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Duke Cunningham's Little Helpers

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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006, at 2:54 PM ET

The scale of the bribery scheme that sent Rep. Duke Cunningham, R.-Calif., to jail exceeded any other in recorded congressional history. The former Vietnam War hero collected an estimated $2.4 million in payoffs before his lack of subtlety attracted the notice of government prosecutors. "In the sheer dollar amount, he is the most corrupt," Deputy House Historian Fred W. Beuttler said in March when Cunningham was sentenced to eight years and four months.

The scope of Cunningham's corruption was so vast that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence couldn't avoid ordering a preliminary inquiry into what assistance Cunningham might have received from committee staff in securing earmarks on behalf of his two co-conspirators, defense contractors Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes. The answer is "quite a lot." Although no evidence turned up of serious bribery (the most lurid payoff appears to have been a souvenir "Global War on Terrorism" rug), the investigation concluded that staff members were well aware that Cunningham's earmarks were a waste of taxpayer money. On Oct. 17 the committee's ranking member, Rep. Jane Harman, D.-Calif., released an executive summary of the report, prompting an immediate objection by the committee's chairman, Peter Hoekstra, R.-Mich., who said the report was an "incomplete, internal committee document." Two other considerations may be that the report paints an implicitly damning picture of Hoekstra's leadership of the committee, which in this instance might fairly be called neglectful, and that it does so less than a month before the midterm congressional elections. You may judge for yourself by perusing the report on the following five pages.

We begin, however, with an amuse-bouche: the so-called bribe menu that Cunningham wrote out on his official congressional stationery, spelling out precisely how much he expected Wade to pay him per million dollars in bribes. (To see it, scroll down.) As prosecutors explained in their sentencing memo, the left column expresses the cumulative dollar value (in millions) of appropriations that Cunningham secured on behalf of his "client," Wade. The right column expresses the dollar value (in thousands) of additional bribes that Cunningham required in exchange. The top row, which has three columns, sets a baseline of $140,000 in bribes for $16 million in earmarks. (The notation "BT" indicates a particular yacht, valued at $140,000, that Wade turned over to Cunningham.) Each additional million in appropriations required Wade to fork over an additional $50,000 in bribes. Once the total number of bribes reached $340,000, however, Wade only had to pay an additional $25,000 in bribes per additional million in appropriations. This was a volume discount that Cunningham offered his very best customers.

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Please proceed now to the intelligence committee report, which begins on page 2.

hot document
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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006, at 2:54 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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