Damning.
From Isikoff ...
The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence.
...
In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson's assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA sponsored trip to Africa: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
Puts Cheney right in the center of it. No doubt, directing the whole effort, which many of us have long suspected. Right there down to the ridiculousness of his 'wife send[ing] him on a junket'. Did he come up with it? Was he the first one to slip that slop into the rightwing media stream?
Late Update: You can see a copy of Cheney's scribblings here.
--Josh Marshall
New Newsweek poll:
A majority of Americans polled, 53 percent, believe that reports that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create a database of calls goes too far in invading people's privacy, according to the new Newsweek Poll, while 41 percent feel it is a necessary tool to combat terrorism. In light of this news and other actions by the Bush-Cheney administration, 57 percent of Americans say they have gone too far in expanding presidential power, while only 38 percent say they have not.Only 35 percent of Americans approve of the way the president is handling his job-down one percentage point since the last Newsweek Poll. Seventy-one percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, an all time high in the Newsweek Poll, while only 23 percent are satisfied. When asked how history will view George W. Bush, an overwhelming 50 percent of Americans polled said he will be viewed as a below average president. Since his re-election in 2004, 47 percent feel his performance has stayed the same, while 48 percent feel it has gotten worse.
--Josh Marshall
You say Fah-go, I say Foh-go? Well, turns out there's no need to call the whole thing off.
Here at TPM we've been following the Kyle "Dusty" Foggo story for six months or more. And all this time I've thought the name was pronounced Foh-goh, with a long O like 'Joe'. But recently I've heard people pronouncing it Fah-goh, as though it were the were fog, with a little 'oh' tacked on at the end.
Now, I don't think I based on my own pronunciation on anything more than that was how it occurred to me to pronounce it when I first saw it on paper.
So I thought I could resolve the issue for myself and perhaps do a small public service by looking into it.
I spoke to a friend and sometimes source from the intel world who shares some friends and acquaintances with Foggo. He checked it with them and it turns out it's Foh-goh, not Fah-goh.
--Josh Marshall
This is partly a rhetorical question. But mainly, it's the real thing. How many prime time television addresses has President Bush had over the last twelve months? It really seems like they're coming pretty fast and furious these days. Can anyone provide a tally?
--Josh Marshall
Any poll like this is just a snapshot in time. But CNN just commissioned a poll comparing public attitudes toward President Bush and his predecessor ...
Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush). (Watch whether Americans are getting nostalgic for the Clinton era -- 1:57)On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton's favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.
Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.
When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers -- 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush -- falling within the poll's margin of error. The same was true for a question on handling national security: 46 percent said Clinton performed better; 42 percent picked Bush.
Speaks for itself. And I suspect Americans attitudes toward President Bush will only grow more grim over time.
--Josh Marshall
An even more excellent adventure than we understood. Wilkes had the Foggos along on a vacation to a resort in Hawaii where it cost $20,000 a night to put up both families. That and the time they rented the castle in Scotland.
--Josh Marshall
The Post and the Times both have Saturday run-downs of the raids at the home and office of Dusty Foggo. Of the two, the Post's seemed more detail rich.
Some interesting tidbits.
According to the Post, Foggo was in his office at Langley as late as late Thursday evening. In his resignation email he'd given readers the impression that he'd be around for a few more weeks. By Friday morning, though, he'd been barred access to the entire CIA campus.
Both papers are now hearing from intel sources that Goss had asked Foggo to resign early last week, a few days before Goss himself resigned. And both papers are also hearing and apparently crediting claims that Goss himself didn't know Foggo before plucking him from relative obscurity to assume day to day management of the Agency.
If Goss didn't know Foggo well enough to come up with the idea to hire him, who did? What we've been hearing of late is that the idea originated with staffers Goss brought over from the House. And the Times points to Brant "Nine Fingers" Bassett, the retired CIA officer who went to work for Goss on the Hill and then went back to the Agency with him as a consultant.
Remember, as TPMmuckraker was first to report on Tuesday, Bassett did consulting work for Brent Wilkes between retiring from the CIA and going to work for Goss. As another recommender of Foggo, we keep hearing the name of Patrick Murray. But the indications are less clear there. And it may be that Bassett is the one who sold Murray on Foggo. The whole question, as you can see, is quite murky.
Here's one other graf that jumped out at me in the Post's piece ...
During his tenure, Foggo tightened the agency's publication rules and launched several probes of leaks to the media.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this.
And before proceding, let me say that what follows is highly speculative. In fact, I'm just going to set out some connections between various facts already in the public record. I don't know more than is already out there. With that said, let me proceed.
Foggo seems to have been close to the hack-in-chief in the partisanized hackocracy that Goss tried to create at the CIA. But does Foggo's role in pressing what were apparently leak probes of unprecedented scope have some deeper connection to the story?
We now know that the CIA Inspector General's investigation, which CIA spokespersons had until recently been calling perfunctory, was nothing of the sort. They were there on the scene yesterday helping haul documents out of Foggo's home and office. That investigation has been going on for some time. And clearly it was a pretty big deal.
