Porter Goss and the CIA

[Guest Tom Scully]

How much sense did the enthusiasm on display here, really make? The man so revered in a bi-partisan display of gushing praise served as DCI for no more than a year. Doesn't it seem like Goss and Rob Portman had to bite their tongues as they made such lame and unpersuasive arguments in support of naming the new CIA HQ building after GHW Bush, i.e., that there was so much more they wanted to say, to actually justify the empty farce of their proposals, as delivered?

Naming the CIA HQ building after the man who was permanent DCI for the shortest tenure in the agency's history, an official association for Mr. Bush with a government agency that was the briefest in his long career of government "service", is a proposal delivered by Rep. Porter Goss as a routine, obvious thing to do:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/h980803-cia.htm

GEORGE H.W. BUSH CENTER FOR CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE (House of Representatives - August 03, 1998)

[Page: H6906]

Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3821) to designate the Headquarters Compound of the Central Intelligence Agency located in Langley, Virginia, as the George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence.

The Clerk read as follows:

H.R. 3821

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. DESIGNATION.

The Headquarters Compound of the Central Intelligence Agency located in Langley, Virginia, shall be known and designated as the `George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence'.

SEC. 2. REFERENCES.

Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to the Headquarters Compound referred to in section 1 shall be deemed to be a reference to the `George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence'.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), each will control 20 minutes.

The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss).

GENERAL LEAVE

Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 3821.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Florida?

There was no objection.

Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I am pleased to bring this legislation before the House today. H.R. 3821 will designate the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters complex in Langley, Virginia as the George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence. This is a fitting tribute to our 41st President and former Director of Central Intelligence, the only person in our Nation's history to have occupied both offices.

The Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has taken no formal action on this bill. However, I would note that all 16 of our members are cosponsors, among the 150-plus cosponsors we have for this legislation. There is strong bipartisan support for H.R. 3821 in the House as a whole, and the other body has passed a similar measure as part of its fiscal year 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act.

George Bush has dedicated much of his life to public service. I think we all know that. Beginning back in World War II where he flew for the Navy in the Pacific theater. We have heard many of those stories. In 1967, Bush was elected to the House of Representatives, and he would later serve as Ambassador to the United Nations and as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China.

(President Ford left office on January 20, 1977......)

In January of 1976, Bush was appointed Director of Central Intelligence by President Ford, a position he held through the end of the Ford Administration. His tenure as DCI was relatively short, but it came at a time when the U.S. intelligence community was undergoing increasing public scrutiny and some criticism.

It was during this year that the first permanent congressional committee on house oversight devoted to intelligence matters was formed. Took place in the other body. Of course, the House followed suit.

Bush demonstrated leadership and trustworthiness at a time when both were desperately needed to help restore confidence in the Central Intelligence Agency and the other intelligence agencies that make up our intelligence community. Mr. Speaker, I urge the House to support to this bill. I congratulate its author and lead sponsor, my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Portman).

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 3821, to designate the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia as the `George Herbert Walker Bush Center for Central Intelligence.'

George Bush served this country not only as President but also as Vice President, Member of Congress, United Nations Ambassador, chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and also, Mr. Speaker, as a naval aviator in World War II. As a matter of fact, he received the Navy Cross for his courageous action in the Pacific.

He is the only Director of Central Intelligence to have become President of the United States. The CIA headquarters does not now have a formal name, and there is no facility in the Washington, D.C. area named after President Bush. I thus believe this legislation represents a fitting tribute to honor President Bush's long and distinguished career in public service.

I have known President George Bush for a good many years. History has shown that he was an excellent Director of Central Intelligence, and I heartily endorse naming the CIA headquarters after him.

I am thus happy to join my colleagues on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in cosponsoring this tribute to former President George Bush, and I urge its passage by the House.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and friend from Missouri, who participates in an extraordinarily helpful and valuable way on matters of national security, many of the things we cannot talk about. If people knew the contributions he made, they would indeed be gratified. I think that to have his support for this bill is a very meaningful statement, and we appreciate it very, very much.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Portman), author of the bill, and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control the balance of the time.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Florida?

There was no objection.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.

While he is here, let me thank him for the critical role he has played in this concept from the outset in his role as Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, but also in his role as a friend and supporter of George Bush. He has been absolutely essential to getting this legislation to this point.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert).

Mr. BOEHLERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding me the time. I also thank him for his leadership in advancing this important legislation.

I am privileged to serve on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and in that capacity I have come to appreciate even more than before the invaluable contributions of President Bush, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Bush, for all that he did so well for so long, but particularly in his capacity as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

He took over that agency at a time when it was somewhat troubled. Morale was low. He elevated it to a new high. For that, everyone in the intelligence community will be internally grateful.

But when I think of President Bush, I just think about him in today's terms. Every day when I get up and read the day's newspaper, we read yet another story about how good the economy is and how the Nation is moving forward, and I am reminded and all of us should be reminded that this longest period of sustained growth in our economy started under the leadership of President Bush, during his administration, and it has sustained itself. I think that is something that he can be proud of. It is one of the enduring legacies he has left to this Nation.

I also think of George Bush the human being, one of the finest, most decent, most caring, sharing individuals it has ever been my privilege to know. He is a wonderful inspiration for generations to come. He still is at it, providing leadership. He is still at it, providing valued friendship. He is very deserving of this honor for a whole bunch of the right reasons. And for that, I am proud to identify as one of the 16 members on a bipartisan basis of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who have cosponsored this legislation.

