It's been a long time since we've had the opportunity to write about Ex-Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) after his ignominious defeat last November (he asked voters for "the benefit of the doubt" and they didn't give it to him). But unfortunately for Weldon, he's back in the news:

Former representative Curt Weldon's chief of staff has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges for allegedly helping a consulting firm that Weldon championed obtain federal funds and for concealing money the firm paid him and his wife, according to court papers unsealed today.

According to the court document, Russell James Caso and a top official at the unnamed consulting firm met repeatedly with Weldon to seek the Pennsylvania Republican's help in obtaining federal funds for the organization's defense projects....

The court papers make no accusations against Weldon. But they say Caso "intentionally" concealed payments of $19,000 from the firm to his wife by failing to report them in congressional disclosure forms "even though he knew he was required to do so."

Although the papers make no direct charges against him, Weldon appears in the charging document as "Representative A," which is mighty bad news. It's a pattern that prosecutors have followed repeatedly in the Jack Abramoff scandal -- getting guilty pleas from former staffers and cutting cooperation deals with them in order to build cases against their former boss. Look out, Curt! It's amazing that the left-wing conspiracy to bring him down has persisted even after his forced retirement.

Update: Here's the "information," the document that lays out the charges to which Caso is pleading guilty.

Just-departed Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) was cited by the House ethics committee for improperly accepting $23,000 worth of travel last summer, but has so far failed to repay that amount, according to a new statement from the panel.

The statement, released today, contradicts earlier claims by Weldon's lawyer that the committee had "apparently" cleared the congressman of wrongdoing in the affair.

In October, McClatchy Newspapers reported Weldon's personal attorney William Canfield told a report that the ethics committee had "apparently dismissed the matter because he's heard nothing in more than two years."

Yet the statement from the committee's chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and ranking member Howard Berman (D-CA), states, "We therefore concluded in the middle of this year [sic], and advised Representative Weldon, that he was required to repay to the donors certain expenses of that trip, which exceeded $23,000."

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Looks like we may have gotten one last no-no from departing congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA): breaking a House rule to hide news of his investigation in a failing effort to win his election.

We learned in October that Weldon was under federal investigation, via leaks to the press. A few weeks later, Weldon lost his election to Democrat Joe Sestak, due at least in part to news of the investigation.

Weldon has blamed the investigation on a liberal conspiracy, and charged that the FBI -- who, he says, leaked news of the investigation to throw his election -- is "out of control."

Funny thing: it turns out that prior to the election, a grand jury issued a subpoena to then-Rep. Weldon for information relating to the FBI's investigation. House rules dictate that all such subpoenas are to be reported publicly in the Congressional Record -- yet Weldon's was never reported, according to the LATimes this morning.

This news means a couple things: First, Weldon appears to have broken the rules when he found them inconvenient.

It also means that leaks or no leaks, news of the FBI's investigation into Weldon should have come out before the election, so Weldon's concerns about loose lips at the bureau seem misplaced. The Congressional Record is read by many reporters -- particularly its items about subpoenas being issued to lawmakers. It would have been on the wires in a heartbeat.

Now, the LATimes notes that they can't confirm when Weldon received the subpoena. But it's hard to imagine a grand jury issuing such a writ and then waiting weeks to deliver it.

Incoming House intelligence chief Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) found himself in hot water recently for failing to know the basics of Islamic radicalism. But he's got other problems: WarandPiece.com blogger Laura Rozen and other reporters recently noted that Reyes attended a strange meeting with former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) and lying arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, according to former CIA official Bill Murray.

Reyes has simply denied the claim, but Weldon is apparently outraged. And while he may be leaving Congress, he's not one to leave an embattled friend behind. So to Newsmax.com, he fired off a defense of Reyes in his inimitable style:

"Bill Murray's aim was to impugn the reputation of the incoming chairman of the House intelligence committee. . . . This is outrageous. And it is a blatant lie, because Reyes never met with Ghorbanifar in Paris."

That's right -- Weldon doesn't deny the meeting took place, nor that he attended. He's only incensed that Murray insulted Reyes by suggesting he was also there.

Does that remind anybody else of that old Groucho Marx line, I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me for a member?

The FBI is investigating leaks to the press confirming various inquiries into federal lawmakers, the bureau's chief told Congress yesterday.

In particular, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said he was incensed that details of the investigation into departing Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) became public. Reports AP's Lara Jakes Jordan:

Mueller described himself as "exceptionally disappointed, and that is being charitable, in terms of my response upon hearing about the leak."