The biggest scalp bagged by those leak investigations was CIA historian and Africa specialist Mary McCarthy. You remember that a few weeks ago she was fired from the Agency, just before retiring, allegedly for leaking information to the Washington Post's Dana Priest.
Now, in emails today, several readers noted the fact that at the time of her firing, McCarthy was working in the CIA's Inspector General's office, the same office that was then investigating Foggo and not more than a few weeks after McCarthy's firing would participate in raids on Foggo's home and office.
Is there some connection here? My professional instincts tell me not to jump to conclusions based on what are likely coincidences or press for the nefarious and complex explanation when the banal and simple ones are more common. Some version of this is what I emailed to readers.
But my experience with this case -- and by that I mean the whole thing leading back the Cunningham part of the story -- points in a somewhat different direction. At most every point there's been much more going on under the surface of the story than was known at the time. And that's continued to be the case over the last couple weeks.
So I'm not sure I'd dismiss this suggested connection out of hand. When McCarthy was fired, "several former senior intelligence officials [told the Post] they could not recall a similar sanction being levied against a serving CIA officer in the past several decades." Current and former Agency used similar words today with both the Post and the Times, explaining that a non-espionage criminal investigation of a CIA official seemed unprecedented.
Clearly, over the last month you've had several things pop at the CIA that insiders call unprecedented in the Agency's history. And I don't think we can dismiss the possibility that they may interconnect in ways we don't yet understand. I'm not saying it as simple as that Foggo managed to whack the IG's office before they whacked him. Perhaps it is simply that the pressures that blew up over the last week had the place in such a tight vise that weird things were happening all over. Who knows.
At a minimum, if Foggo was the prime mover behind investigating and firing McCarthy and today he's barred from entering the CIA campus and the target of a corruption investigation, the whole McCarthy saga deserves a fresh look.
I'll just say I think there's much more we're going to find out about this story over the next few weeks. And little of it, I suspect, will be pretty.
--Josh Marshall
Foggo's memory gets foggy on how the Wilkes-CIA contract deal went down.
--Josh Marshall
Just to keep count, how many federal investigative agencies in on the expanding Cunningham investigation?
FBI, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, IRS, CIA IG. The first three were there from the start in the raids on Wilkes', Wade's and Duke's homes. This is CIA IG's office's first appearance.
I guess the IG's investigation of Foggo wasn't quite as routine as they claimed earlier this week. Go figure.
How many federal investigative jurisdictions?
San Diego, LA, DC, Northern Virginia.
Any I'm forgetting?
--Josh Marshall
Now, here's a question to consider. Is it just a coincidence that the FBI raided Dusty Foggo's home and office, like, three or four days after he announced he was stepping down? And if not, did Foggo really step down because of Goss's departure? Or maybe does the line of causation run the other way?
--Josh Marshall
John Roberts just read a CIA statement live on CNN. It seems these raids were joint raids by the FBI and the CIA's office of inspector general. (The phrase was "an on-going joint investigation.") I think that makes sense given that I'd imagine the CIA keeps pretty tight security over the ED's office. So I wouldn't figure the FBI agents can just drive up to Langley and start banging on the front door.
--Josh Marshall
CNN is now reporting that not only was Dusty Foggo's home raided this morning but apparently his CIA office too. (AP has the confirm on the office search.)
I guess that gives a whole new meaning to FBI-CIA turf war.
And does John Roberts need a primer on this case. (ed.note: See the late update below. This passage was based on a mishearing of what Roberts said.) It's true that there's no proof that Porter Goss is tied to the Cunningham scandal. But no connection between Foggo and the Cunningham case? John?
Here's Roberts quote ...
It would appear that if there is no direct connection between Goss, Foggo, and the Duke Cunningham case, or even between Foggo and the Duke Cunningham case because nobody's sure yet, it would seem that the thing Goss could be vulnerable on is whether or not people that he picked for high places in the agency were somehow bringing disrespect or disrepute to the CIA.
I'm not trying to give Roberts a hard time. And things get said quickly when you're reporting a breaking news story. But, to the extent that we can ever know these things, I really don't think there's any question that the Foggo and Duke Cunningham cases are connected.
Late Update: Let me add one point here. When I did the original call out of John Roberts (above), I was going on what we initially heard over the air on CNN. Given the way it was said, we didn't at first catch the "if" in the first clause. That made it sound like Roberts was giving Foggo a clean bill of health with respect to the connection to Cunningham. With the "if", what he said reads very differently. What I said still stands about there really not being any question of Foggo's connection to the Cunningham case. But if we'd heard the quote correctly the first time, I would have written this post differently. And I wouldn't have zinged Roberts as I did.
--Josh Marshall
If Dusty Foggo's house getting raided doesn't catch your fancy, Tony Snow did his first gaggle this morning. Here it is.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, here's a Friday scandal trivia topic. What are the ten most important articles written on the Cunningham-Wilkes-Foggo investigation?
