Can we stroll down memory lane for a second? Remember when Paul and I offered a grand unified theory of President Bush's warrantless surveillance efforts? Or when I brought you General Petraeus' own methodology for tabulating sectarian killings? How about the time I hung around the Rayburn building when Blackwater's Erik Prince smirked his way through a House oversight hearing? Those times I embarrassed myself playing TV reporter? And, hey, Cookie Krongard -- that was some fun, right?

Well, I'm getting wistful because today's my last day at TPM. As great as working here has been -- more on that after Boyz II Men do their thing -- I'm transferring over to The Washington Independent, a forthcoming online experiment designed to shift the tectonic plates of investigative reporting. We launch on January 28 on washingtonindependent.com, and I hope you'll check it out. (You might find some old friends there, too.) Until then, I'm having some fun with Jonah Goldberg's brilliant book on my personal blog, if you're interested.

Read more »

Even after Duke Cunningham pled guilty to accepting millions in bribes, he'd still tried to cast himself as somehow less than thoroughly greedy and corrupt. He'd accepted gifts from defense contractors, yes, and sure, he'd been instrumental in procuring tens of millions in government contracts for them, but that doesn't mean they were bribes.

Well, a year in prison seems to have clarified things for Cunningham. Investigators sat down with him in February of this year, and as the FBI's summary, obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune, shows, Cunningham was straightforward about the extent of his corruption: He asked for, got, and worked to conceal bribes.

That's bad news for Brent Wilkes, who's been indicted for bribing Cunningham. Wilkes has gamely argued that he didn't bribe Cunningham, so much as play the game the way it has to be played. "Transactional lobbying," is Wilkes' name for it, and that's apparently what he plans to argue to a jury -- that he was extorted, that he was a victim of Washington's culture.

Unfortunately for Wilkes, Cunningham says the two went to an awful lot of trouble to conceal their activity. As the Union-Trib points out, that means Cunningham will likely make an appearance at Wilkes' trial as an unfriendly witness. Cunningham also confirms that Wilkes procured prostitutes for the both of them during a trip to Hawaii, something that Wilkes has denied (Cunningham says that Wilkes took the “younger and cuter” one for himself).

Read more »

It wasn't immediately apparent from the stories yesterday, but Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) showed great faith in the Fourth Estate yesterday, admitting to being a customer of the D.C. madam as a sort of preemptive measure. The madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, released her business' phone records to the press last week and uploaded the records to her website (currently down) yesterday. Apparently Vitter thought it was just a matter of time before some muckraker found him out.

Update: Actually, Hustler Magazine says it was behind Vitter's sudden statement.

Vitter's statement only admits obliquely that Vitter's number was on one of Palfrey's old lists. The AP's New Orleans' bureau apparently received the statement yesterday, and then spent some time trying to confirm its authenticity. "Vitter's spokesman, Joel Digrado, confirmed the statement Monday evening in an e-mail to The Associated Press," according to an early version of the wire story.

No one seems to know when (or how often) Vitter used the service; all his statement says is that it was "prior to his running for the U.S. Senate" in 2004. He'd been a congressman since 1999, and Palfrey's records date back to 1996. The AP still hadn't seen the records as of last night, since reporters were "unable to connect to Palfrey's website."

The records contain thousands upon thousands of numbers without names. Most of the recent records, dating from 2002 to 2006, were released to ABC News back in March; a team of researchers set to matching the numbers to names. Jeff Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said that they had not found Vitter's number in those records. "With the release of a full ten years of records, it seems clear that his number came up in one of the records we did not have access to," he told me.

As for now, the race is on for who can pile up the most vividly hypocritical quote from the family values (or as he put it, "Louisiana values") conservative. In the running: Sen. Vitter maligning the "Hollywood left" for violating the "sanctity of marriage," and Vitter arguing that President Clinton should step down for his extramarital affair (Vitter, by the by, replaced Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) after the speaker was forced to step down because of an affair). There are, you can be sure, many more. Glenn Greenwald has a rundown here.

Update: The prevailing quote of the day seems to be this one:

In 2000, Vitter was included in a Newhouse News Service story about the strain of congressional careers on families.

His wife, Wendy, was asked by the Newhouse reporter: If her husband were as unfaithful as Livingston or former President Bill Clinton, would she be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton?

