobbyists for several years and then returned to Lewis' staff.

There's more here, detailing all of the similarities and the same names that kept popping up in the case. Lewis might be in Redlands, but Lowery and Wilkes and Foggo and all the dirty dealings were in San Diego, and so Lam's office would have to be involved. Meanwhile there are links between Wilkes, Foggo, Mitchell Wade and the office of the Vice President. No defense contractor is in a vaccuum, their tentacles are spread throughout the Republican Party. An investigation that was persistent could find all of those threads.

• Patrick Leahy is vowing to issue subpoenas to compel White House officials to testify to the Judiciary Committee in the case. Leahy said, "I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this... I do not believe in this, we'll have a private briefing for you where we'll tell you everything, and they don't." I don't think Rove et al. will be able to outrun these; if they try it will set up a Constitutional showdown.

• Chuck Schumer is so sure that Gonzales will be out of office soon that he put forward a short list of AG candidates that would be confirmable. For his part, Gonzales has less than half of Congressional Republicans willing to support him, so Schumer's boast looks pretty right on.

• David Iglesias was so bad at handling election fraud cases that he was selected by the Justice Department to run seminars on how to handle election fraud cases.

• This timeline of the Carol Lam firing includes something interesting:

February 17, 2005: Mistrial declared in first Medicare fraud trial against San Diego's Alvarado Hospital, after jury fails to reach a verdict. U.S. Attorney Carol Lam suggests a retrial is likely.

Would failing to get a conviction on a Medicare fraud case raise the ire of the White House? I'm going to do some digging on this.

• Oh, and there's going to be a major document dump tonight. More to read. Hoo-rah.