Just off hand, I'd figure ...
1. Marcus Stern's piece breaking the story. "Lawmaker's Home Sale Questioned," SDUT, June 23th, 2005.
2. Jerry Kammer's piece on the Jerry Lewis-Bill Lowery Nexus. "A Steady Flow of Financial Influence," SDUT, December 23rd, 2005.
3. Dean Calbreath's and Jerry Kammer's piece on Wilkes's apprenticeship in scamdom and his ties to Foggo. "Contractor 'Knew How to Grease the Wheels'", SDUT, December 4th, 2005.
4. Scot Paltrow's piece in the Wall Street Journal openning up the hookergate/CIA part of the story. "Prosecutors May Widen Congressional-Bribe Case," WSJ, April 27th, 2006.
This list isn't meant to be exhaustive or even in any particular order. For instance, I don't have any selections from the North County Times, which has also done amazing work on this story. These are just a few key pieces that came to mind.
But let's come up with the rest. Top ten stories on the Cunningham bribery investigation. And, let's not forget: some of the best are probably yet to be written.
--Josh Marshall
Dusty Foggo asks, Brent who? That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Knocking around Michelle Malkin is pretty much a staple of the liberal blogosphere. But to date I've always just tried to ignore Michelle and so far I've never partaken.
But I noticed this column of hers this evening in which she tries to wrap the hookergate mess in with the immigration hysteria into a big knock of government bureaucracy. No, I couldn't follow it either.
But this paragraph stood out ...
Ironically and amusingly enough, Democrats -- those always reliable, pro-affirmative action zealots -- are crying foul over Shirlington Limo's minority preferential treatment and raising questions about the company being used as a minority-owned front in a "historically underutilized business zone." Glad they are finally on board with those of us who have long raised questions about the government's small-business diversity scam. These racial and ethnic bean-counting programs are among the most corrupt government vehicles in the bureaucracy -- and in post-September 11 America, the most potentially dangerous to boot.
No, Michelle. I don't think I've seen anyone say the problem with Shirlington was minority set-asides. (Earlier she references, TPMmuckraker, Harper's and Pogo. So I think she's referring to us.) The issue raised is that Shirlington is owned by a convicted felon, who was in personal bankruptcy at the time DHS awarded him his big contract, has a long history of vehicle repossessions and poor service and if all that weren't enough didn't even make the lowest bid.
Not everyone agrees but I think minority set-aside programs can actually play a benign role in righting historic wrongs and encouraging entrepreneurship in minority communities. But things can just sort of go wrong when corrupt political appointees turn government contracts and taxpayer dollars into pay off money for the guy the corrupt pols got to drive around their hookers.
It's a distinction some conservatives don't seem quite able to grasp.
--Josh Marshall
It's not just Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) who's in the cross-hairs of the expanded Cunningham investigation. The Times says it's "several members of the House Appropriations Committee."
Not surprisingly, Bill Lowery, Brent Wilkes' mentor and Rep. Lewis's right-hand-man, appears to be the nexus of concern.
My favorite passage from the article? This one ...
The government officials said that investigators had not found records documenting contract awards that might have been influenced by individual lawmakers. Moreover, they said practices that appeared to be improper might prove to be allowable under Congressional procedures.
In other words, some instances of apparent bribery might not be a problem since congressional procedures say it's okay.
--Josh Marshall
David Ignatius has a good column in the Post tomorrow about Dusty Foggo, Patrick Murray and the mix of ineptitude, paybackism and mismanagement that did vast damage to the CIA under Porter Goss's leadership. Ignatius views Foggo's alleged corruption as a secondary part of the story. In that I suspect he's mistaken, that we'll come to see it was integrally connected to his other forms of ridiculousness. But the stuff he describes is bad enough. Give this one a read and absorb what it means about what's been occupying the time of our intelligence agencies while we're supposedly fighting a war on terror.
The Times also has a good run-down of Foggo's increasing centrality to the expanded Cunningham investigation and a slew of new details fleshing out various aspects of the story.
The Times also came up with a new name for TPMmuckraker. They're calling it 'the Internet.' See below ...
Mr. Foggo was one of many C.I.A. officials close to Mr. Wilkes. In May 2000, Mr. Wilkes paid Brant G. Bassett, a retired German-speaking C.I.A. official known as Nine Fingers, a $5,000 fee to travel to Germany for five days as a consultant on a business deal that Mr. Wilkes was negotiating with a German software engineer, according to a former agency official aware of the arrangement. The official was granted anonymity to speak about the business deal.Documents revealing the $5,000 payment to Mr. Bassett from Mr. Wilkes first appeared on the Internet on Tuesday.
Here's the story. Here are the documents.
The Post was more specific.
--Josh Marshall
This line, packed a decent way down into the article in the Washington Post, jumped out at me as the most significant ...
Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening.
This seems key.
This isn't yet another program with civil liberties concerns hanging around it. It's an integral part of one program. This is the initial cull, from which targets of interest -- that wouldn't be able to meet 'probable cause' standards -- are chosen for actual monitoring.