“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

“I think fear is a very good motivating factor in a marriage,” she added. “Don’t put fear down.”

Just when D.C.'s johns got comfortable again.

Today, a federal judge denied the government's attempts to keep Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. madam, from disseminating her business' phone records. Now she's free to do what she will with them. The government sought a restraining order on Palfrey back in March, too late to stop her from giving most of her records (Palfrey says it was about 80% of years 2002 to 2006) to ABC News, which busily matched thousands of numbers to names. Those records led to Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias' resignation. Brian Ross, during ABC's 20/20 report on Palfrey's service, said that there were plenty of high-profile D.C. types on the lists -- numbers of "Georgetown mansions and prominent CEOs, officials at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and lobbyists both Republican and Democratic" -- but that there were no members of Congress or White House officials that they could find. Maybe in that remaining 20%?

OK, so you knew Duke Cunningham was dirty, but you didn't know that he was this dirty.

The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught, the book about Cunningham by the reporters who brought him down, hits stores this coming Monday. We here at TPM were lucky enough to get an advance copy and have been tearing through it.

The book is the Cunningham scandal from A to Z -- following from Duke's childhood to his guilty plea, and following the (alleged) bribes from Brent Wilkes' or Mitchell Wade's pocket to the harassed contracting officer in the Pentagon who was to make sure that the contractors got their money. And the book is bursting with details, a number of them new and unforgettable.

Take, for instance, the following scene aboard Duke's yacht, the Duke-Stir. It has a way of seizing hold of your imagination and not letting go, no matter how very, very hard you try:

...even Wilkes drew a line on what he would do for the congressman. For one thing, Wilkes was totally disgusted by the hot tub Cunningham put on the boat's deck during the autumn and winter. What repelled Wilkes -- and others invited to the parties -- was both the water Cunningham put in the hot tub and the congressman's penchant for using it while naked, even if everybody else at the party was clothed. Cunningham used water siphoned directly from the polluted Potomac River and never changed it out during the season. "Wilkes thought it was unbelievably dirty and joked if you got in there it would leave a dark water line on your chest," said one person familiar with the parties. "The water was so gross that very few people were willing to get into the hot tub other than Duke and his paramour." That was a reference to Cunningham's most frequently seen girlfriend, a flight attendant who lived in Maryland.

One of these parties started at the Capital Grille with Cunningham ordering his usual filet mignon -- very well done -- with iceberg lettuce salad and White Oak. Wilkes used the dinner to update Cunningham on the appropriations he wanted. Cunningham then took the whole group back to the boat where they drank more wine, sitting on white leather sofas while Cunningham told more war stories. Cunningham then took his clothes off and invited all to join him in the polluted hot tub that was hidden from the neighbors by a white tarp. There were no takers.

You can read an interview with Marcus Stern, one of the book's authors, here.

What do you do if you're competing for a transportation contract with the Department of Homeland Security but don't actually own any buses? Get Duke Cunningham.

From The Blotter:

The Department of Homeland Security violated government regulations by awarding a multi-million-dollar contract to a limousine company with ties to the Duke Cunningham scandal, a recent investigation concluded....

What's more, the inspector general's report determined that DHS failed to conduct due diligence on Shirlington to ensure they could fulfill the terms of the contract, which required the company to run several shuttle buses for DHS employees and provide drivers and dispatchers for a fleet of government cars.

Shortly after Shirlington got the contract, it told DHS it did not have buses for the agency, according to the report. It said it did not have the money to buy new buses and asked for a cash advance from the department to help buy new ones, investigators found.

DHS declined the request. It took several weeks for Shirlington to lease new buses to ferry department employees to and from work, according to the report.

Speaking outside after a court hearing this morning, the D.C. Madam, Jeane Palfrey, says she expects ABC News to track down more clients of her firm, who she says will serve as "potential witnesses for my defense."

So who's up next? ABC News -- where Brian Ross and TPM alum Justin Rood are on the case -- has Palfrey's phone records for the past four years. This morning, they report that "also on Palfrey's list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials."

Expect some of that to come out this Friday, during Palfrey's star turn on 20/20.

From Ken Silverstein over at Harper's:

I recently received an advance copy of Seth Hettena's Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, History's Most Corrupt Congressman, which will be published this July and which I highly recommend. In addition to being a terrific piece of political reporting, the book is filled with juicy details concerning the seamier side of the Cunningham affair, otherwise known as “Hookergate.”

