Let The Games Begin

Brent Wilkes is going to spend some time in quiet contemplation.

Brent Wilkes was convicted Monday of 13 felonies for bribing former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham with expensive meals, trips, a yacht and mortgage payments for his Rancho Santa Fe mansion in exchange for lucrative government defense contracts.

The verdict was announced just before noon. The jury had been deliberating since Wednesday.

The 53-year-old Poway defense contractor faces at least 20 years in prison.

Following the verdict, jury forewoman Tyheshia Smith-Kruck, the only jury member to speak to reporters, said the jury had no doubts about Wilkes' guilt.

“The evidence was enough to convict him of all charges,” she said.

This was so sweeping, I can't imagine an appeal, although celebrilawyer Mark Geragos is claiming he can prove a mistrial. But flipping for the bigger fish... that's possible. I think calls between California Congressional Republicans and top law firms could be heard all around the state tonight.

The Wilkes Trial: Just A Preview For The Lewis Indictment?

Josh Marshall is puzzled by the defense strategy employed by celebrilawyer Mark Geragos for corrupt defense contractor Brent Wilkes. So far he's called to the stand exactly one witness, who pretty much just called Wilkes a nice guy. That hardly refutes the voluminous amounts of evidence showing Wilkes' multiple bribery schemes.

So what's the strategy? Perhaps Geragos is hanging Wilkes out as a possible flipper for a bigger fish:

The only logic I can see to this is based on something a lawyer friend told me. If Wilkes tries to push an 'everybody does it' too hard at trial then he's locked himself to a set of facts that will make it a lot harder for him to turn around and cut a deal in exchange for serving up Bill Lowery and Rep. Lewis (R-CA).

That makes sense, I guess. Though I think I need to guard against a professional investment in having it having it be true since Wilkes serving up these two jokers would be a veritable festival of muck, something akin to taking a pin to a muck balloon. But in that case, why'd he go to trial in the first place? Something about the whole thing just doesn't fit to me.

Me neither. But we do know that Lewis is getting nervous about further investigation, because his staffer just told the Justice Department to go eat a fig.

According to RollCall, a former staffer for the House Appropriations Committee that worked for then Chairman Jerry Lewis said he intends to defy a federal subpoena he was served today from the US District Court for the Central District in California...

The staffer, Greg Lasker, is trying to hide behind the "speech and debate" clause of the Constitution and claim that the subpoena is not consistent with the "rights and privileges of the House." I guess it's a lead-by-example thing, the President and his staff doesn't see any need to comply with subpoenas, so why should Lasker?

After months of dormancy, the new US Attorney in Los Angeles, Thomas O'Brien, appears to have ramped up the Lewis investigation. Stay tuned...

(in other news, Duke Cunningham is a complete idiot)

Try Getting This Image Out Of Your Memory

Ick.

A prostitute whom prosecutors say a defense contractor provided to former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham testified Wednesday that the congressman fed her grapes as she sat naked in a hot tub before they headed to a bedroom at a Hawaiian resort.

Is dry heaving due to something I read that's not work-related on company time covered on my group plan?

(This came out in the Brent Wilkes trial, by the way, as just one of the gifts offered in bribe from the defense contractor to members of Congress. But if you're reading this far, you have an AMAZINGLY strong stomach.)

The Duke-Stir

Via Yglesias, Duke Cunningham got mad that his buddy Brent Wilkes always got the better prostitutes, and he had trouble performing, but eventually he did not have sex with the girl “because he felt guilty about his behavior."

He felt guilty about sex with the not-so-young and not-so-cute prostitute that he couldn't get it up for. The cute one would have been fine.

Do prostitutes have special Congressional rates?

Meanwhile there might be a bunch more of these coming down the pike. I'm inclined to believe that there's nobody more deviant than a family values conservative.

US Attorney Scandal Going Faster Than The Speed of Light

The revelations in the past 24 hours have been considerable. To wit:

• According to NPR (via JMM), Karl Rove's plan from the very beginning of the second term was to fire all 93 US Attorneys as a cover for getting rid of the ones he really wanted. I think he could have gotten away with that, too, despite its unprecedented nature. It was the selective firing that raised red flags for me. The plan was dismissed as impractical, and given all of the cases being pursued it probably would be, but to go ahead and fire the ones he wanted anyway without a cover story has led the White House to the mess they are in today.