On Oct. 13, McClatchy Newspapers reported that the FBI was looking into whether Weldon illegally steered $1 million in contracts to his daughter's lobbying firm. Agents followed up with the raid three days later, in part out of fear that evidence would be destroyed after the investigation was exposed.

Officials also confirmed federal investigations of several other House lawmakers that month, including former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., and retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz. All three men have maintained their innocence.

Senators scolded Mueller about the leaks. The committee chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said the disclosures were "just disastrous" for suspects who have not been charged, much less proven guilty.

As Josh mentioned yesterday on TPM, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) -- under federal investigation for the ties between him and his daughter's lobby shop -- has been running an ad in his district asking his constituents for the "benefit of the doubt." You know, just like you would "a friend." The ad ends with: "He's been there for us. Now it's our turn to be there for him."

Showing remarkable restraint, in the ad Weldon refrains from repeating his allegation that the probe is the result of a left-wing conspiracy, although the spot notes that Weldon's "made a few enemies."

Enjoy:

Update: Another recent ad from Weldon has his wife telling voters, "Curt deserves the benefit of the doubt."

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) is back, this time armed with hard evidence that his Democratic opponent is in cahoots with the Justice Department.

Weldon said yesterday that a retired FBI agent had "confirmed to me that a person who works on my opponent's campaign was bragging that the campaign knew three weeks ago" about the FBI's investigation into Weldon and his daughter's company. McClatchy Newspapers revealed the existence of the investigation last Friday, citing "sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry," one of them a law enforcement official.

So who's this retired agent? He's Gregory Auld, a Weldon supporter. Auld says that a man at a local gym, whom he calls "Grumpy," because he doesn't know his name, told him that three weeks ago, a guy in a Sestak T-shirt (Auld doesn't know this guy's name, either) said "something big" would happen to Weldon in three weeks. So Auld decided to check that out. He approached the Sestak-T-shirt-wearing-dude in the gym and asked if he was happy about what happened over the weekend. Auld says the guy shrugged his shoulders and replied, ""We sniffed this out two weeks ago."

The evidence could not be clearer or more damning. Or as Weldon says, "That is what it is."

And for all you doubters who think that a Republican controlled Justice Department wouldn't be involved in a liberal conspiracy to out Weldon, he's got an answer for that, too:

"You all know that bureaucrats don’t change with presidential leadership at the top. You know that, come on," he said. "Bureaucrats are in office from one administration to another, whether it’s in the CIA, or the DIA or the State Department or the Defense Department or the Justice Department, and this obviously did not start at the top. It obviously came from the bureaucracy."

via War & Piece.

The widespread assumption in the media has been that investigators probing Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his daughter's company are concentrating on three- or four year-old crimes, first reported in the Los Angeles Times in 2004. Weldon used that assumption yesterday to buttress his argument that the investigation was an October surprise engineered by conniving liberals.

But the revelation today in the Washington Post that investigators have been gathering evidence on Weldon over at least the past four months -- including wiretaps of "Washington area cellphone numbers" -- suggests that the suspected crimes have been ongoing. And if Karen Weldon's work for her clients over the past couple years has been under the radar, it's by design.

"The investigation focuses on Weldon's support of the Russian-managed Itera International Energy Corp., one of the world's largest oil and gas firms, while that company paid fees to Solutions North America, the company that Karen Weldon and [her partner, Charles Sexton] operate," The Washington Post reported today.

The LA Times broke the story of the 29 year-old Karen Weldon's booming little company back in February 2004. Since then, very little has been heard from her. Around the time that thestory came out, both Weldon and Sexton ceased to register as lobbyists for their clients.

Weldon told The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year that his daughter no longer lobbies. But that doesn't mean her company hasn't been busy. It may even have continued to do business with Itera, the Russian energy giant and focus of the probe, until recently. It's impossible to tell.

There's a glaring question that Weldon and his daughter have yet to answer: if Solutions North America (or Solutions Worldwide, as they seem to go by now) isn't a lobbying firm, what do they actually do? The Philadelphia Inquirer, in their piece today, refers to them as a PR firm. For a PR firm, they keep a remarkably low profile: they have no website.

The FBI investigation into Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) is growing -- but so is the left-wing conspiracy against him, according to the blustery, theory-prone lawmaker.

In a two-and-a-half minute interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian's blog, The Spin, Weldon fleshed out earlier charges that the Democrats are behind the federal probe into his dealings. Agents raided six locations today in connection to the investigation, including his daughter's home.

