Looks like the price that Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who last year was identified as a client of the "DC Madam," the late Deborah Palfrey, will be paying for his transgression just got even steeper. The Hill reports that, according to a draft opinion released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Vitter won't be able to use campaign funds to pay over $160,000 in legal fees associated with the scandal.

Vitter has so far accumulated over $200,000 in legal bills. The FEC opinion allows him to use campaign funds to pay for only $31,000 of that figure -- the amount related to a Senate ethics committee probe. It does not allow him to tap his campaign coffers to pay for hiring a lawyer to help quash a subpoena issued by Palfrey's defense, or to pay for monitoring Palfrey's criminal proceedings.

Vitter, who is up for re-election in 2010, admitted last year that he had been a client of Palfrey's firm, and apologized for "a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible." He has already spent $70,000 of his own money on his Palfrey-related legal expenses.

From Fox News:

Police say DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey has committed suicide in Florida.

Police were called to the home of Palfrey's mother on Thursday to investigate the suicide.

Palfrey was convicted on all counts a couple of weeks ago.

Not so fantastic news for the purveyor of a legitimate "fantasy sex" operation.

It looks like the prosecution's "long, sad parade of former prostitutes" did its work. Deborah Jeane Palfrey was convicted on a slate of racketeering and money laundering charges related to running the service.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), your prayers have been answered! The D.C. Madam's attorney tells the AP that he will not be calling her most famous former client as a witness.

Of course, Vitter's attorney made it as clear as he could that Vitter would not be a helpful witness for the former madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Palfrey's defense is that she was running a legitimate "fantasy sex" operation from her laundry room in California. Vitter's attorney said his client would plead the Fifth if called; not a helpful spectacle for the madam's case.

If Vitter and his escort didn't restrain themselves to fantasy, they weren't alone. The prosecution has called more than a dozen of Palfrey's former escorts to testify, and it hasn't been pretty. From The Washington Post:

The jurors have watched a procession of scared, mortified ex-prostitutes (13 so far) reluctantly take the witness stand, forced to reveal their secret former lives in intermittently graphic detail -- a past each clearly hoped was buried forever. Most testified that they grew weary of the business in less than a year and quit.

At $250 for 60 minutes or so, these weren't high-priced call girls, it turns out. They didn't measure up in appearance to the elites in the business. As the women tell it, Palfrey's niche was a middle-of-the-road, largely suburban clientele -- a long way up from the streetwalker trade, but well south of Emperors Club VIP, the four-figure-per-hour call girl outfit that last month proved the undoing of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer....

[T]he trial has been just a long, sad parade of former prostitutes, some in wigs provided by the government, a feeble disguise, a few dabbing tears on the witness stand.

The Post offers some snippets of testimony to convey the tone of things:

Prosecutor: "Of those 80 appointments, approximately how many times did you have sex?"

Ex-call girl: "Seventy-nine. . . . All except the gentleman who was a quadriplegic."

and:

Defense attorney: "Ma'am, you ultimately decided that this wasn't for you, right? . . . I believe you were tired of lying to your boyfriend, correct?"

Ex-call girl: "Yes."

Defense attorney: "And you're not particularly happy to be here, are you, ma'am?"

Ex-call girl: "Who would be?"

Amen to that, eh, Sen. Vitter?

You remember the D.C. Madam, the not-a-people-person who ran a high-end escort service out of her laundry room in California.

Well, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) certainly does, and in a hearing Friday, Vitter's lawyer was trying his best to keep the senator from being called at Deborah Jeane Palfrey's upcoming trial. Palfrey, who has pleaded not guilty and says that she was running a legitimate "fantasy sex" operation, has subpoenaed Vitter, apparently with the idea that Vitter would testify that no, there was no sex, only fantasy.

But for some reason, Vitter seems reluctant. From The Times-Picayune:

[Lawyer Henry Asbill], who represented Vitter in some earlier motions related to the Palfrey case, told [Judge James] Robertson that the defense has a responsibility to establish that it has a valid legal reason to call his client other than to simply "harass and embarrass him." He also said that it's hard to imagine a legitimate reason to call him as a witness given that the escort service had hundreds, if not thousands of customers, and the defense hasn't even spoken to his client about whether he would have anything to say that would assist its case.

Preston Burton, Palfrey's attorney, told Judge Robertson that he shouldn't be required to reveal his reasons for putting people on his witness list because it would disclose his defense strategy to prosecutors.

The judge declined Asbill's suggestion that he hold a hearing in chambers, and declined to nullify the subpoena. Robertson said he didn't know the name of Asbill's client and "didn't want to know."

Vitter narrowly avoided testifying earlier in the case at a pretrial hearing in November. That hearing was mercifully canceled.

Asbill also seems keen to indicate that Vitter would be no help to Palfrey's defense. He'd take the Fifth, Asbill told the judge -- obviously not what Palfrey would want since fantasy is as legal as can be. As the Legal Times reports, the prosecution have a line up of 14 former escorts from Palfrey's service who are expected to testify that the job involved more than a vivid imagination.

And what does Sen. Vitter have to say about all this? Well, when the Times-Picayune queried, he was both sentimental and eager to change the subject:

"I want to reaffirm how sorry I am to have hurt the people I love so deeply, starting with my family and certainly including the people of Louisiana," Vitter said. "I continue to work every day to make up for that."

He continued: "I continue to focus on crucial challenges for Louisiana families like health care reform and good-paying jobs."

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.

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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.