Let me again thank my colleague for the leadership he has demonstrated.

[Page: H6907]

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank the gentleman for his wonderful comments and for his support of the legislation.

I would like to make one point, to reiterate what the gentleman said, which is that all members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Republican and Democrat, have now cosponsored this legislation, and that is the one committee of jurisdiction for the naming of the CIA center. So we are appreciative of the support of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) and really the entire committee, Republican and Democrat.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf).

(Mr. WOLF asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Portman) for sponsoring this bill. It is with great honor I rise today in support of this legislation that would designate the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia as the George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence.

Renaming the CIA headquarters would be a fitting tribute to our distinguished former President. .....

[Guest Tom Scully]

It took nearly a month for anyone at a MAJOR MEDIA OUTLET to decipher what Porter Goss intended to misstate in his April 25 Wapo OpEd:

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/05/20...probably-right/

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Pelosi's Probably Right

Posted by Jay Newton-Small

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week — much of it her own making. But in looking at the substance of the accusations, it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in September 2002:....

Pelosi News Conference on Waterboarding Disclosure ...

May 14, 2009 ... Those conducting the briefing promised to inform the appropriate members of Congress if that technique were to be used in the ... The only mention of waterboarding was that the briefing -- in the briefing was that it was not being employed. ... That's the only mention, that they were not using it. ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9051402100.html

Pelosi had made the same assertions as above, on April 23. Goss's carefully worded OpEd was printed in the WaPo on April 25....

...Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned.....

Again....can anyone post a quote of Porter Goss specifically saying that CIA told Pelosi and him in September, 2002, that they had ALREADYused waterboarding as an interrogation technique, even though we now know the CIA had waterboarded one man 83 times in the previous month?

Edited May 24, 2009 by Tom Scully

[Guest Tom Scully]

Back in post #43 on this thread, Bill Kelly on April 26, posted Porter Goss's opening shot in this carefully planned, partisan propaganda Op...

Nearly a month later, this is what it had deteriorated to...a very telling farce that speaks to Goss's ridiculousness and his "party first" irrelevancy:

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics..._boehner_1.html

Nancy Pelosi: CIA lied; Boehner: Who?

Posted May 14, 2009

...."It's hard for me to imagine,'' Boehner said, ''that anyone in the intelligence areas would mislead us... I don't feel.. that I have been misled.''

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/ind...11/post_24.html

Hoekstra says CIA lied about Peru plane downing that killed missionary Veronica Bowers, daughter

by Ted Roelofs | The Grand Rapids Press

Thursday November 20, 2008, 10:10 AM

A new federal probe of the 2001 downing of a plane carrying West Michigan missionaries in Peru concluded the CIA operated outside the law and then lied to Congress and federal officials, according to U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra.

"We cannot have a community that operates outside the law and covers up what it does and lies to Congress," Hoekstra said today.

Hoekstra said he will press for criminal investigation following release of the report by the Office of Inspector General.....

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/090...sitroom.02.html

THE SITUATION ROOM

Critics Slam President As "Socialist"; Interview with John Boehner

Aired May 20, 2009 - 17:00 ET

...We'll talk about that and much more with the House minority leader, John Boehner. He's standing by live.......

...BLITZER: Last year, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, he said this in response to a case that he was watching very closely -- an American citizen who was killed in a plane crash, a cover-up, he alleged, involving the CIA. He said these words

"We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress."

That's what Pete Hoekstra said in 2008.

BOEHNER: Pete Hoekstra did say that. And the inspector-general of the CIA did an investigation. And it became clear that some CIA operatives did, in fact, cover this up.

This is not -- we're talking about two different issues here. All the facts in this case are on the table. And the truth is now known to all of -- to everyone. And (INAUDIBLE)...

BLITZER: So based on what you know on that case involving Hoekstra -- the case he was interested in -- do you agree that the CIA then lied to Congress?

BOEHNER: I know a little -- I know as much about this case as Pete Hoekstra does. And the inspector general did, in fact, do an investigation, produced a report and, frankly, supported, I think, Pete's claims.

And all we're trying to do here, in both cases, is to get to the bottom -- get to the truth. And it's the truth that we want here. And the fact is, is that CIA Director Panetta issued a very strong letter to Speaker Pelosi making it clear that in his opinion, they did not mislead her or lie to her.

And so I want to either see the documents or I would like to see the speaker apologize....

The letter from Leon Panetta does not seem as "very strong" as Boehner characterized it:

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-...the-volume.html

...As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.....

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...JA38SAD98C2BB80

Analysis: CIA's Panetta navigating tight course

By PAMELA HESS – 7 hours ago

...Panetta's management of the issue hasn't been spotless. The leaked CIA list that he had provided to Congress to settle the question of who had been given classified briefings became an issue of its own. It turned out that the list had errors, causing both Republicans and Democrats to call for a full release of classified CIA records to clear up remaining ambiguity....

[Guest Tom Scully]

On the day after president George W, Bush announced the resignation of George Tenet as DCI, Tenet sent a classified memorandum to DNS Condi Rice, containing a false description of the timing of "events" that both Tenet and Rice had to know was inaccurate....a lie:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8101403331.html

CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos

Waterboarding Got White House Nod

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, October 15, 2008; Page A01

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public....

...Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003, during a meeting with members of the National Security Council, including Rice, the officials said. Days later, he got what he wanted: a brief memo conveying the administration's approval for the CIA's interrogation methods, the officials said.

Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe their contents in detail because they remain classified. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss the events.