In addition to blaming the D.C.-based watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and its head, Melanie Sloan (who filed a complaint against Weldon with the FBI -- in 2004), the cabal (according to Weldon) now includes: former President Bill Clinton; former CIA official Mary McCarthy; former senior Justice Department official/9-11 Commission panelist Jamie Gorelick; former national security adviser Sandy Berger ("I know what he stole -- I know why he stole it!"); and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He has the documents to prove it! They're in a secret file, right next to his proof of Iraqi WMD.

Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) daughter had her house raided today by FBI agents, who raided five other locations, all connected to her lobbying activities. The players involved, the favors they won from Weldon, the money changing hands -- it's not a simple story, of course.

But that doesn't explain why, in covering the fiasco, CNN apparently took their cue from Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) trademark bluster and hyperbole. Rather than explain why Weldon's in so much trouble, CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash devoted most of their coverage on the unfolding FBI probe to ask the burning question of whether the investigation is a massive liberal conspiracy against Weldon, as he has charged. (Absent evidence, as is his wont.)

Enjoy:

For more on the source of Weldon's paranoia, see our earlier post.

It's official: the nonprofit watchdog Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington is the new bogeyman for conservatives.

With a small but crucial role in the Foley page scandal earlier this month, the group's visibility skyrocketed. When conservatives discovered CREW had taken $100,000 from billionaire liberal financier George Soros' Open Society Institute, they became a favorite target for anyone seeking to spin a "vast left-wing conspiracy" tale behind the GOP damage from the fiasco. Suddenly, their early possession of the Foley e-mails wasn't just evidence of good investigating; it was proof of a partisan hatchet job.

Now Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), whose daughter's home was raided by federal agents this morning, is charging his woes were engineered by CREW, too. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

At an event earlier today at Philadelphia International Airport to discuss airport noise, Weldon said the investigation is politically motivated - blaming a complaint filed by Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

"She is the only one I know of who went to the Justice Department and asked for an investigation," Weldon said. "I know that because I have her letter."

Sloan did indeed request that the Justice Department investigate Weldon in April*. But as the group's run-in with the FBI on the Foley matter demonstrated, CREW's hardly calling the shots for FBI investigators.

Update*: Actually, that's April, 2004. So apparently it took approximately two and a half years for the liberal conspiracy to take hold.

Just this weekend we learned that the FBI was investigating the relationships between Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his daughter's lobbying clients.

Today, federal agents have raided the home of Karen Weldon, who launched her successful lobbying career at 28, and whose clients reportedly enjoy remarkable attention from her father's office.

Weldon sought to cast doubt on the reports' veracity that there was an investigation. There can be no more doubt.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Federal agents raided the home of the daughter of U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) this morning.

The agents departed Karen Weldon's three-story brick home on Queen Street in Philadelphia with arms loaded with boxes.

A government car pulled into the alley to the back door of the house and loaded boxes into it. Three agents standing in an alley declined to identify themselves.

Over the weekend, a number of papers (McClatchy first among them) reported that the FBI had opened an investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon's relationship to her daughter's lobbying clients -- Karen, who was 28 when she started up her small practice, seemed to trade on her father's position.

Update: In an update of their earlier story, the Inquirer reports that Charlie Sexton, Karen Weldon's lobby partner, was also raided.

The LA Times broke the story back in 2004 that Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) daughter Karen, then in her late twenties, ran a lobbying firm that was raking in approximately $1 million a year - and by some strange coincidence, her three main clients all had developed a relationship with her father, Curt.

Now McClatchy breaks news that the FBI opened an investigation of the matter in recent months. Just out:

The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a federal law enforcement official said....

But McClatchy Newspapers' sources said the FBI only over the last few months obtained evidence suggesting that the congressman may have broken the law. One of the sources, a federal law enforcement official, said that Weldon had not yet been told about the inquiry.

The official said that the FBI recently sought the assistance of federal prosecutors in pressuring an unidentified person to provide evidence about the 59-year-old congressman. The attempt to "squeeze" this individual appeared to be an early step, the two sources said.

It is uncertain whether the current investigation will blossom into a full-blown inquiry that will result in criminal charges being filed. It is possible at this stage of the investigation that nothing will come of it. But the FBI typically does not seek the involvement of the Justice Department unless it finds substance to the evidence it has gathered.

Weldon is locked in a tight re-election race with retired Vice Adm. Joe Sestak.

What do Sens. Conrad Burns (R-MT), Bill Frist (R-TN) and Rick Santorum (R-PA) have in common? (Hint: they're frequent subjects on TPMmuckraker.)

The three men are the most corrupt senators in Congress, according to a new list of the most corrupt lawmakers in Washington.