--Josh Marshall
Time: "The number three official at the Central Intelligence Agency, who 
announced this week he is stepping down as his boss Director Porter Goss leaves later this month, cleared defense contractor Brent Wilkes in for at least one visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., within the last 12 months, sources tell TIME.The visit occurred before Wilkes was cited -- though not charged -- in ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham's November guilty plea as an unindicted co-conspirator who provided over $600,000 of the $2.4 million in bribes that Cunningham admitted accepting from defense contractors ... A former CIA official said it was highly unusual to help a friend get access to headquarters."
I'm eager for more detail on precise dates. Duke didn't get charged -- and Wilkes cited -- until November of last year. But the scandal popped in early June 2005 -- about 11 months ago.
Wilkes name first surfaced in scandal in mid-July. He was clearly tied to Duke's scams in early August. And his offices were raided by the Feds on August 16th.
So this new Time piece really leaves me wanting to know whether Foggo was waiving Wilkes into the CIA complex after the Feds were raiding his office back in California.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, I think we got one wrong here. The sentence the feds are requesting for phone-jammer James Tobin is well below the statutory maximum for the offense. But the prosecutors are apparently asking for a longer sentence than the federal sentencing guidelines would dictate.
I haven't been able to confirm this myself yet. But a number of TPM Lawyer Readers have chimed in to this effect. And their unanimity suggests to me that they're correct.
We'll get up more details on this on Muckraker. But I didn't want to let this error stand. Here's the government sentencing memorandum itself for those of you who'd like to peruse.
--Josh Marshall
Over at Muckraker we've done a few pieces today on just whether Duke Cunningham really ever cooperated with federal investigators or did much more than admitting to what they already knew. This leaves the distinct possibility that the only one of the principals in the case -- Duke, the four co-conspirators -- to have cooperated with investigators in any material way is Mitchell Wade, whom various published reports say began cooperating early and extensively.
I'm pretty certain from my reporting that they've gotten nothing from Wilkes or Tommy Kontogiannis, the other two co-conspirators.
So if the feds never got Duke to cough up his accomplices, what went wrong?
The other question is what to make of these statements from the west coast head of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, claiming that Cunningham isn't cooperating and hinting that the scandal is far more extensive than people realize. We've had a hard time figuring out just what he means by that. But my hunch is that there's some conflict between the DOD and DOJ investigators about how far to take this. More on this soon.
--Josh Marshall
Dems say AG Gonzales lied to Congress about the NSA massive call database program. And it looks to us like he did. Read the testimony for yourself.
--Paul Kiel
Questions emerge about how prosecutors handled the Duke Cunningham investigation.
Update: Maybe Duke never cooperated.
--Paul Kiel
There's a pretty high bar on news that makes former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith look like an even bigger jackass.
But this may meet the standard. According to this Periscope report in Newsweek, just after 9/11, as administration officials were debating where to launch the war on terror, Feith came up with an idea that showed he was really thinking outside the box.
The first attacks, he apparently wrote, should come in South America. Such attacks would have the advantage of being "a surprise to the terrorists."
Feith and his advisors "argued that an attack on terrorists in South America -- for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence -- would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations."
I don't usually find much common ground with Feith. But I think he's right that such an attack would have come as quite a surprise to the terrorists. But why stop there? They probably would have been even more dumbfounded if we'd blown up one of our ships in our initial round of retaliation, or perhaps bombed Portugal.
All jokes aside, consider that this fool was a key architect of our policies in fighting terrorism.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. The president is now saying that the new NSA phone call cull program "strictly target[s] Al Qaeda and their known affiliates." Yet USAToday says it pulls in the calls of tens of millions of Americans.
If al Qaida has really grown that large on the president's watch, isn't he doing something wrong?
Late Update: TPM Reader MC expands on the point: "Well Josh, we have captured 17,658 of Zarqawi's top lieutenants, so I think we can extrapolate several million members. They must be that new third party we keep hearing about."
--Josh Marshall
Reed Hundt, former FCC Chair: "No one should imagine that what NSA has done, if reports are accurate, is normal behavior or standard procedure in the interaction between a private communications network and the government. In an authoritarian country without a bill of rights and with state ownership of the communications network, such eavesdropping by people and computers is assumed to exist. But in the United States it is assumed not to occur, except under very carefully defined circumstances that, according to reports, were not present as NSA allegedly arm-twisted telephone companies into compliance. That is a topic that can't be avoided in the general's hearing, if he gets that far."
--Josh Marshall
Brent and Dusty: still crazy after all these years. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Perish the thought. Feds open an investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) ...
Federal prosecutors have begun an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis, the Californian who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee, government officials and others said, signaling the spread of a San Diego corruption probe.The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles has issued subpoenas in an investigation into the relationship between Lewis (R-Redlands) and a Washington lobbyist linked to disgraced former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe), three people familiar with the investigation said.
The investigation is part of an expanding federal probe stemming from Cunningham's conviction for accepting $2.4 million in bribes and favors from defense contractors, according to the three sources.