The second request from Tenet, in June 2004, reflected growing worries among agency officials who had just witnessed the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Officials who held senior posts at the time also spoke of deteriorating relations between the CIA and the White House over the war in Iraq -- a rift that prompted some to believe that the agency needed even more explicit proof of the administration's support.

"The CIA by this time is using the word 'insurgency' to describe the Iraq conflict, so the White House is viewing the agency with suspicion," said a second former senior intelligence official. ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...6-2004Jun3.html

CIA Director Tenet Resigns

Bush Says Tenet Will Leave in Mid-July for Personal Reasons

By William Branigin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 3, 2004; 2:54 PM

CIA Director George J. Tenet, dogged by controversies over a string of U.S. intelligence setbacks, has decided to resign for personal reasons and will leave the agency in July, President Bush announced today.

Bush, who accepted the resignation during an hour-long meeting at the White House last night, lauded Tenet, 51, as a dedicated public servant who has fought hard in the war on terrorism.....

http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/0...708_Other_3.pdf

The Director of Central Intelligence

Washington, D.C.

4 June 2004

MEMORANDUM FOR: The National Security Advisor

SUBJECT: (To (The rest of the first page is entirely redacted.)

(From Page 2)

Top Secret

SUBJECT: (To (Redacted until point #3)

....3. As you know, beginning in September 2002, the Justice Department authorized CIA in its discretion, to employ on selected HVDs [Redaction ~3 lines] waterboard, [Redaction ~2 lines] CIA has reserved use of these [Redaction] techniques to elicit ongoing threat information from the most hardcore, senior terrorist figures that have been captured– men such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad, Abu Zubaydeh, [Redaction ~ 7 lines] key members of Congress have been briefed from the beginning–CIA informed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Committees of the existence and nature of the Program when it commenced in late 2002, in early 2003 when members of the leadership changed, and again in September 2003....

The DOJ did not "authorize" waterboarding that exceeded SEER school training parameters and was actually carried out BEFORE Sept., 2002.

The CIA destroyed the "torture tapes", but the ACLU filed suit seeking the thousands of documents related to the tapes still existing in CIA records:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=1

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 19, 2009

....The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum......

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/39321res20090409.html

DOJ Letter to Judge Hellerstein Regarding Work Plan (4/9/2009)

April 9, 2009

BY FACSIMILE

Hon. Alvin K, Hellerstein

United States District Court

Southern District of New York

500 Pearl Street, Room 1050

New York, New York 10007-1312

RE: ACLU, et al v. Department of Defense, et al., No, 04 Civ. 4151 (AKH)

Dear Judge Hellerstein:

We write with regard to the March 17, 2009 Order Regulating Proceedings, which

ordered the Government to create a work plan for production of certain material relating to the

destroyed videotapes.

To provide context for the Government's work plan, the Government is acknowledging that the destroyed

tapes were made between April and December 2002. The Government is also acknowledging that August 2002 was the month

during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations....

Respectfully submitted,

Levi L, Dassin

Acting United States Attorney

[William Kelly]

Now let me get this straight. Don Bohning calls Porter Goss on the telephone twice and gets him to acknowlege that

1) Goss worked at JMWAVE during the Cuban Missile Crisis as Photo Analysist and small boat ops, (just as Brad Ayers remembered). So JMWAVE did get U2 photos and may have had the ability to request U2 overflights of targets, just as suspected in Nov. 20, 1963 U2 downing thread.

2) Goss spent a lot of time in Dominican Republic, where David Atlee Phillips was Chief during the 1964 LBJ ordered invasion.

3) Goss was recruited into CIA out of Yale where he was in Army ROTC and worked with Army Intelligence (on campus).

THEN WE LEARN THAT:

4) When Goss was appointed head of CIA by Bush he brought in Kyle "Dusty" Foggo to be the #3 man in the CIA.

5) Foggo had a hot & heavy affair with another CIA official Stephene Danes-Smith, head of the Printing and Photography Group.

6) Three days after Goss leaves CIA, Foggo also resigns, and then Copley News of San Diego (CIA asset - according to Penthouse article) reports that FBI raid Foggo's house and he is under grand jury investigation because of giving CIA contracts to friends.

7) Among those testifying is Stephene-Danes Smith.

According to Don Bohning in The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies (Volume 16 – Number 2 – Fall 2008)

The highest profile CIA figure Simkin fingers as a member of Operation 40, and as usual without any documentation, is Porter Goss, a CIA operative from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. Goss subsequently served as a Republican congressman from Florida and as CIA Director from 2004 to 2006. In its account of Operation 40, the Spartacus website carries a photograph which it claims to have been "taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963... it is believed men in the photograph are all members of Operation 40." Among them, allegedly, is Goss. I sent Goss a copy of the photo. In a subsequent telephone interview after seeing the photo, not only did he say he had "never heard of Operation 40," but declared with some vehemence the man identified in the nightclub photo "categorically, decisively and completely was not me." ...

There are 15 pages devoted to Goss, including a two page opening biography and the rest an accumulation of excerpts from mostly obscure sources that generally echo Simkin's own radical views. They include the alleged picture of Operation 40 members - among them Goss - at a Mexico City nightclub in 1963, and which Goss categorically denies is he.

The brief website biography is a mishmash of confusing and contradictory misinformation. It begins, saying that after joining the CIA in 1962, Goss spent the next few years at the JMWAVE station in Miami "where he worked with people such as Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Edward Lansdale, William Harvey and Tracy Barnes."

