Curt Weldon, who’s yer daddy?
Watching
the explanation for this one should be entertaining.
Over at TPMmuckraker.com, Paul Kiel has been walking you through the Russian energy/’security services’ thread of the Abramoff scandal.
In short, two executives for the energy company Naftasib (Alexander Koulakovsky and Marina Nevskaya) were spreading money around Washington in the late 1990s looking for friends and favors. They hired Jack Abramoff. Abramoff then acted as the pass through by which Koulakovsky and Nevskaya bankrolled the sham nonprofit, the US Family Network, Tom DeLay’s then-Chief of Staff Ed Buckahm set up while he was still on the government payroll. Buckham later used the US Family Network to kick start his lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group. To make this all a little more complicated the Russian money was funnelled through front outfits in the UK and the Netherlands.
I know the trail of money and the details are rather byzantine. But suffice it to say that these foreign energy executives with what newspapers usually delicately refer to as ‘close ties’ to Russian security services were pumping millions of dollars into the Abramoff-Buckham-DeLay syndicate. And they were getting a lot in return.
You’ll also remember that one of the quids Rep. Bob Ney (R-Toast) was trading for Jack Abramoff’s quos were encomiums and hatchet-jobs slipped into the congressional record, for Abramoff’s pals and enemies, respectively.
So with all that as background, here are remarks Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) inserted into the Congressional Record back on February 4th, 1999 …
Now, Weldon does fancy himself something of a Russia hand. Indeed, his daughter, when she was only in her late 20s, set up a lobbying firm that seemed to specialize in getting fat contracts from Russian and Serbian interests which ended up getting favors from her dad. Indeed, one of them was Itera International Energy Corp, another Russian energy outfit with ties of various sorts to Russian government officials.
But I digress.
Whatever the deal with Itera, what was Weldon’s thing with Koulakovsky? This guy was funnelling millions of dollars into the DeLay machine. His shenanigans and deals with DeLay, Abramoff and Buckham are a central part of the on-going federal corruption probe. Weldon seems to have thought he was a really, really great guy.
Why?