What will we tell the children? And what about the appropriators?
--Josh Marshall
Way back when, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) justified getting tons of free dinners at Jack Abramoff's restaurant Signatures by claiming that, heck, he took Jack out a lot too. So it all came out in the wash, you might say.
Now Kyle "Dusty" Foggo seems to be trying that same line out to explain all the largesse he got from Brent Wilkes.
Does Dusty have to credit Dana for first using the excuse? You know, sort of like reporters. This bogus excuse, first used by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, is the one I'll use to explain this apparent bribes and/or illegal gratuities.
--Josh Marshall
Last night I mentioned that I was 
leafing through my Duke Cunningham file. One of the things that prompted that was a few questions I had about Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), a fellow who had a decent number of ties to Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes and a lot of ties to the guy who I figure was basically Wilkes' mentor, former Rep. Bill Lowery (R-CA).
Jerry Kammer at the San Diego Union-Tribune did some great reporting on the Lowery-Lewis nexus almost six months ago. And ever since then I've thought that Lewis was likely far more tied up in this mess than we've known.
But look at this passage from Monday's piece in the LA Times. Briefly, the context is that Brent Wilkes was giving Cunningham marching orders to get the Pentagon to pay him for some more of his substandard products. Afterwards, Duke was rewarded with a generous cash bribe ...
In July 1999, co-conspirator No. 1 [i.e., Brent Wilkes] faxed Cunningham "talking points" on how to bully a Pentagon manager into releasing more government funds. These documents were included in Cunningham's sentencing hearing.The memo instructed the lawmaker to demand that the Defense Department official shift money from another program to cover funds designated for ADCS. "We need $10 m[illion] more immediately," Cunningham was to tell the official.
If the official didn't cooperate, Cunningham was to say his next calls would be to two high-ranking Pentagon officials. The script called for Cunningham to add: "This is very important and if you cannot resolve this others will be calling also" — two names in this passage are blacked out in the memo. Despite Cunningham's threats, the Pentagon manager was unmoved, according to grand jury testimony.
A week later, Cunningham and Lewis called a Washington news conference to announce that they had slashed $2 billion in funding for the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, one of the Pentagon's prized programs, citing cost overruns. Both congressmen had been key supporters of the project, and their comments shocked Pentagon officials.
Within days, the same Pentagon manager who had been resistant to Cunningham's appeals sent the congressman a list of other programs where money could be "reallocated" to Wilkes' firm, according to court documents. "The Defense Department spends $1 billion a day, so the [Wilkes] contract was like a rounding error. It just wasn't worth putting our big programs at risk," a senior Pentagon official said on condition he not be identified.
On Friday, Lewis said "there was no connection whatsoever" between his position on the F-22 program and Cunningham's effort to pressure the Pentagon on Wilkes' behalf. "If I knew about it, I would have stopped it," Lewis said.
The Pentagon agreed to send $5 million more to Wilkes' firm, according to court documents. The F-22 funds were later restored. In subsequent years, Cunningham and Lewis supported full funding for the warplane.
In May 2000, a month after his firm received the $5 million, Wilkes wrote two checks to Cunningham for a total of $100,000. These payments were used as evidence in the bribery case.
So Cunningham was bought and he actually accepted detailed instructions from Wilkes on how to shake free 'his' money. And there's Lewis, going as far as to kill a major weapons program, to get Brent Wilkes his $6 million.
Now, maybe I'm just cynical. But you've got two members of Congress doing your bidding for you, pretty much on command. With one you've got a textbook corrupt arrangement. He does your bidding. You give him cash. With the other guy, it's just for good government? He just temporarily lost faith in the F-22?
Look back through the record: you see Jerry Lewis doing a lot of bidding for Brent Wilkes and Bill Lowery. See example after example and at a certain point you just add two and two and it occurs to you that it might equal four.
--Josh Marshall
How does this look?
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has now come forward to say how sorry he is that in a public speech he told a story about how he kills government contracts if the owners of the companies in question don't support President Bush. Now he admits that it never happened. It wasn't true. And in fact he never lets politics interfere with HUD contracting decisions.
This reminds me of the time I walked into a bank and told them I'd stolen a bunch of their money even though I hadn't. I really regretted that.
Or the time I told a good friend I'd slept with his girlfriend even though I hadn't. I really regretted that too.
Alphonso Jackson. HUD Secretary.
--Josh Marshall
HUD spokeswoman Tucker sleeping with the fishes after contradictory explanations of HUD Secretary's bizarre corruption inculpation speech?
--Josh Marshall
The results are in on Abramoff's White House visits... Two.
Update: And yes, that excludes every Abramoff visit that we knew of.
--Paul Kiel
We're going to be covering this in more depth today at TPMmuckraker. But let me say a few more things about the the North County Times article mentioned below.
Do you know what the threshold is for a government criminal investigator, the regional head of DOD's in-house investigative service, to go public and say on the record that someone isn't cooperating and that the scandal is much bigger than anyone thinks?