There are several problems with that, including the fact that William Harvey, Edward Lansdale and Tracy Barnes - while no doubt visiting Miami at one time or another - all worked out of Washington, not the Miami station. Goss, over the course of two recent telephone interviews, said "the JMWAVE stuff (regarding Goss) is nonsense. I knew Shackley but I was so junior compared to those people… a basic Boy Scout at that point."

Neither, he said, did he work at the JMWAVE station over several years as Simkin's website claims, but only two to three months - primarily as a photo interpreter - in the period surrounding the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He said he also did duty during that period as a small boat handler "as a matter of dealing with lots of people moving around but I never went into Cuba."

The Simkin website profile erroneously claims Goss was "one of the 400 officers who was employed on the [Operation Mongoose] project," the Kennedy administration's post-Bay of Pigs covert operation designed to bring down Castro. Goss, in a phone interview, said: "All I know about Mongoose and the Bay of Pigs is what I have read about."

Contradicting his own website profile information that Goss joined the CIA in 1962, two paragraphs later Simkin quotes Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA agent, as claiming that Goss was involved in paramilitary activity against the Cubans: "I know he was involved in the Bay of Pigs operation, he worked out of Miami with Cuban exiles… and took part in… attempts to overthrow Castro."

The Bay of Pigs took place in 1961 so it would have been impossible for Goss to have taken any role in it if he didn't join the CIA until 1962, as Simkin himself says. Goss confirmed that although recruited earlier, he did not actively start working for the CIA until late 1961 or early 1962, after first joining Army Intelligence through Yale University's Army Reserve Officers Training (ROTC) program. From there, he said he "gravitated to the CIA."

Goss confirmed that his first four to five years with the CIA involved the Western Hemisphere, namely Central America, Mexico and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He said he was never permanently assigned to any CIA station in the area, always "traveling to those regions from Washington," with the Dominican Republic being "the only place I lived for any extensive period." He was assigned to London in the mid-1960s, retiring in 1970 for health reasons.

But the real mystery is how Foggo became the CIA's executive director, the official in charge of day-to-day operations at the entire agency: He was a midlevel field officer with a procurement background when Goss appointed him in 2004. A CIA spokeswoman, who did not want her name used, said Thursday that the two men met when Foggo testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which Goss chaired from 1997 until 2004, when Bush made him the CIA director. No date was provided for Foggo's testimony before Goss' committee."

A Mistress Scorned: Inside the Foggo CIA Contracting Scandal

9th June 2008

May 22, 2008

www.thespywhobilledme.com

A federal grand jury issued a new indictment on Tuesday against the former Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. The source of this new indictment is reliably rumored to be Stephanie Danes-Smith, Foggo's (alleged) former mistress before he dumped her and took up with the woman referred to as "ER" in the indictment.

Payback's a bitch.

According to informed sources, Foggo and Danes-Smith had been going hot and heavy since they met while assigned to the in Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology in the mid -1990s. This intimate relationship continued when Dusty was assigned to head up the Frankfurt support base and Stephanie was head of Printing and Photography Group (P&PG) in 2003/2004. Despite being a GS-15/SIS level administration group chief, Danes-Smith was constantly traveling on temporary duty assignments to Frankfurt, supposedly at Foggo's personal request, to "help out" when Afghanistan and Iraq were ramping up.

Danes-Smith's travels to Europe magically corresponded with visits by Foggo's wife to Vienna to visit relatives. (Foggo's wife was an Austrian Foreign Service National that he had met when assigned to Vienna.) The frequency of Danes-Smith's travel on to a place that had no relationship to her official duties became so obvious that she was finally called in by her boss, then Director of Global Support Jeanette Moore, and told that future trips to Frankfurt would have to be confined to authorized vacations. Foggo was also reprimanded by Moore by cable in mid-2004.

When Foggo was named ExDir by Porter Goss, he told Moore that her days were numbered and she retired. Not one to waste talent and connections, Raytheon picked up Moore shortly thereafter as a business development executive.

With Foggo back at Headquarters, Foggo and Danes-Smith became well known around Agency headquarters for requisitioning chauffeured limos from the Agency motor pool and cruising around Washington, DC. Rumors of these alleged trysts were rampant at Langley and Dusty's colleagues warned him to give up this high profile habit. But Dusty was a guy who "made Bill Clinton seem like a choirboy," according to a source familiar with this taste in hookers and strip joints.

Foggo's response to their warnings was to take up with "ER" and try to force Agency subordinates to hire her at Headquarters.

It appears that Foggo offered Danes-Smith a consolation prize when he dumped her for "ER" in Feb 2005 by appointing Danes-Smith as the Director of the newly re-established Directorate of Support (formerly known as the Directorate of Administration, or DA). A bit of history: The DA was dissolved in mid-2001 by Foggo's predecessor as Executive Director, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, principally to spite a bitter enemy of his, former DDA Dick Calder, creator of the "working capital fund" concept (and current president of Abraxis). Buzzy, an investment banker, thought "working capital fund" was totally dysfunctional, and even stated this in no uncertain terms at a annual gathering of CIA finance officers in 1999. Foggo and Calder were quite close, Foggo having served as Calder's "hit man" in firing career CIA DA employees rendered excess by the working capital fund and it was Buzzy who exiled Dusty to the Agency's Frankfurt support base (where Danes-Smith gave a hand with the "ramp up").

Back to the Langley soap opera: Among other issues, "ER" (the new mistress named in the indictment) apparently had security clearance problems, over which Foggo tried to exert the influence of "a personal interest in this case."

