We've been trying to nail down whether the brother of State Department Inspector General Howard "Cookie" Krongard is a member of the Advisory Board of Blackwater. The Democrats on the Waxman committee are saying he is; and Krongard himself appeared to deny it in his testimony this morning. But we've just received confirmation from Blackwater that he in fact does sit on the board.

There was some confusion at first because Rep. Waxman seemed to say that Krongard's brother, himself a former #3 man at the CIA, was on the company's board of directors, which would be a bigger deal. But sitting on Blackwater's advisory board is still plenty to create a clear conflict. And it sheds a lot of light on Krongard's habit of scuttling investigations into Blackwater's business practices.

As a secondary matter, there's also now the question of why Krongard denied it.

Beyond that though there's a lot of evidence emerging that the State Department has been peculiarly lax in its dealings with a number of major military contractors in Iraq, seemingly enabling a lot of the subsequent rip-offs of taxpayer money as well as arguably creating the climate in which incidents like the Nisour Square shooting were allowed to take place.

More coming soon.