Also, consider Duke Cunningham. What would it take to get him to clam up? Duke is 64 years old. He's had cancer. He was just sentenced to 8+ years in prison. That might well be a death sentence. Who's he protecting? And what would make him think he's better off keeping quiet than telling investigators what they want to know?
--Josh Marshall
San Diego's North County Times has
a big scoop on the Cunningham scandal and Hookergate.
Apparently, even in the slammer, Duke isn't cooperating. He's not willing to give up the really big fish, it seems.
Says Rick Gwin, regional head of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, "In my opinion, he has not been cooperative and I have not gotten any information from him to further develop other targets. I was hoping that from a jail cell, he might become more cooperative, but we just don't have the cooperation that I think we should have."
And then Gwin says this: "This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham. All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) ears are burning. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
So now we've got the response from the self-confessedly corrupt Alphonso Jackson.
He was just kidding.
HUD spokeswoman Dustee Tucker told the Chicago Sun-Times: ''The secretary's story was anecdotal. He is not part of the contracting process. He was trying to explain to this group how politics works in D.C."
This doesn't sound like a particularly exculpatory explanation. That story was made up. Jackson was just how explaining how he does business?
Then there's this ...
Tucker said Jackson does not plan to resign. She acknowledged that he did not tell the audience the story was made up. But, she said, Jackson used the ''hypothetical'' story to describe the ruthless politics of Washington. She said Jackson was trying to convey that Washington is a place where political opponents, rather than stabbing you in the back, ''will stab you in the chest.''
This 'hypothetical' sounds more like he was trying to explain how he operates.
--Josh Marshall
Too much information?
As we delve ever deeper into the web of corruption connecting Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Dusty Foggo, Mitchell Wade, et al., I was flipping tonight through my Duke Cunningham file -- news clips, documents, reporter's notes, etc. -- and I realized I'd forgotten this golden oldie from the Duke book of love.
In addition to the Wilkes' party suites at the Watergate and the Westin Grand, there's always been talk of some pretty freewheeling parties down at the marina on the Duke-Stir, allegedly involving the same mix of booze and women and cigars, at least a couple other members of Congress, and who knows what else.
That stuff's never really seen the light of day in the legitimate press. But I'd forgotten that Copley News Service actually found two women willng to talk about what happened when the lights dimmed down on the yacht. Apparently when Duke got down to serious courting he would change from the congressman's get-up (seen above right) "into pajama bottoms and a turtleneck sweater to entertain them with chilled champagne by the light of a lava lamp."
Almost Hefneresque. Or maybe Austin Powers?
--Josh Marshall
This is pure speculation from TPM Reader PHB. At a minimum, though, he raises a real oddity in the conversation HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson described in that speech. Maybe more ...
Just read the thinkprogress on the HUD thing. First comment set me thinking.Why on earth would a contractor bidding for a contract come out and say 'I do not support your President'.
There is only one circumstance I can think of where that reply would come up in a sales call - IF THE CEO WAS ASKED FOR A CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION.
I certainly would never bring up politics with any customer unless I knew what their politics were in advance and that they were compatible.
The politics issue has to have come from Jackson.
That is why he is making this peculiar statement, what he is really doing here is repeating his internalized self-justification for demanding a bribe and being rebuffed.
Isn't this sort of a good point?
Maybe the whole conversation Jackson recounted was a fictive one, meant to communicate a message without being literally true. Speech-making gives some license for that sort of thing, I suppose.
But why would anyone volunteer such a statement unprompted? Hopefully, a government contractor who didn't support President Bush wouldn't reduce him or herself to kow-towing. But if you're a businessman working hard for a government contract, would you bring up your opposition to the president, unprompted, to one of his chief appointees, when the whole topic isn't even appropriate to discuss?
I think PHB may be on to something.
Meanwhile, Sen. Lieberman's joining the calls for an investigation into the HUD Secretary.
--Josh Marshall
One of the colorful characters we've been hearing about in the Wilkes/Foggo Hookergate scandal is this guy "Nine Fingers" -- a nine fingered former former CIA case officer who was a regular at the 'poker parties' and went to work for Goss on the House intel committee. Turns out that just before he reported for duty on the Hill, Brent Wilkes cut him a check for $5,000.
--Josh Marshall
For those of you particularly adept at guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar or gauging lobbyists' influence, here's a game for you.
--Paul Kiel
In the past, when President Bush 
got a free ride for this or that form of wrong-doing, the answer was usually press craveness. Now, though, there's so much scandal and criminality, maybe it's just hard for most administration wrong-doing to make the cut, what with the Cunningham bribery investigation creeping into the CIA and DHS, Rove about to get indicted, etc.
All day I've been getting emails about this piece in the Dallas Business Journal about how HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson publicly admitted killing a major government services contract because the head of the company in question wasn't a Bush supporter.
(Thinkprogress explains why this almost certainly violates federal law.)