He officially designated "ER" as "ExDir Interest" to push the security clearance through. Sexual escapades and questionable contracting might prompt turned heads and hallway gossip at Headquarters, but comprising security crosses the line. Dimes started dropping in virtually every phone in the greater McLean area, prompting the Agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to begin an inquiry.

Courtesy of "Duke" Cunningham and lifelong friend Brent Wilkes, the FBI soon joined in.

And that takes us to this week's indictment which significantly ups the ante for Foggo. Instead being liable for receiving $90,000 in in kind benefits, he is now liable for almost $2 million in monies that he controlled and directed to other parties. In addition to the sexier aspects of the indictment, new allegations in the indictment include:

Foggo muscling a major contractor to hire his co-conspirator Brent Wilke's companies as subcontractors;

Foggo pressuring a major contractor to hire various cronies as either employees or consultants; and

Foggo passing classified information to Wilkes (Wilkes didn't have a clearance) so that he would have the inside track on contracts.

Ironically, Foggo served two years as a CIA ethics officer.

http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2008/05/a-mistress-scor.html

Edited April 17, 2010 by William Kelly

[Guest Tom Scully]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-in-...tor-porter-goss

INTERVIEWER: [Y]ou come from intelligence. This is what you did, this is what you know.

REP. GOSS: Uh, that was, uh, 35 years ago.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

REP. GOSS: It is true I was in CIA from

approximately the late 50's to approximately the early 70's. And it's true I was a case officer, clandestine services office and yes I do understand the core mission of the business. I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day, "Dad you got to get better on your computer." Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have.

-- Rep. Porter Goss, March 3, 2004, Washington, DC

Bill,

This has "young republicans", and thus, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, and Mark "Thor" Hearnes, written all over it, and

thus, it is connected to Bay of Pigs/Watergate "Plumbers"/Voter "Caging"/Jack Abramoff Scandal. and it just keeps on coming, now in it's 50th year in all of our faces....

From the JFK Debate thread titled, " Don Bohning Writes of Simkin's Leftist Motivated Inaccuracues, vs. Consequences of Bohning's & CIA Political Ideology"

...A piece of Porter Goss's palatial "held in trust", oceanfront home ends up deeded to a right wing voter fraud propagandist, after Goss deeded it to a "trust":

From the link at the last entry of this comprehensive timeline of the activities of the man rewarded in late 2004,

with a portion of Porter Goss's Sanibel Island home.....)

....The good news: The complaints about references made to GOP vote-suppressor Thor Hearne's now-defunct front group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), have resulted in the New York Times dropping the reference to ACVR from yesterday's (May 12, 2008) front-page article, to which we referred yesterday, with no small amount of disgust.

The bad news: The Times didn't bother to note their error (at least not in this online version of the story) as one would expect, as per transparent, journalistic ethics. More disturbingly, nor did they bother to note Hearne's continuing paid-partisan position as the GOP's top "voter fraud" scammer-in-chief, pushing for disenfranchising Photo ID laws around the country, his role in writing the very laws he's quoted discussing, his discredited and debunked ACVR group or their participation revealed at the heart of the U.S. Attorney Purge which pushed out Republican attorneys for not pursuing non-existent cases of "voter fraud" with enough fervor, or even his post as the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who mislead Congressional members during hearings on these matters in 2005.....

The Lee County, FL land records are freely available online for public inspection. That accessibility changes, one week from

today, when Lee County will begin charging more than $100 for access per three months period:

http://www.gulfreturns.com/2005/11/casa-yucca-sanibel.html

Casa Yucca Sanibel - Gulf Returns

Casa Yucca, the former Sanibel home of CIA Director Porter Goss, is listed for $18.9M. This is currently the highest asking price for a home in SW Florida. ...

http://www.leeclerk.org/OR/showdetails.asp...&ref=search

23 $0.00 AMETHYST REVOCABLE TRUST GOSS PORTER J + MARY R 7/31/1997 Deed O 2851 1380 PAR IN GL3,SEC28-46S-22E 4213979

http://www.leeclerk.org/OR/showdetails.asp...&ref=search

30 $0.00 AMETHYST TRUST HEARNE MARK F THOR II TRUSTEE 12/27/2004 Deed O 4537 3330 PAR IN GL3,28-46S-22E,SANIBEL 6578553

Description of the Goss property in Sanibel, FL

http://www.trulia.com/property/36198627-38...anibel-FL-33957

Link to deed putting the property in trust in 1997, a conveyance to a trust is not a sale:

http://www.leeclerk.org/OR/showdetails.asp...&ref=search

Goss's 1996 Congressional disclosure firm. listing his 3869 W. Gulf Dr., Sanibel, FL address for the last time:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/pfd1996/H8FL13037_96.pdf

Description of the current trustees, Ms. Andrews and Mr. Hearne:

http://www.leepa.org/Scripts/PropertyQuery...olioID=10023546

...After the July. 1997 real estate transaction deeding his Florida residence to Amethyst Revocable Trust, Porter Goss filed all subsequent required disclosure forms, as a congressman, and later as the DCI, listing a Sanible, FL PO Box No. as his address.

On the 1997 and 2004 deeds, Amethyst Trust is listed with an address identical to that of prominent anti gambling crusader and supporter of Swift Boater sabotage of John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, Mark B. Andrews. Andrews wife, Patricia E., is listed as the trustee who Goss put his expensive home parcel in trust with.

