Foggo's plea agreement left CIA with a sigh of relief

Frankly, financial melt-down is getting to be a drag. Fortunately, the Bush administration is such a total disaster that there are a lot of interesting pieces of Bush-related crap to distract us from the bail-out. Laura Rozen has been kind enough to provide a particularly juicy story out of the CIA. On Monday Dusty Foggo, the number three manager of the CIA under Porter Goss, pled guilty to wire fraud instead of airing the CIA's dirty laundry about "Duke" Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, and his boss, Porter Goss, in public in a federal court.

As court documents laid out in 28 charges, the man known to colleagues as "Dusty," a former logistics officer, served as the CIA's number three official and effectively day to day manager when he badgered the Agency to hire one of his mistresses, identified in the indictment as "E.R.": "On or about March 19, 2005," the indictment reads, "Foggo sent the CIA Acting General Counsel an email stating, in part, that his staff would tag E.R.'s conditional offer of employment as 'ExDir Interest' in order to 'zip her to the top of the pile.'" (E.R. was indeed hired, to a new position Foggo created—deputy director of administration. "ExDir" refers to Foggo's position as CIA Executive Director.)

Foggo's generosity extended beyond his girlfriend: He also, according to the indictment, engineered the hiring of his best childhood friend's company for a CIA contract to provide bottled water to staff in Iraq at a 60 percent price markup over the offer of another contractor (who, under the deal worked out by Foggo, was hired as the subcontractor to actually perform the work). He was frequently dealt into a weekly poker game at various memorable Washington hotels (the Watergate was one) popular with congressmen such as Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), lobbyists, and House intelligence committee staff members; as well as—according to other court documents—prostitutes. That childhood friend, Brent Wilkes, also turned out to be among two defense contractors bribing House intelligence committee member Duke Cunningham with tens of thousands of dollars in antiques, travel, fancy meals, house payments, and hookers in exchange for earmarks steering more than $100 million worth of government contracts to Wilkes' San Diego-based firm, ADCS.

But it wasn't the hookers, the card games, the water contract, or even the staff mistress that concerned the Agency's executives when Foggo spared them by entering a guilty plea on a single count of wire fraud Monday. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors agreed to drop the 27 other charges and requested only three years prison time out of the 20 Foggo could have faced. ("Your lawyers did a good job for you," US District judge James C. Cacheris told Foggo after he accepted his guilty plea, with evident understatement.)

No, what truly worried Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3. They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes, estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source familiar with Foggo's discussions with Wilkes told me. What kinds of deals? According to the source, they included creating and running a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret planes now that the network it used for extraordinary rendition flights has been outed. "In or about December 2004," the Foggo indictment says, "Foggo discussed with Wilkes and J.C. the idea that Foggo might be able to get Wilkes a classified government contract to supply air support services to the CIA…. In or about January 2005, Wilkes directed various ADCS employees to begin developing an air support proposal that would be designed to answer the CIA's classified needs as outlined by Foggo."

The indictment continues: "On or about February 3, 2005, an employee of Wilkes' corporation emailed J.C. with an offer to update him on their work developing the air support proposal. …" (J.C., the indictment explains, is Wilkes' nephew, whom I've identified as Joel G. Combs, the nominal head of a Wilkes' front company, Archer Logistics.) The "classified air support contract" and its implied purposes for renditions are among the truly damaging national security secrets, along with the methods the CIA uses to create front companies and dole out black contracts, that the CIA and Bush White House would have been anxious not to have exposed, especially in a trial set to take place the day before the election in a suburban DC courtroom within a ten-minute drive of the entire national security press corps.

Needless to say the CIA is heaving a great sigh of relief. The only real loss is that individuals like myself who are curious about the processes the CIA uses to perform its Intelligence magic will not have all the dirty laundry to root through. But no doubt the CIA management has a lot of better things to do that keep those of us spy story junkies who are interested in Intelligence procedures entertained.

(Laura Rozen has another interesting article here providing some interesting gossip about her reporting on the Foggo story.)

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) running again under a cloud

From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire we get the report that while John doolittle is running again for reelection to his house seat, his connection to the Abramoff scandal has the Republican Party worried about whether he is vulnerable. He

...may face as many as three primary challengers next year, the Sacramento Bee reports.

Doolittle defeated Democratic challenger Charlie Brown by three points in 2006, and with Brown to run again, Republican leaders are growing increasingly worried. NRCC Chair Tom Cole said whether Doolittle would seek re-election was an open question, despite Doolittle's insistence otherwise.

Abramoff is the gift that just keeps on giving to Democrats.

Bradblog has been discussing vote rigging

For a series of blogs on the Clint Curtis / Tom Feeney / Yang Enterprises Inc. (YEI) Voting-Rigging Scandal [Key Articles & Documents]voter fraud] go to Bradblog. This series started in December 2004 and runs up to recent stories.