I was particularly interested in stories Hettena unearthed about Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, whom former CIA director Porter Goss had named as executive director, the agency's number-three official. Foggo resigned last year not long after FBI agents raided his home and office. The Feds suspected that Foggo, who was later indicted, had funneled CIA contracts to his long-time friend Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor who is accused of bribing Cunningham with money and prostitutes.

Some of the more sensational stories in Hettena's book—and he has on-the-record sources—got me thinking. First, didn't Foggo's frequent indiscretions (for example, flashing his agency ID to jump the line at a strip club) raise red flags about his character? Second, wasn't Foggo's outlandish sexual behavior—like, say, publicly performing oral sex on a hooker (hired by Wilkes) at his own bachelor party—just the sort of thing that makes intelligence officials potentially vulnerable to blackmail by a hostile spy service? Third, might it be possible to cynically point to such revelations and use them as a hook for a blog item that combines sex and espionage?

The answers, you won't be surprised to find out, are yes, yes, and yes.

Finally, we hear from Christopher Baker of Shirlington Limousine. Now that his champion Duke Cunningham's in the slammer, he's lost his contract with the Department of Homeland Security, and he's not happy about it.

And in the interview, he finally airs his views on the characters in the Cunningham saga. Brent Wilkes? He's a nice, upstanding guy. But Mitch Wade? He's got a "bad spirit."

But above all, he wants the world to know that he's no pimp. Just bad luck with customers.

From The Hill:

A Washington transportation company that was questioned in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham investigation is on the verge of losing its contract with the Department of Homeland Security, but has gone to federal court to keep it.

Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc. filed a lawsuit last week accusing the department of “caving” to “political pressures” surrounding the Cunningham case by illegally changing its shuttle-services contract to exclude Shirlington....

In an interview, Baker said he did nothing wrong in his interaction with Cunningham, Wilkes and Wade, or in his performance of the Homeland Security contract. He said he became a scapegoat in the Cunningham scandal and was a convenient target for Democrats in election-year politics.

“It’s like someone has an axe to grind and they’re just going to make it happen,” Baker said. “I feel like one of the Rutgers girls. All this happens, and now I’m treated like I’m a pimp.”

Baker, who testified before a grand jury in the Cunningham case, said he started driving Wilkes in 1994. He said he drove Cunningham on occasion, but that he usually saw Cunningham driving himself in a green sport-utility vehicle.

Most of the time, he said, “I saw Mr. Cunningham in his green truck. On certain occasions I drove him to the Hill or to his apartment. Duke Cunningham was a self-sufficient gentleman. He liked to drive himself.”

He said he believes Cunningham and Wilkes started off as decent men steered into making mistakes.

“I believe Duke Cunningham to be a good man who made stupid decisions,” he said. “He has been a supporter of me as an African-American businessman.”

Of Wilkes, he said, “He was a winer and a diner. He liked to take people to eat. If a young lady gets in the car, or he asks us to pick up a young lady, we don’t know who it is. We’re drivers.”

As for any prostitution occurring, he said, “It might have happened. I don’t know anything about it. And from driving Brent Wilkes, I question it happening.”

He said he continues to believe that Wilkes was a decent person until he got involved with Wade.

“Brent Wilkes has morals,” Baker said. “He crossed his morals getting involved with Mitch Wade. Mitch Wade had a bad spirit.”

I'm not exactly sure what I imagined, but it wasn't this.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a profile yesterday of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. madam who has threatened to go public with her high-flying clients' names. Apparently Palfrey ran her business from her home in California, where she kept what you might call a low profile:

Palfrey has lived in Vallejo since 1991, when she purchased her house. Neighbors described her as a recluse who kept her blinds closed and came outside only to feed other people's cats...

The only real communication anyone in the neighborhood had with her was when she called the police and fire departments on her next-door neighbor, Michelle Gandley, who had put out tiki lamps for a Hawaiian luau party....

Palfrey's other house is adjacent to a country club and golf course in Escondido and is for sale for $439,000. Her neighbors there also described her as reclusive and unfriendly.

"I don't think she is a people person," said Lois Weldon, who lives nearby.

