The federal investigation of former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) has nabbed another one.

Pleading guilty in federal court today was Cecelia Grimes, Weldon's very good friend and a former lobbyist.

Grimes admitted to destruction of evidence and could face up to 20 years in prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The case goes back to October 2006, just after the feds began investigating Weldon for alleged nepotism, particularly concerning the lucrative lobbying contracts awarded to his inexperienced daughter.

Grimes admitted today that just a few days after the feds served her with a subpoena, she stuffed a stack of documents into a trash bag and put it on the curb outside her home for pick up. The FBI later retreived those documents, which included records of her travel plans and Weldon's campaign.

She also told a federal judge that she threw her Blackberry into a trash can at a fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania so the FBI could not recover the emails stored on it.

The court documents refer to Weldon only as "Representative A."

Weldon's chief of staff pleaded guilty last year

This federal investigation probably contributed to Weldon's failure to win reelection in 2006, But so far, none of this seems to be getting in the way of Weldon's new career as an international arms dealer.

Wouldn't it be great if we could all take long, leisurely European vacations with our whole extended family -- and have the $23,000 tab paid for by Russian and Eastern European business moguls?

Unfortunately, it seems that former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) is among the only ones who actually gets to do that.

Ken Silverstein over at Harper's digs into the details of Weldon's January 2007 trip with ten family members (including his son's girlfriend and his daughter's boyfriend). They stopped in Moscow and Vienna (not cheap cities).

We're not sure the trip has anything to do with Weldon's new arms trafficking business. But there's a couple of interesting things to point out.

First, Weldon asked the notoriously lax House ethics committee for formal permission to take the trip before he went. He offered the lame explanation that the Russians and Serbs were paying for his trip because he was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and it had nothing to do with his House seat.

But when he got the sense the committee wasn't buying that argument, he "withdrew" his request for a waiver on the gift rules.

In other words: Weldon apparently didn't get the answer he wanted, so he simply ignored the committee's advice and ethics rules and went anyway, with the tab being picked up by outside sponsors.

And here's another key aspect of the trip: the Serbian family who paid for part of it was the Karic Group, run by the Karic family, which is barred from entering the U.S. due to its close ties with the warmongering Milosevic regime.

That's the same Serbian group who just a few months later hired Weldon's inexperienced 29-year-old daughter to lobby for then to the tune of $240,000 a year.

The Weldon family sure is living the American dream.

Cecelia Grimes, the lobbyist and "very good friend" of former Rep. Curt Weldon, has been charged with destroying evidence relating to the federal investigation of the former Pennsylvania congressman.

According to the court documents filed today, Grimes "placed her Blackberry device in a trash can near an Arby's restaurant in Southeastern Pennsylvania. . . for the purpose of keeping the FBI from reviewing certain of her emails."

But apparently Grimes creative disposal of evidence only extended to fast-food restaurants.

She also tossed the grand-jury subpoenas, Amtrak receipts, American airline boarding passes, and fourteen RSVP cards for a dinner honoring Weldon, which call for responses to be sent to Grimes. The FBI "surreptitiously retrieved" the garbage bags containing the documents from the trash cans next to Grimes' house.

[Late Update]: In October, 2006, it was revealed that Weldon was under federal investigation for his alleged nepotism activities, notably his lucrative arrangements for his daughter. He lost re-election that November, and has since been working as a Chief Strategic Officer for Defense Solutions-- an organization that has also come under media scrutiny for its shady arms deals.

Cecelia Grimes has been tied to Curt Weldon's investigation before. Back in 2004, Ken Silverstein reported that Curt's family had an uncanny ability to get hired by large defense companies.

In January 2006, Silverstein reported that Weldon's ties also seemed to extend to more than just family-- also helping, his close friend Cecelia Grimes. Grimes was realtor turned lobbyist at Grimes and Young, a small lobbyist firm comprised of only herself and Cynthia Young. Curiously, Young is the daughter-in-law of Rep. Bill Young (R-FL).

According to Silverstein's piece, Grimes was retained by Oto Melara, a subsidary of an Italian defense firm with a $20,000 annual retainer. Weldon had previously championed the causes of Finmeccanica, Oto Merelara's parent company, in legislation before the House Armed Services Committee, on which he used to be vice-chair.

We've previously followed some of Sharon Weinberger's coverage at Wired on former Representative Curt Weldon's ties to shady arms-dealings. Weldon, a defeated Republican from Pennsylvania was employed as Chief Strategic Officer for Defense Solutions after losing his election in November 2006.

Lost in the holiday weekend traffic was a Wired story on the Pennsylvania based arm dealer's multiple contracts, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to corner the supplier market from Eastern Bloc countries to to Iraq. The deals, which the magazine describes as "often legally murky" were brokered by Weldon, who is currently under investigation by the FBI for corruption stemming from his work in Congress.

In an update yesterday, Weinberger expanded on Defense Solution's claim that they had an exclusive deal with Ukraine to supply their armored vehicles to Iraq. The boast was bolstered by a signed letter from Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andri Veselovsky, to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Stephan Minikes.

Defense Solution's CEO, Tim Ringgold, bandied the letter about as proof of their relationship -- that is until Veselovsky told Wired the letter was a fake, and that it wasn't his signature. Now Ringgold seems to be taking it all back.

In an update on Weinberger's Wired blog DANGER ROOM:

Timothy Ringgold, the CEO of Defense Solutions wrote DANGER ROOM to express some objections with this post. His letter, with our answers, follows......

Ringgold writes: Your article of July 7, 2008 11:07 a.m. has a number of significant inaccuracies, not he least of which deals with your allegation of forgery:
As I informed you during our phone conversation, I have no knowledge of a "letter" from Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister, but I am aware of an email dated February 25, 2008 received from the Deputy Foreign Minister. Since I spoke with the Deputy Foreign Minister after receiving it, I think it safe to conclude the email was genuine.
[DR: The forgery allegation is not ours; it is Veselovsky's. He stated quite clearly it is not his signature on the letter. When asked about the Veselovsky letter during the interview, Ringgold acknowledged it, until he was told the Veselovsky denied signing it.]