It's the second year now that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has released its list of 20 muckiest senators and congresspeople.

Although the group names the trio as "most corrupt," it doesn't rank the 17 House members they finger.

The group also identified five "members to watch" -- that is, folks with muck in their past that could be a harbinger of muck to come.

The list, in no particular order, is after the jump.

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Did Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) decide to go find the WMDs in Iraq on his own? And bring Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) along for the ride?

From columnist Tom Ferrick in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

[Dave] Gaubatz, who lives in Dallas, is a former Air Force special investigator who served as a civilian employee in Iraq for a number of months in 2003.

While in Iraq, he acquired what he considered reliable information on the existence of WMD caches in four locations - not old stuff dating from the pre-Gulf War days, but recently produced gas and chemical weapons.

He never could get U.S. military officials to look into the matter. They apparently viewed it as too speculative and too much of a drain on personnel who were, after all, engaged in combat.

But he has persisted - even as evidence mounted that there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq.

Gaubatz said he first contacted Weldon and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R., Mich.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, to share his info and get them to prod the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to do the WMD searches in the locales.

Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon latched onto the idea as a "personal political venture" and discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to Nasiriyah.

Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging by the Euphrates for the cache Gaubatz believed to be there.

He said that Weldon made it clear he didn't want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.

As Gaubatz told me: "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out."

Now, Dave Gaubatz (profiled by The New York Times here) is not some reluctant witness to this aborted adventure. He tells the whole tale on his website, which he started out of frustration after Weldon's adventure never happened. "I then established this website," he writes, "and have informed both Congressmen I will keep updating it until the suspected WMD sites in Iraq are inspected." Gaubatz, remember, says he knows four sites where there are WMD caches.

Gaubatz is the sole source on Weldon's aborted crusade, but there can be little doubt that he had Weldon's ear. After all, this is what Weldon told a reporter in early June:

...Weldon said he knows of four sites in Basra and Nasiriyah that have yet to be searched for biological or chemical weapons. [my emphasis]

"I think the jury is still out on WMD," said Weldon, who also believes Saddam Hussein may have smuggled the weapons to Syria with Russian assistance prior to the March 2003 invasion.

Family members and close "family friends" of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), a powerful member of the Armed Services Committee, share an uncanny ability to get hired by large companies fishing for U.S. defense contracts, the new investigative blog at Harper's magazine reports. His daughters Kim and Karen, and "family friend" Cecelia Grimes, have all landed jobs or contracts with Boeing, two divisions of Italian industrial firm Finmeccanica, as well as other firms. Company reps assured Harper's that their hires' connection to the congressman was sheer coincidence.

He just gets classier and classier.

Yesterday, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) suggested that his opponent, Joe Sestak, was wrong to keep his daughter in a Washington, D.C. hospital during her cancer treatment - he should have brought her to a hospital in Pennsylvania, he said.

After a firestorm of criticism, Weldon's campaign chairman, Michael V. Puppio Jr., offered an explanation today... Joe Sestak tricked Weldon into talking about it:

But Puppio insisted that Weldon did not intend to make an issue of where Alexandra Sestak was treated.

"Any discussion of Mr. Sestak's daughter was initiated by the Sestak campaign," Puppio said.

Read the article - see how Weldon was so craftily and despicably lured in to seeming like a jerk.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) thinks it was inappropriate for his opponent to bring his daughter to Washington so she could receive cancer treatments.

But it was okay for Weldon to bring his daughter to Washington to make money off her dad? Perhaps now is a good time to remind everyone of Weldon's special relationship with his daughter.

The LA Times broke the story back in 2004 that Weldon's daughter Karen, then in her late twenties, ran a lobbying firm that was raking in approximately $1 million a year - and by some strange coincidence, her three main clients all had developed a relationship with her father, Curt.

The clients? There was:

-- "a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic." Weldon and his daughter worked, without any apparent success, to get them visas.

-- a Russian aerospace manufacturer who paid Karen Weldon's firm $20,000 per month to promote its technologies, which included its "flying saucer." Her firm also was to get " a 10 percent finder's fee if the company '[struck] a deal from a lead supplied'" by them. That little bonus had to be taken out of the subsequent contract, however, when they realized that it was illegal for a lobbyist to take a cut of a government contract. Weldon worked hard to win a contract for the firm.

-- a $500,000/year contract from a Russian natural gas company called Itera International Energy Corp. to "'create good public relations.'" She won the contract shortly before her father held a dinner at the Library Congress to honor the company's chairman.

Weldon needs to search harder for that moral high ground.