In 2004, with no record of any actual sale of Goss's home subsequent to Goss's 1997 trust transaction, Amethyst Trust, under the signature of trustee Patricia E. Andrews, transferred a portion of Goss's property held in trust to former 2004 national Bush/Cheney campaign treasurer, "Thor" Hearne, an extreme political partisan who created a fake voting fraud "research" and "investigation" organization, a false flag operation inventing a fake voter fraud controversy, for the planned purpose of preventing as many potential voters predicted to vote against republican candidates, from voting at all....

Bill,

The rerporter employed by the Copley paper in San Diegp who broke much of the Dusty Fogg, Brett Wilkes, Mitchell Wade,

Randy Cunningham story, is Marcus Stern. I doubt that he is a CIA "asset". Here he is at work yesterday, in a guest appearance in the WaPo.:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0041505962.html

Nearly two dozen congressional fundraisers held at D.C. Springsteen shows last year

By Marcus Stern and Sebastian Jones

ProPublica Reporters

Friday, April 16, 2010....

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/05/hbc-90000141

May 22, 2:00 AM, 2007 · Washington Babylon

Six Questions for Marcus Stern on Duke Cunningham

By Ken Silverstein

Marcus Stern and his colleagues Jerry Kammer, Dean Calbreath, and George E. Condon Jr. are the authors of the newly released book, The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught. The four were part of the Copley News Service and San Diego Union-Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for exposing the bribes that defense contractors Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade paid to Cunningham, who is now serving eight years and four months at a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. Stern has worked in Copley’s Washington Bureau for 23 years. His foreign assignments have included Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, India, and Turkey. I recently asked him six questions about the Cunningham affair.

1. What’s the origin of the famous bribe menu that Cunningham drew up, and which in the end led to his downfall?

Mitch Wade was treating Cunningham to a nice lunch at the Daily Grill in Georgetown. As they were talking about the future, Cunningham pulled out a piece of his own congressional stationery. He made a line of numbers down the left hand side of the stationery in which he wrote out the million of dollars in contracts that he could provide to Wade, up to $25 million. He put corresponding numbers down the right hand side, in the tens of thousands of dollars, which was what he expected to get in the form of kickbacks or bribes–or what he would call gifts–from Wade. In exchange for the first $16 million in contracts he delivered to Wade, Cunningham was given possession of a yacht called the Buoy Toy, which he eventually renamed the Duke-Stir. Wade had purchased it for Cunningham with a cashier’s check for $140,000. According to the bribe menu, Cunningham would get another $50,000 for every additional $1 million he got Wade in contracts. But after getting to $20 million, there was discounted rate by which he would get $25,000 per million in contracts. That’s why Cunningham was so intense about winning contracts through federal earmarks–he’d bully his own staff and staffers on the Appropriations Committee to make sure he got the earmarks he wanted. He also bullied and threatened sometimes balky defense officials to make sure they paid Wilkes and Wade.

2. How nasty did he get?

In one case, an appropriations staffer sent an email to one of Cunningham’s aides to notify him that earmarks had been cut across the board, including for Wade. The aide emailed back to say he was hiding under his desk because he was afraid of Cunningham’s reaction. The aide soon wrote again to say Cunningham was furious and was demanding that the money for Wade be restored. As a result, Wade got a $6.3 million earmark for a storage device for an agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which hadn’t asked for the device–and it’s not clear that it ever used it. Wade billed the government the full $6.3 million for the device, though he subcontracted the project to Wilkes, who bought it off the shelf for $700,000 and had it delivered to CIFA.

3. And yet Cunningham claimed he was a patriot, right?

After his arrest, Cunningham argued that no matter what sort of gifts he received, everything he did was good for national security and the country. What he was really doing was plundering the defense budget year after year. Meanwhile, this was a guy who ranted on the House floor and attacked people who wanted to cut the defense budget. When former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder stood up to challenge him he called her a socialist and told her to sit down.

4. Did Cunningham arrive in Washington corrupt or was he corrupted by Washington?

This was a fundamental inquiry of our book. You have a man who achieved hero status during the Vietnam War and yet later in his life he’s exposed as being completely besotted with greed. We looked at his childhood in the 1940s–he was an average kid, maybe with a penchant for bullying, but nothing out of the ordinary. Then in 1972 he shot down three MIGs over Vietnam in seven minutes and was shot down himself. He returned home to the U.S. a war hero, to parades and honors and awards. Almost immediately you begin to see a mixture of greed and entitlement on his part. He was quickly nominated for the Navy Cross, the highest medal the Navy awards, but he and his radioman went to their commander, Ron McKeown, and said they wanted to hold out for the Medal of Honor. McKeown was stunned, he told them you don’t hold out for the Medal of Honor, you die for it. McKeown told us that Cunningham wanted the Medal of Honor because it came with a lifetime stipend, which we calculated would have been about $100 per month. Under great pressure he accepted the Navy Cross but according to his wife he always felt cheated by that. For us, that foreshadowed a dark and greedy side of Cunningham that made him a scandal waiting to happen when Republican House leaders put him on the Appropriations Committee.

5. Has Cunningham expressed remorse for his crimes?

Cunningham feels railroaded and widely blames his predicament on Mitch Wade, his co-conspirator, and on the media. At his sentencing on March 3, 2006, he told the court that repentance will be a lifelong endeavor, that “no man has ever been more sorry,” and that he “accepted responsibility” for his crimes. But after he was sentenced and taken away to a jail in San Diego, he told the deputy federal marshal who put him in his cell, a guy named Dave Dallaire, that it was all a misunderstanding and that he had been “ramrodded.” His wife, Nancy Cunningham, said in an interview with Kitty Kelley last year that he claimed he was innocent, had been railroaded by the government, that he had signed the plea agreement under duress, and that he even thinks he will pardoned by President Bush. He lied up until the moment that he pleaded guilty and engaged in cover-up practices, clumsy as they were. There’s no reason to think the tears he shed in court were genuine. I received a letter from him last September that was filled with rage at the media and at Mitch Wade.