Earlier today, D.C.-area madam Jeane Palfrey held a press conference after her status hearing. CNN was there:

As CNN notes, the government is seeking a gag order against Palfrey to prevent her from releasing information about her clients.

Since the government seized her assets, Palfrey has floated the idea of selling off her business' phone records to fund her defense.

From Roll Call's Heard on the HIll column (sub. req.):

The lawyer representing the alleged madam of a prostitution ring that operated in D.C. for 13 years says it’s a “mathematical certainty” his client’s not-so-little black book includes some of Roll Call’s readers, i.e., power players in and around Congress.

Attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley, who is representing accused madam Jeane Palfrey, tells HOH Palfrey hasn’t told him if the client list includes lawmakers. “But it’s a pretty good bet,” Sibley said.

Palfrey, who denies her “adult fantasy firm” was illegal, has only generated a few thousand dollars from donations to her Web site, www.deborahjeanepalfrey.com, Sibley said, so she still is considering selling records of her decade-plus operation to pay her legal bills, which likely will run well into six figures.

Palfrey is expected to be arraigned Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The quality of the escorts would attract a high-quality clientele,” Sibley said, explaining his certainty that the list includes droppable-in-Washington names. Other factors pointing to lobbyists, lawmakers and other bigwigs? “The cost and the location of the meetings — they were always in upscale hotels or in upscale parts of D.C., Maryland and Virginia.”

Naughty boldfacers on the list have plenty to be nervous about. Sibley said he isn’t sure when his client will decide what to do with her records. But for now, selling them “seems to be her only option,” he said.

As we reported before, Palfrey's lawyer told us that the madam herself "will cooperate with whoever acquires the information to supplement it with other information at her disposal."

Back in October, the feds busted a long-time prostitution service in the Washington, D.C. area. The madam, Jean Palfrey, soon caught attention by telling a reporter from the Smoking Gun that they must be going after her as part of a larger investigation into "some Duke Cunningham-type bigwig client that got caught up in something[.]"

As we noted back in December, Palfrey hasn't actually named a member of Congress. But she seems determined to make it easier for those who want to find out. Though her firm's policy was that "no record is a good record!!" she's now apparently mulling selling her phone records from the last thirteen years to raise funds for her defense.

Palfrey, whose assets were seized by the IRS back in October, has launched a website, deborahjeanepalfrey.com, to solicit contributions. But if that doesn't bring in enough, "consideration is being given to selling the entire 46 pounds of detailed and itemized phone records for the 13 year period, to raise the requisite defense funds," according to the website.

My request for comment from her lawyer, Montgomery Sibley, who's listed as the contact for the site, wasn't immediately returned.

Update: Her lawyer responds: "The records identify the telephone number of the customer. Since 2000, the customers and the independent contractor escorts of the service almost exclusively used their personal cellphones, their identifying information is readily and publicly available. Jeane will cooperate with whoever acquires the information to supplement it with other information at her disposal."

OK, you knew they'd make an appearance.

Among the staggering laundry list of bribes of ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) listed in the second indictment issued today, there's one that's bound to get a lot of ink.

The indictment alleges that, during a trip to Hawaii, Wilkes paid for a prostitute for Cunningham. I'll just excerpt the indictment here, since it displays the prosecutors' fetish for detail (no bribe goes undescribed):

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;

...and the next day, after a catered breakfast, a cocktail party, a lavish dinner...

On or about August 16, 2003, at approximately 11:00 p.m., [Wilkes] arranged to have Prostitute "A" and Prostitute "C" available for himself and [Cunningham]. Pursuant to Cunningham's request, Wilkes arranged for the Congressman to get a different prostitute for the second evening;

On or about August 16, 2003, at approximately 11:00 p.m., Prostitutes "A" and "C" and their "driver" arrived at the Hapuna Suite. Persuant to [Wilkes'] instructions, his employee paid the driver $600 in cash and escorted Prostitute "C" (who had not previously been to the suite) to [Cunningham's] room. At apprroximately midnight, Wilkes again tipped Prostitute "A" $500 for the services;

Although Shirlington Limousine does make an appearance in the indictment, it's not connected to prostitution -- rather, it's just mentioned that Wilkes paid Shirlington to ferry Cunningham around Washington, DC.

Update: CREW has uploaded a copy of the indictment here (pdf).