• As I mentioned briefly yesterday, Kyle Sampson suggested replacements for US Attorneys a full year before they were fired. This is a direct contradiction to his sworn testimony, when he said that the prosecutors were fired without concern for who would succeed them. Gonzales comes out looking bad on this too, as his chief of staff was talking about this for a year, and it's not credible that he wouldn't have known something about it, despite his repeated claim that he was kept in the dark.

• It turns out that Steven Biskupic, the US Attorney for Wisconsin who prosecuted the bogus case against a top aide to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle during the past election year, was indeed targeted for removal by the DoJ at some point, but then was saved for some reason.

Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.

It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.

Nevertheless, the disclosure aroused investigators' suspicion that Biskupic might have been retained in his job because he agreed to prosecute Democrats, though the evidence was slight. Such politicization of the administration of justice is at the heart of congressional Democrats' concerns over the Bush administration's firings of the U.S. attorneys.

It's clear that the narrative that Rove and the Republicans have been developing about voter fraud centered on Milwaukee, and Biskupic's reluctance to prosecute those cases clearly left him vulnerable. So it appears he ramped up the Georgia Thompson case as a means to prove he could play ball.

• The Justice Department included membership in the far-right Federalist Society as a criterion for evaluating the US Attorneys. Those with membership in the Society remained in place.

• Regarding the amazing vanishing emails, the White House will let the Senate send in a cleaner to find them, but has not yet agreed to let the Senate see any of the emails once they're found. Meanwhile Karl Rove's lawyer is admitting that some of the lost emails include those written by Rove in 2003 which would have been central to the CIA Leak Investigation. Emptywheel has much more on that. And Henry Waxman wants documents and missing emails related to the Bush Administration's financial deals with MZM, the company that bribed Duke Cunningham (bringing this full circle, since Carol Lam was the former USA who prosecuted that case).

That's a LOT for 24 hours. I think this missing email thing set off a real firestorm within the press, at least. It was such a demonstrably lame excuse, so redolent of the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, that it simply didn't pass the smell test. And this document dump has already revealed a lot. Under every rock there's some more dirt. It's nuts.

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.

"The Real Problem We Have With Carol Lam" Is Political

Bingo. As I suspected.

Fired San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe the day before a Justice Department official sent an e-mail that said Lam needed to be fired, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday.

Feinstein, D-Calif., said the timing of the e-mail suggested that Lam's dismissal may have been connected to the corruption probe.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse denied in an e-mail that there was any link.

"We have stated numerous times that no U.S. attorney was removed to retaliate against or inappropriately interfere with any public corruption investigation or prosecution," he wrote. "This remains the case and there is no evidence that indicates otherwise."

This is exactly what I brought up last night in my running commentary with rightie blogger Patterico over this subject. His claim was that Lam couldn't have been targeted for political reasons over the Rep. Jerry Lewis investigation because the USA for Los Angeles executed the subpoenas for Lewis, not Lam. It's simply not credible to me to suggest that the Lewis and Cunningham cases weren't connected (they involved all the same people) and that there was no coordination between the SoCal USAs, but I brought up that the the CIA/Brent Wilkes/Hookergate thing was a far bigger story at the time than the Lewis investigation anyway. Porter Goss had resigned only 6 days earlier, and Foggo only a couple days after that. It would be far more troubling to the White House and the Justice Department to have an independent US Attorney like Carol Lam snooping around a government agency under the executive branch. And given that the DoJ has admittedly lied to Congress in the course of this probe, I don't find their protestations worth much of anything.

It was obvious that any USA who took down a sitting Republican member of Congress would be a target: just open your eyes and look at how this White House treats any disloyalty. Lam was targeted for dismissal before the Cunningham investigation began, true, supposedly for immigration cases, but we know that she was reprimanded about that and changed her ways, and that Will Moschella at the DoJ agreed that Lam was cooperating with Administration policy and prosecuting a requisite number of cases in that department. He either lied to Feinstein in that Aug. 23 letter, or he lied later, to Congress, when he said that immigration cases were indeed the problem and the reason for the firing.