CIA official, contractor, face new corruption indictments

The previous number three official at the CIA, "Dusty" Foggo, and the contractor, Brent Wilkes, who allegedly bribed him to arrange a $100,000,000 contract are facing new indictments on thirty charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. From the Sacramento Bee:

According to the new indictment, Foggo provided Wilkes with "sensitive, internal information related to our national security," including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviation company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Foggo allegedly then pushed his CIA colleagues to hire Wilkes' companies without disclosing their longstanding friendship.

In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to "use some 'EXDIR grease'" on Wilkes' behalf - apparently a reference to his title as the agency's executive director.

Prosecutors say that in return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo after he retired from government service. In the meantime, he allegedly treated his friend to a Scottish golf trip during which they racked up a $44,000 hotel bill at the luxurious Pitcastle Estate.

Details in the indictment show that the arrangement between the two men began deteriorating in the summer of 2005, as the federal investigation into Cunningham began to envelop Wilkes. Foggo, who hosted a lunch in the CIA dining room for Wilkes in February of that year, allegedly instructed a CIA employee not to hire his friend after federal agents raided Wilkes Corp. offices in August.

This grew out of the Abramoff corruption investigations, and may well have been the reason why the U.S. Attorney for San Diego, Carol Lam, was fired. These new indictments replace the indictments filed by Carol Lam two days before she was forced to leave her job by the Department of Justice.

Rep. Doolitle is in the investigator's sights now.

Damn! These investigations are slow! If this were a TV movie, it would only have taken two hours to get this far, and they even throw in commercials!

California Rep. John Doolittle (CA - R) has been talked about as a target of investigations for corruption since 2005, and his close association with Abramoff has made it clear that there is more than just smoke there. But now everything seems to be heating up. Kevin Ring has just resigned suddenly with no notice from his lucrative job as a lobbyist. This is usually the pattern just before a person makes a deal with the investigators for a lighter sentence if he will give up someone higher on the food chain. In Ring's case it is going to be his former employer, Rep. Doolittle.

TPM Muckraker has the story.

All I can say is, it's about time. Now when does Rep. Jerry Lewis (CA - R) get his turn in the barrel?

Surprise. The emails sent through the RNC have 'accidentally' been lost.

How tragic. The White House has announced today that the emails sent through the private email accounts at the Republican National Committee have been mishandled and somehow "accidentally" lost. According to the Associated Press:

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

Democrats also have been asking if White House officials are purposely conducting sensitive official presidential business via nongovernmental accounts to get around a law requiring preservation - and eventual disclosure - of presidential records. The announcement of the lost e-mails - a rare admission of error from the Bush White House at a delicate time for the administration's relations with Democratically controlled Capitol Hill - gave new fodder for inquiry on this front.

"This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "I am deeply disturbed that just when this administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information."

These accounts, which were apparently used by about 20 top aides to the President, were used at times to coordinate the firings of the US attorneys and were also used by the convicted felon Jack Abramoff to conduct some of the business for which he was convicted and is now serving time in federal prison. Since those email accounts were not subject to the archive requirements mandated by law for all White House communications after Nixon resigned, for some odd reason the aides at the white House tended to send sensitive emails over the private accounts rather than the official White House accounts.

Keep in mind, Federal law requires that all White House documents by archived and preserved. That makes those communications available for review if, oh, say the Congress wanted to review them to see if something criminal had been coordinated. But these Republican National Committee accounts used by people such as Karl Rove (See? A surprise there, no?) have been mishandled and many of them have been improperly deleted so that they will not be available to the Waxman Committee as was anticipated.

Karl Rove learned a lot from Richard M. Nixon. Nixon himself once said that his biggest mistake was to have not destroyed the White House tapes before they were released. Anyone who does not know that the RNC emails were used to avoid scrutiny and were purposely disposed of simply does not understand the nature of the Republican occupation of the White House.

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Addendum 10:31PM CDT
Too good not to include. Kagro X says the name for this scandal should be "DogAte."

This is the best comment in the post on the subject by EmptyWheel at the Next Hurrah. Emptywheel thinks this report is just a trial baloon by the Bushies to see how much flack they'll get if they try it seriously. The techies who commented don't think anything is likely to be missing, just hard to find. Hope they are right.

Carol Lam was not an innocent victim.

An anonymous diary at dKos gives a brief recent history of Ron Nehring, the head of the San Diego County Republican Party before he was recently appointed head of the California Republican Party. He got Carol Lam appointed as San Diego US attorney, then had her investigate the then-dominant Democratic Party county office-holders publicly while the Republicans used those indictments to replace the Democrats with Republicans. His appointment as head of the California Republican Party is an effort to drag the California Republican Party back to the right, after Schwartzenegger went off the reservation and moved to the middle.

Nehring has tight connections to Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform, and was close to both Jack Abramoff and now-convicted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. US attorney Carol Lam slow-walked the investigation into Cunningham, but he was so over-the-top in his corruption that she couldn't derail the investigation and conviction.

If I lived in San Diego I'd be writing a book about this. As it is, I can only get snippets like this diary (and Digby's discussion of it) as they reach the more national news.