Just as interesting was Jackson's follow-on statement in which shows his understanding of how government contracting works: political supporters get contracts so they can pump a percentage of the profits back into the political party. Standard machine politics, at best. Organized bribery, at worst. And whatever you want to call it, the guiding principle of all contracting and government spending in the second Bush administration.
Said Jackson: "He didn't get the contract. Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."
--Josh Marshall
Bush to teach character to the elderly ...
Those who don't sign [for the Medicare drug benefit] up by May 15 will have to pay a penalty to enroll, although Bush repeatedly pointed out that there are exceptions for the poor. Many lawmakers want to extend the deadline, but Bush has opposed those calls."Deadlines are important," Bush said. "Deadlines help people understand there is finality and people have to get after it."
Bush.
--Josh Marshall
At TPMCafe Bookclub this week, Fawaz Gerges is discussing his new book Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, in which he follows "the journey of three generations of jihadists and narrate[s] their story in their own words." Today Gerges is discussing his contention that we greatly overstate the religious or Islamic element of contemporary jihadism and overlook its essentially political character.
--Josh Marshall
The latest from Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) lawyer: "They are flat making it up." That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Here's something that keeps popping into my head and popped with an extra burst with the news this morning that the latest Gallup poll -- generally friendly to Bush -- has him at an anemic 31% approval rating.
Given that pretty much all the polls now show the president mired in the mid- to low 30s, simple 
statistical probability would suggest that at one point in the not too distant future some poll will catch the president under 30% in the Dante-esque public opinion nether region of the 20s.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the president's popularity will continue to fall into the 20s. The continuing descent is something like a mathematical limit. Each point lower digs deeper into the base of truly committed partisans and unquestioning hacks. So knocking off each new point on the way down requires ever greater displays of incompetence, failure and general infamy. And even for President Bush that's a challenge. So, as I say, I'm not saying he'll really get down into the 20s. I'm saying that if the president is consistently scoring like 32% or 33%, the margin of error built into the polls themselves should eventually spit out an outlier under 30%.
(By the way, if you're a pollster or statistician and you know some reason why my logic is flawed, just keep it to yourself because it'll really break my stride in writing this post.)
So, any predictions on when it will come or if it ever will? Is May the month when George W. Bush will cross that Stygian threshold on the path to presidential perdition? June? Never?
--Josh Marshall
The government's case against Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) is looking stronger by the day. See the newly released court docs.
--Paul Kiel
Reuters: "President Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake."
bin Laden still at large; fish rolled up in rod-n-reel sting op.
--Josh Marshall
Via Laura Rozen, here's the link to an article in today's New York Sun that suggests that John Negroponte has already agreed to let the DOD take covert operations from the CIA. This, and the other issues discussed in this article, is a pretty big deal. And it is far from what the Congress called for in the 2004 intel reorganization.
Here's one passage from the article ...
The pending appointment of General Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency will pave the way for the agency's emasculation and for the Pentagon to assume full authority over paramilitary operations.A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated "he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon."
The source also pointed out that the Pentagon has requested increased budget authority to prepare for the acquisition of the CIA's targeted military operations. The intelligence overhaul of 2004 envisioned that they would remain under the purview of the CIA.
The authority to commission and plan these secret military operations has been a point of contention since 2004 when Congress and the White House began reorganizing the intelligence community.
The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president's war policy.
This contradicts what we just told you Steve Clemons is saying. And I'm not sufficiently plugged in to the story to tell you who's right and who's wrong. But this stuff is genuinely worrisome on a few different levels.
First, our whole intelligence infrastructure is being chopped apart and cobbled back together in ways that Congress never envisioned and doesn't appear to be having a chance to sign off on. More immediately troubling is the fact that all our forward-leaning intelligence capacity is being taken over by the Pentagon when it's still being run by Don Rumsfeld, a guy who just about everyone seems to agree now is a demonstrated failure at the job, someone who should already have been fired.
In this universe, as opposed to the alternative Bush loyalist universe, who's screwed more stuff up recently, the political appointees at the Pentagon or the CIA? CIA's far from perfect. But I don't have much trouble answering the former. Yet we're handing over a big chunk of the what the CIA does to those guys.
I don't want to romanticize the intel community status quo ante. But you really have to wonder whether all these changes aren't doing far more harm than good to our intel capacities and our national security. Again, particularly because Don Rumsfeld appears to be the one implementing what Congress mandated. Really, that sentence says it all.
Late Update: TPM Reader LG responds ...
Re the DNI to turn over covert ops to DoD meme...keep in mind that there is a very big difference between clandestine and covert ops. Covert ops (the paramilitary stuff) has almost always relied on heavy DoD suppport, training, funding, etc. with very little DoD oversight. The DO fair-haired children do clandestine ops. I think it actually makes sense for the Pentagon to be running the covert ops, especially since the Director of the CIA is no longer the DCI, just another Agency head that answers to the DNI.
This is a decent point. But making the decisions without clear congressional authorization still seems like a big problem, and having Rumsfeld in charge of implementing them even bigger.