It's just clearly suspicious, and arguing one small aspect of the story to knock it down will be insufficient. You have to look at the whole picture.

I Love The Smell of Rolling Tanks in The Morning

...smells like money:

When Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes heard that the United States was going to go to war with Iraq, he was ecstatic, say several former colleagues.

“He and some of his top executives were really gung-ho about the war,” said a former employee of his now-defunct firm ADCS Inc. “Brent said this would create new opportunities for the company. He was really excited about doing business in the Middle East.”

He was especially excited about the prospect of damaged tanks and aircraft and a shortage of ordnance and dead soldiers and Iraqis... 'cause you, that'd all have to be REPLACED!

Allow me to advocate for something that will never happen. All defense work should be nationalized, budgeted modestly and scrutinized year over year, and irrelevant or obselete programs should simply be dismantled. The inevitable outcome of a private defense industry is that war is advocated as a means to prop up the economy. And private contractors will use all illegal means at their disposal to get a jump on the competition. We now have war cheerleaders in the private sector, bribing public officials (as they have for decades) and ensuring that the stance of the country is belligerence. I think George W. Bush said it best yesterday is a little-remarked-upon but brutally honest portion of his press conference.

"Money trumps peace."

When the Iraq war began in 2003, Wilkes redoubled his efforts to woo politicians and officials in the Pentagon and CIA.

“He was trying to build a business in the Middle East and needed support from some politicians,” said a former employee, who asked not to be named for fear of being drawn into the court case. “It was one of the things (the top executives of ADCS) were really excited about.”

Wilkes' plan to deliver water to Iraq began in the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion. At the time, CIA operatives in Iraq were relying on contractors in Kuwait and other friendly countries to supply them with bottled water, first-aid kits and other provisions.

Wilkes had little obvious experience ferrying goods overseas, especially to a war zone. But he wanted the CIA supply business to go to his holding company, Group W. He was aided by Foggo, who was then a logistics officer in Frankfurt, Germany, overseeing CIA purchases throughout Europe and the Middle East, including Iraq.

It doesn't matter if it's water or the B-2 Bomber. The point is that an economy predicated on the war machine (and take a look at some manufacturing sector numbers to see the proof of that) must have war to feed itself.

"Money trumps peace."

Incidentally, some House Democrats are working to keep Carol Lam, the prosecutor who brought about the Wilkes-Foggo indictments, and who is being forced out of her job as US Attorney by the Justice Department, on the case as an outside counsel. They sent a letter to Attorney General Gonzales today.

Carol Lam's indictments of Foggo and Wilkes underscore the importance of last week's request and the need for an explanation of why these diligent public servants were dismissed. It is vital that U.S. Attorneys be able to prosecute wrongdoing free from political pressure. We are pleased that the Department of Justice has also agreed to brief members of the House Judiciary Committee on the dismissals of Carol Lam and other U.S. Attorneys. We look forward to further details regarding the date for that briefing and your response regarding the request to appoint Carol Lam as an outside counsel to finish the Cunningham and related investigations.

This won't happen for a simple reason.

"Money trumps peace."

UPDATE: So do hookers.

On or about August 15, 2003, at approximately 6:30 p.m., [Wilkes] provided [Cunningham] and assorted other guests with a dinner served on a private lawn outside the Hapuna Suite [approximately $6,600 per night at the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel on the Island of Hawaii]; which consisted of Seafood Gyozas of Kona Lobster, shrimp, scallops, seared hawaiian snapper, "Manoa" lettuce leaves, and an open bar featuring fine wines;

On or about August 15, 2003, at approximately 11 p.m., Prostitutes "A" and "B" and their "driver" arrived at the Hapuna Suite. Persuant to [Wilkes'] instructions, an ADCS [Wilkes' company] employee escorted the prostitutes into the Suite and paid the driver $600 in cash;

On or about August 15, 2003, after approximately 15 minutes in the suite, [Wilkes] and [Cunningham] escorted Prostitutes "A" and "B" upstairs to separate rooms. At approximately midnight, Wilkes tipped Prostitute "A" $500 for the services;