6. Who are some of the other characters in the Cunningham story that are still facing legal problems?

Wade pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Cunningham, and to denying the country the full honest services of defense officials and to committing election fraud. He is awaiting sentencing, which is expected in the fall. It’s been delayed because he’s assisting in the prosecution of Wilkes and possibly other co-conspirators. Wilkes has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, and Dusty Foggo, the former number-three official at the CIA, has also pleaded not guilty to charges that he funneled contracts to Wilkes. They will be tried this fall in San Diego and both have indicated they will fight the charges very aggressively. Wilkes gave three-quarters of a million dollars to Republican leaders and flew Tom DeLay around on his private jet. There’s probably real uneasiness on the part of Karl Rove and other GOP strategists that if Wilkes pleaded guilty and became a government witness, that it could jeopardize some more Republican congressional seats.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/05/sb-...ggo-21-20060513

Dusty Abroad

By Ken Silverstein

May 13, 2006 · Washington Babylon

A CIA spokeswoman said Friday that a federal investigation of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the CIA’s former number-three official, had “absolutely nothing, zero” to do with Porter’s Goss’s recent announcement to retire. That’s a bit hard to swallow at this point, especially as her emphatic statement came as FBI agents were raiding Foggo’s home and office....

http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/poli...-1n13foggo.html

Foggo's office also searched in probe tied to Cunningham case

By Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer

COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

with Dean Calbreath and Onell Soto

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

May 13, 2006

....Federal prosecutors have identified Wilkes as one of two defense contractors who plied Cunningham with more than $2.4 million in bribes in return for government contracts, but Wilkes has not been charged with a crime. The other contractor, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in February and is awaiting sentencing.

Cunningham, a former Rancho Santa Fe congressman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion and resigned his seat after 16 years in the House. He was sentenced in March to eight years and four months in prison.

Wilkes and Foggo are lifelong friends who grew up in Chula Vista, where they attended Hilltop High School and played on the football team. They roomed together at San Diego State University, where they were active in the Young Republicans club. Later, each was the best man at the other's wedding, and each named a son after the other.

As Wilkes launched a career in accounting, Foggo gravitated to law enforcement. In college, he worked as a security guard at Sears, Roebuck & Co. and was named in two lawsuits by people who accused him of falsely arresting them for shoplifting. Sears settled the cases out of court.

After graduation, he joined the San Diego Police Department, patrolling Paradise Hills.

“He was a real hard charger, really interested in the job and really interested in the community,” said a retired police sergeant who worked with Foggo at the time. “He was just a really nice young guy.”

Foggo quit the police force in 1979 to work as an investigator with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office. About two years later, he was recruited into the CIA. Sources who knew Foggo at the time say the CIA appointment came with the help of political ties he had forged at the Young Republicans club.

Honduras post

Foggo's first foreign posting was to Honduras, the center of the U.S.-backed Contra guerrilla fighters who were trying to topple the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

About that time, Wilkes launched a Washington-based financial firm and accompanied lawmakers on trips to Central America, where they met with Foggo and Contra leaders.

Three of Wilkes' former friends say he told them he was involved in assignations between some of the legislators and prostitutes in Central America. The former friends – each of whom has known Wilkes and Foggo since high school – would speak only on the condition that they not be identified.

“Brent Wilkes adamantly and vehemently denies ever being involved in getting anybody prostitutes, and that includes congressmen and any other officials,” Wilkes' attorney said..

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/158288.php

03.27.07

Mitchell Wade paid the bribes to former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) that eventually led to both men pleading guilty to multiple felonies. Almost two years ago we noted the odd news that the first federal contract Wade ever received was with none other than the White House, the White House itself, which is officially called the Executive Office of the President in federal contracting-speak.

The contract was signed on July 15th, 2002 and it was supposedly for "office furniture."

On December 5th, 2005, the LA Times reported that the contract was "to provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Cheney."

Now, a lot of people have wondered for a long time just what that contract was really for. Remember, this was the maiden contract for a company specializing in defense and intelligence services. (The company was approved for federal contracting two months earlier.) And they bag a contract to deliver a bunch of desks and chairs to Vice President Cheney's office? Add to the mix that, as we and others have long reported, Wade has long bragged that he had pull with the Vice President and those in his office and the whole thing starts to sound a bit fishy.

Indeed, just yesterday, Rep. Waxman (D-CA) sent the White House a letter asking for details about this mystery contract.

Well, we've found out what the contract was for.

Earlier this month, I told you about the upcoming book on the Cunningham scandal written by the guy who broke the story, Marcus Stern, and his colleagues at Copley News service, Jerry Kammer, Dean Calbreath, George E. Condon Jr, who as a team led coverage on the story for the next year.

The book's called The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught. Today I got a glance at a key section of the book and it reveals that what that contract was really for was for screening the president's mail.

That's right, screening the president's mail, presumably for Anthrax and other similar biohazards. Remember, this was in mid-2002, not long after the Anthrax scare that shut down several offices on Capitol Hill. So this is a pretty important contract, a pretty sensitive task on any number of levels.