--Josh Marshall
We've been focusing on the Wilkes-Wade dimensions of Porter Goss's firing at CIA. Meanwhile, much of the criticism of CIA nominee Gen. Hayden, from both sides of the aisle, has been over the fact that he's an Air Force General (not retired, but currently serving) and that his command over the CIA would bolster Don Rumsfeld's efforts to consolidate control of the intel community in the Pentagon. Remember, in theory at least, as a general, Hayden works for Rumsfeld.
But Steve Clemons has a contrary view.
He thinks Hayden's appointment may actually bolster John Negroponte in his efforts to resist Rumsfeld. There are a lot of different moving parts in what's going on here -- contending personalities, fights over the structure of the intel community, whether the balance of power will be at the Pentagon or elsewhere, etc. But on balance, blunting Rumsfeld in his efforts to run everything out of DOD seems like a good thing.
Steve also says that Steve Kappes, a key CIA player who was run out by Goss, will be coming back as Hayden's deputy.
--Josh Marshall
So why did Porter Goss resign as Director of the CIA?
Over the weekend there's been a lot of amorphous talk about turf battles between Goss and DNI John Negroponte. We've heard that the White House has long doubted Goss's leadership of the Agency. We're hearing that Goss's ouster is part of a planned overhaul of the entire beleaguered agency.
I don't doubt that each of these stories are true, in some measure.
From the start, however, I've never believed that 
any of these overlapping explanations explain the jagged and sudden nature of Goss's departure. And if you read the follow-on coverage closely you'll see the taint and awareness of the underlying scandal spreading like ink in tissue paper.
Newsweek, for example, has a quizzical piece which lays the Foggo story right next to the Goss resignation without quite connecting the two. Interestingly, though, Newsweek says that it was Dusty Foggo was at the center of the turf battle with DNI John Negroponte -- a point we'll return to.
We've heard too that while there was a power struggle between Negroponte and Goss, what tipped the scale was an intervention the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In its day one reportage, the Times said Goss's "departure was hastened because a recent inquiry by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had found that current and former agency officers were sharply critical of Mr. Goss's leadership."
By Sunday, though, Richard Sisk of the New York Daily News, was reporting that the FIAB's concerns centered on Foggo ...
Bush had already gotten an earful from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the shortcomings of Goss, but the final push came from the "very alarmed" President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, intelligence and Congressional sources said.Alarms were set off at the advisory board by a widening FBI sex and cronyism investigation that's targeted Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, and also touched on Goss himself.
Now, successful cover stories must always contain at least a partial version of the truth. Otherwise, they can't be credible. The issue is what they leave out. As we move forward, I think you can see that the official narrative intentionally leaves out the key details. And the White House's inability to provide any reasonable explanation for the manner and timing of Goss's departure points unmistakably the criminal investigation that began with Duke Cunningham and has now made its way into the CIA.
Let's review what we know now about Dusty Foggo to provide context.
The Executive Director of the CIA runs the day to day operations of the Agency. It's the third-ranking position in the organization. In corporate parlance, he's the COO. Foggo was a career CIA officer. But before Goss's arrival, he'd never had a leadership position in the organization. He worked in logistics and procurement.
Newsweek says Foggo was "a logistics expert well known to junketing congressmen who visited Frankfurt, Germany, where Foggo was based." Foggo was in Frankfurt earlier in this decade, I believe. But a deeper look would reveal that he played a similar role in Central America in the 1980s. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last December, back in the mid-1980s one of Wilkes' jobs was "was to accompany congressmen ... to Central America to meet with Foggo and Contra leaders."
When Goss tapped him for the #3 job, it surprised everyone, as you'd expect, given the background I just described.
Now, some are suggesting that the real actor here is one of the congressional staffers Goss brought with him to CIA. And I think there may be something to that. It's quite possible that the only thing Goss did wrong was allow his staffers to make some very bad decisions on his behalf. There's been a lot of chatter about whether Goss was at the Wilkes parties or whether he profited in any way from the Wilkes' related corruption. To date I've seen no credible claims of either. But, politically and simply in terms of accountability, Goss is on the line for what his chief staffer does.
In any case, you have this lingering question of what prompted Goss to put Foggo in the number three job.
Now, fast forward to the present. We've known for more than six months that Duke Cunningham's chief briber Brent Wilkes was a life-long friend of Dusty Foggo's and that their careers were closely tied together. Given that the Justice Department claims that Wilkes gave more than $600,000 in bribes to a sitting member of Congress, the association, for better or worse, inevitably cast some taint on Foggo.
But now we know a lot more.
According to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News, Foggo himself is now a target of the expanded Cunningham investigation and federal prosecutors in San Diego are trying to build cases against both Foggo and Wilkes. As the Journal explains, the "criminal investigation centers on whether Mr. Foggo used his postings at the CIA to improperly steer contracts to Mr. Wilkes's companies."
The #3 at the CIA is about to resign because he's being investigated for his role in one of the biggest congressional bribery scandals in decades. The Director hired him for the job and he quit last Friday. Do you think there's a problem?
--Josh Marshall