Dusty Foggo, while he was a contracting officer at the CIA, helped his best friend Brent Wilkes land multimillion dollar contracts with the agency, and in return....?

Well, Foggo had a job waiting for him at Wilkes' headquarters. But that wasn't all.

Here's our preliminary accounting of all the goodies Brent Wilkes threw Dusty Foggo's way, while he was a contracting officer at the CIA, all culled from the indictment:

August 3, 2003 - Wilkes paid for Foggo and family to join Wilkes and family on a vacation to Scotland - $12,000 in private jets, $4,000 in helicopter ride to a round of golf at Carnoustie, $44,000 for a stay at Pitcastle estate, which included trout fishing on hill lochs, salmon fishing on the River Tay, clay-pigeon shooting, archery, and a seven-person staff

December 27, 2003 - Foggo joined Wilkes on a vacation to the "Sullivan Estates" in Haleiwa, Hawaii, for which Wilkes paid approximately $32,000

January 28, 2004 - Wilkes treated Foggo to a dinner at the Capital Grille, for which Wilkes paid $1,195.96, of which Foggo's pro-rata share was approximately $398.65

November 20, 2004 - Wilkes treated Foggo to a meal at the Serbian crown restaurant, for which Wilkes paid $773.65, of which Foggo's pro rate share was approximately $257,88

November 20,2004 - Wilkes gave Foggo an Ellie Bleu cigar humidor, which Wilkes Subordinate X had purchased for $2,307.38 at Wilkes' direction

November 21, 2004 - Wilkes treated Foggo to a meal at the Capital Grille in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, for which Wilkes paid $712.15, of which Foggo's pro rata share was approximately $237.38

November 22, 2004 - Wilkes treated Foggo to a meal at Ruth's Chris Steak House in Fairfax, Virginia, for which Wilkes paid $902.33, of which Foggo's pro rata share was approximately $225.58

The prosecutors have unleashed a veritable flood of muck on Brent Wilkes today. In addition to the indictment based on his corrupt doings with CIA buddy Dusty Foggo, prosecutors have also unleashed a 42-page indictment on his extensive activities persuading Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) and others (and yes, Shirlington Limousine makes an appearance).

I haven't even gotten my hands dirty with that one yet, but this bit jumped out at me: in March, 1999, according to the indictment, Wilkes, mad that he wasn't getting promptly paid for a Department of Defense contract, "attempted to intimidate" a DoD program manager in Panama City by "tellling him that people disappear in Panama all the time and never make it back home."

Charming.

We'll try and get a copy of the indictment up as soon as possible.

Much has been made of the Republicans' gambit of passing the responsibility of several huge spending bills to the Democratic Congress, hoping to gum up the legislative works, but what of all those scandals they're passing along?

At the House Appropriations Committee, the new chairman, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), had no sooner sat down and given his gavel a couple of test whacks before he was handed a subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego demanding thousands of documents by January 11th. Even though prosecutors nailed Duke Cunningham, they continue to pursue the hanging threads of the investigation -- namely whether the defense contractors who bribed him had their hooks into other lawmakers and/or staffers. Since Duke's bad acts stretch back to at least 2000, it's a giant headache.

Obey is grumpy about it:

“To ask us to produce that stuff by [Jan. 11] is ridiculous given the fact that we haven’t taken over yet and every record that we’re talking about is a Republican record so I have no idea what the documents are and it’s a Republican problem.... We will try to cooperate, but it’s a Republican problem.”

As Roll Call notes (sub. req.), the subpoenas will likely ignite another legal battle (round one was over the FBI's raid of Rep. William Jefferson's (D-LA) office, a battle that's still raging) between Congress and the Justice Department, as they wrangle over which documents are constitutionally protected.

Ten months into his sentence, ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) is getting some new digs:

Imprisoned former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham will soon have a new address ---- a work camp just outside Tucson, Ariz.

The camp is 410 miles from San Diego, a six-hour drive that will allow the former Republican lawmaker's friends and family members to more easily visit him as he serves an eight-year sentence for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes.

Meanwhile, the investigation presses on, as prosecutors continue to examine whether the defense contractors who bribed Cunningham had similar success with others:

Federal prosecutors in San Diego have subpoenaed documents from three House committees as part of an investigation into special-interest earmarks in spending bills.

