Prosecutors Try to Preempt “Duke Made Me Do It” Defense

In his first big interview after coming under suspicion for bribing Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes told The New York Times last year that he’d been a victim of the system. “I played by their rules,” he said, “and I played to win.” If Brent Wilkes is under investigation, he was saying, everyone should be under investigation. It was a system of “transactional lobbying,” where lawmakers shook down those who were seeking government contracts.

Not so fast, say prosecutors. In a 13-page filing today, they make a variety of arguments for why Wilkes should not be able to argue at trial that he was coerced into bribing Cunningham. At base, however, is their common sense assertion that nobody put a gun to Wilkes’ head — not back in the 90’s when he started bribing Cunningham, not in 2005 when he gave Duke his last bribe, and certainly not in 2003, when the two were relaxing in a hot tub in Hawaii with two prostitutes:

The overt acts in the Superseding Indictment… include a plethora of bribes that defendant Wilkes provided Cunningham over about a decade, including over $100,000 in 2000, and over $500,000 in 2004. The two remained friendly enough throughout this period that they shared numerous vacations, including a vacation in Hawaii in August 2003, during which Wilkes and Cunningham relaxed in a hot tub with prostitutes hired by Wilkes. No reasonable juror could believe that during that long period, despite outward appearances, Wilkes was secretly operating under a imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death, or some other harm sufficient to justify bribery, and could never find a way to inform law enforcement of such threats.