This afternoon, we've independently confirmed that this is the case. According to a knowledgeable source, the text of the contract itself refers to "threat mail technology insertion" which we believe is spook-speak for screening technology for Anthrax and other biohazards.

But there's still more to the story.

If you're a Cunningham case afficionado, you know that in early 2002 Mitchell Wade was still acting as a cut out for his corruption mentor Brent Wilkes -- who's now awaiting trial in the Cunningham case. And around the same time Wilkes was greasing palms in DC trying to get into the Anthrax mail screening racket himself.

He got some help from Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) who got money from Wilkes. We pick up that part of the story from the San Diego Union-Tribune from March 19th, 2006 ...

Julie Doolittle was working at Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses.

One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

Note the reference to the House Administration Committee. That was the committee then chaired by another Abramoff buddy -- the now-imprisoned Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). And Ney, as he'd earlier done for Abramoff associate Adam Kidan, actually read into the House record an encomium to Wilkes.

So it all comes back to the same question. Why did a company like Wade's, which had no track record whatsoever and had only been approved to receive federal government contracts two months earlier, get a contract from the White House to screen the mail of the President of the United States? Was Wade actually working in concert with or as the cut out for accused fellow Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes? And what role might Doolittle and Ney have played? And what about Wade's claims of having pull with the Vice President? Is that what got him the deal?

The Wilkes-Wade business model was corrupting members of Congress and the executive branch in order to obtain pricey government contracts, often but not always for worthless products and services, and almost always stashed away in classified programs where the light of day could never expose their corrupt practices. And Wade's first contract was with the White House itself. So whose palm got greased?

Late Update: David Corn adds some more details to the mix and gives some pointers on how the investigation might proceed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070812152029/...ingham_scan.php

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=to+...410489031361284

Cunningham's Fall From Grace, Power; Running for Congress as …

Pay-Per-View - Los Angeles Times - ProQuest Archiver - Dec 5, 2005

The first contract, worth $140000, came from the White House -- to provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access...mp;pqatl=google

Peter Pae, Tony Perry and Richard Simon

Los Angeles Times

Dec 5, 2005

More than five years would pass before it became clear exactly why [Randy "Duke" Cunningham] had gone to such extremes: The small information technology company involved with the digitization project was allegedly one of two obscure defense contractors that secretly showered Cunningham with an estimated $2.4 million in cash and expensive gifts -- including a Rolls-Royce, money to buy a posh 8,000-square-foot house, and a cornucopia of antique furniture, Oriental rugs and jewelry.

As a member of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, Cunningham could push for funding approval for programs such as the digitizing system that prompted him to threaten the defense official's job in 2000. That program used services provided by ADCS Inc., located in Poway, Calif., and founded by Brent Wilkes, a supporter of Cunningham and other Republicans.

It was also in the late 1990s that Cunningham met [Mitchell J. Wade], who had worked in the Pentagon and was in the Navy Reserve. The two became close. Wade, Cunningham told friends, "is the younger brother I never had."

Ed Buckham happened to be House majority leader, Tom Delay's "spiritual" advisor, and employed Delay's wife at a no show job in an office in a Washington DC condominium owned by Tom Delay's "charity", U.S. Family Network.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/ref/buckham.php

...Key points:

Buckham's ASG channeled money from Abramoff clients to DeLay through the U.S. Family Network.

A CNMI textile company, the Choctaw Indians and the Russian oil interests each donated large sums of money to the USFN, allegedly in exchange for support from Tom DeLay. USFN paid ASG hundreds of thousands of dollars, and ASG paid Christine DeLay $3,200/month, though she did not work in their offices on Capitol Hill.

Buckham arranged DeLay's first trip to the Mississippi Choctaws.

Buckham, along with Tony Rudy, was the first DeLay staffer to visit with the Choctaws, an Abramoff client. The trip, taken in 1997, lasted 3 days and cost the Choctaw $3,000. The following year, Buckham arranged a trip for DeLay to the Choctaw Casino and golf resort. The day after DeLay left the resort, the Choctaws made an initial $150,000 payment to the USFN. The Choctaws were Abramoff clients.

DeLay's Scotland trip was partially billed to Buckham.

When DeLay traveled to Scotland to play at an exclusive golf resort in 2000, parts of the trip were billed to Buckham's credit card, a violation of House ethics rules since Buckham was, by that time, a registered lobbyist. Other parts of the trip were charged to Abramoff's credit card.

Buckham represented Brent Wilkes' Group W Advisors.

Group W Advisors, a lobby shop operated by Brent Wilkes, who has been implicated in the Cunningham bribery investigation, hired ASG in 2002 to lobby DeLay on defense contracts. ASG has earned $620,000 on the contracts to date. Buckham represented Group W for ASG along with Rudy and several other ASG lobbyists.

Buckham's Concorde flight caught the press's attention.

On the Buckam-DeLay trip to Russia in 1997, which was financed by Russian oil interests, Buckam took a $5,000 flight home on the Concorde. Questioned by the press, he claimed the ticket was financed by the NCPPR.

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=buc...n&scoring=a

Former DeLay Aide Enriched By Nonprofit

Washington Post - Mar 26, 2006

Buckham, an evangelical minister, also continued to serve as DeLay's spiritual adviser and prayed frequently with him, the former aides said. ...

Church Leader Says He Was Lured into Abramoff Web

NPR - May 23, 2006

Buckham was viewed as one of the most powerful staff members in Congress. He was also DeLay's spiritual advisor. Geeslin himself had ordained Buckham into ..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page A01

The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.

DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.

House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists....

Edited April 18, 2010 by Tom Scully