TPMMuckraker

Duke’s Letter Revealed!

The San Diego Union-Tribune published excerpts from a fiery letter it received from Duke Cunningham, the felonious ex-congressman the paper helped put in jail.

But, as clever Reader DH found, the paper secretly published the entire letter, hiding it in a PDF on its site.

You can read the four-page letter here. It’s clearly a response to Marcus Stern, the U-T reporter who broke the Duke scandal and now appears to be working on a book about the saga. “You write you book,” Cunningham wrote in a barely-legible scrawl, “and remember what forge [sic] got from [Mitchell] Wade [one of Duke’s main bribers] they you printed” he continued writing, “as truth will come out and you will find out how liablist [sic] you have & will be,” he finished.

Although he wrote early in the letter that he could not discuss his case, Duke dropped some tantalizing tidbits later on.

“Ask yourself why I kicked [Wade] off his own boat twice, told him I was not going to stay on his boat and put it up for sale,” Duke wrote. That appears to be a reference to the Duke-Stir, a boat which Wade bought and later gave to Cunningham.

He also appears to disclose classified information. “There is a secret paper in my file that the U.S. Airforce presented to me (both former Chiefs of USAF) to increase the MZM programs and the justification for doing so,” Duke wrote.

“It was funded at less than wanted & it will today save lives in the best Aviation Humit [sic] Program in existence now ever deployed with our training forces.”

Here’s the entire letter. Note: he doesn’t say anything about hookers.

Duke Cunningham, Hookergate, Mitchell Wade

Facebook Conversations

Editor & Publisher

Josh Marshall

Managing Editor

David Kurtz

Senior Associate Editor

Paul Werdel

Associate Editor

Sara Libby

Assistant Editor

Igor Bobic

Reporters

Brian Beutler

Carl Franzen

Sahil Kapur

Eric Kleefeld

Eric Lach

Nick Martin

Evan McMorris-Santoro

Ryan J. Reilly

Benjy Sarlin

Front Page Editor

David Taintor

Poll Editor

Kyle Leighton

News Writer

Pema Levy

Video Editor

Michael Lester

Polling Fellow

Tom Kludt

Video Fellow

Clayton Ashley

Research Interns

Michael Brooks

Publishing Intern

Christopher O’Driscoll

Miles Read

General Manager & General Counsel

Millet Israeli

VP, Ad Sales

Bruce Ellerstein

Waldo Tibbetts

Bob Edmunds

Manager, Ad Operations and Sales Support

Versha Sharma

Deputy Publisher

Callie Schweitzer

Director of Technology

Eric Buth

Designer/Developer

Ni Mu

Matthew Wozniak

Tech Fellow

Dennis Cahillane