The demand ratchets up an investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego into contracts awarded by the Defense Department and other agencies. The probe stems from the bribery case against Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe), who pleaded guilty and resigned in 2005.

The scope of the investigation is unclear, although the request for documents is considered unusually broad....

The subpoenas went to the armed services, appropriations and intelligence committees, whose Republican chairmen reported the subpoenas to outgoing House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in letters dated two weeks ago....

The subpoenas are an escalation of a nine-month tug-of-war between the Justice Department and House Republicans. Prosecutors had asked the committees to turn over the information voluntarily.

For the last couple months a great little story has been bubbling on a back burner, threatening to burst into a classic D.C. potboiler: the feds busted a long-time prostitution service operating in the Washington, D.C. area, with the suggestion of ties to lawmakers.

Indeed, it was the madam herself who told a reporter from the Smoking Gun Web site that the Feds must be going after her as part of a larger investigation into "some Duke Cunningham-type bigwig client that got caught up in something[.]"

Our ears perked up. Has our long-lost Duke-connected hooker arrived? Alas, no hard evidence emerged. The madam, Deborah Palfrey, said she never kept records of clients and commanded her employees to destroy records within hours of a rendezvous. And Palfrey hasn't offer up any names from memory.

But now, juicy tidbits from a new 19-page court filing make the story even more tantalizing, with excerpts from the madam's in-house newsletter and more. (We've got the whole filing for your enjoyment, right here.)

We're only lacking one thing: the name of a congressman who used the service.

Read more »

Associated Press reports:

The Homeland Security Department notified Shirlington Limousine in recent weeks that it intended to exercise an option to extend its contract for transporting department employees around the Washington area, department spokesman Russ Knocke said.

The $21 million contract went into effect Oct. 27, 2005, with annual options for five years. . . .

Shirlington, of Arlington, Va., is part of a federal investigation into whether a defense contractor provided disgraced former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California with prostitutes and limos. Cunningham is serving jail time for taking bribes from defense contractors. Shirlington's president, Christopher Baker, has appeared before a grand jury in San Diego as part of the ongoing investigation.

A House Homeland Security subcommittee held a hearing over the summer on how Shirlington got two Homeland Security contracts, including the one last year, despite a history of problems.

TPMm readers may recall that before he was caught and sent to jail, Duke Cunningham wrote a letter of recommendation to DHS on behalf of Shirlington.

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.

The second-in-command to an admitted briber of Duke Cunningham is facing a federal inquiry for possibly improper campaign contributions, according to a new report.

Retired three-star general James King, top deputy to Duke briber Mitchell Wade, is being investigated by the Federal Election Commission for $12,000 in what appear to be "straw" campaign donations to congressional campaigns, U.S. News and World Report says.

The potentially illegal contributions -- all made to lawmakers representing districts of strategic importance to King's company -- were first reported by TPMmuckraker.

King is now chief of Athena Innovative Solutions, renamed from MZM Inc. when Wade pleaded guilty and sold the company. For a time, King worked as a top aide to Michael V. Hayden, then chief of the National Security Agency, on contract from MZM. Hayden is now director of the CIA.

The U.S. News piece is lengthy, and adds even more color to the established portrait of Mitchell Wade as corrupt, megalomaniacal, vengeful and petty. It also has some good details on King, too. For instance, the magazine reports that one of King's favorite aphorisms is, 'There are no lies; the truth keeps changing.'

Well, maybe not exactly. But they screwed up a field trip to Gettysburg for some of the Pentagon's leaders-in-training last year.

Surely you recall Shirlington Limo -- the company, run by an ex-con, who allegedly ferried former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) and prostitutes to parties and trysts at D.C.'s Watergate hotel and elsewhere.

In 2004, Cunningham wrote the company a letter of recommendation to the Homeland Security Department, and the company later won curious multi-million-dollar contracts to transport the agency's top officials and staff in limos and shuttle buses.

Now, it turns out they had contracts with the Pentagon, too. At least, with a tendril of it: the National Defense University. (Thanks to TPMm Reader CP for the tip.)

Dave Thomas -- not the deceased founder of Wendy's, but a spokesman for NDU, which educates military leadership -- confirmed that two colleges within the university hired Shirlington Limo. And boy, did they learn their lesson.

Read more »