So do we have a preview now of where the investigation into House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is going?
As we’ve discussed before, Lewis and at least two of his former staffers — Jeffrey Shockey and Letitia White — are now targets of the expanded Cunningham investigation. The investigation appears to center on Lewis and the two staffers’ interconnected ties to the lobby shop of Copeland Lowery. Lewis has longstanding ties to Copeland Lowery honcho, Bill Lowery, as Copley’s Jerry Kammer explained last December. Shockey and White left Lewis’ employ to go to work for Copeland Lowery. White, you’ll remember, among other things, bought the Capitol Hill house with one of the big earmark cronies and then rented the House to the PAC she set up, which is run by Lewis’ step-daughter.
Anyway, it’s a complicated world in Lewisland. But bear with me.
This isn’t an investigation into Lewis’ various staffers. This is an investigation of Lewis. The probes into the staffers are means to that end. And given the nature of these investigations, where alleged criminal acts are extremely difficult to prove without a cooperating witness, they need someone to flip on Lewis.
And here’s where the significance of yesterday’s story by Justin Rood comes in. As Justin and the TPMmuckraker staff showed by analyzing Copeland Lowery’s flurry of lobby fee restatements earlier this year, the folks at Copeland appear to be in serious legal jeopardy.
In the Abramoff case, prosecutors have been rolling up cooperating witnesses by charging with statutes that are seldom enforced. But legal experts told us that given the systematic nature of the failure to report lobbying work that shows up in the Copeland papers, prosecution seems likely even setting aside the desire to get folks to flip on higher-ups. And Lowery, Shockey and White are each on the line for those failures to report.
So Copeland Lowery’s problems are Jerry Lewis’ problems. And Copeland Lowery has a lot of problems.
The latest in the NSA calls database story – USA Today now says they’re not sure about Bellsouth’s and Verizon’s involvement.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) on the new WMD bamboozlement from Sen. Santorum and Rep. Hoekstra.
Mike McGavick kinda sorta comes clean on supporting President Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts!
David Postman of 
the Seattle Times interviewed McGavick this morning and, according to Postman, McGavick “wants a phased-in system of individually controlled, privately managed retirement accounts that could provide a higher yield than the government-run system, but would come with a lower guaranteed payment.”
Wipe away the poll-tested double talk and that sounds like, yes, McGavick does support the president’s plan. (He insists on the ‘it’s not privatization‘ word game bamboozlement, for example.)
So does he?
Says McGavick: “I do not think the president’s program was that well designed or that well promoted. But I think something like this with some hard bipartisan work could create a lasting solution for a problem that has cyclically dogged us for decades.”
We’ll come back to this issue because President Bush actually never committed to a specific plan. So I’m curious whether this is really a dodge or whether there’s some specific issue on which McGavick disagrees with the president’s plans.
For now, McGavick seems like he just wants the issue to go away. He told Postman that on Social Security he wants “to get this out of the political world and into a thoughtful space.”
For the moment, let’s put McGavick down as being for President Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts, along with some as yet unspecified revisions to the Bush plan, and also for getting “into a thoughtful space.”
Bush Advisor Norquist: If we get 60 Republican senators, Social Security is toast.
It came late in the day today, so we didn’t get a chance to get into it at TPMmuckraker. But a Justice Department IG Report came out late this afternoon. And this one looked into the long-simmering question of whether Jack Abramoff used his juice with the Bush White House to get the acting US Attorney in Guam, Frederick A. Black, fired just as the guy was opening a criminal probe into Abramoff’s activities on the island.
The report concludes, we think not altogether convincingly, that while Abramoff volubly took credit for getting Black canned, in fact he had nothing to do with it. It’s stunning how many things Abramoff took credit for, and everybody else thought he was responsible for, which turn out to have had nothing to do with him at all. But let’s leave that for another day.
But there’s something else that caught our eye.
We’ll let MSNBC’s Joel Seidman explain …
The report also contained evidence of Abramoff’s strong ties to the Bush White House. One White House political official, Leonard Rodriguez, told Fine’s investigators he kept Abramoff aware of information relevant to Guam “at the behest of Ken Mehlman, the White House Political Director,” the report said. There was no explanation of why Mehlman would have wanted the information shared with Abramoff.
So Ken Mehlman, now head of the RNC, had a White 
House official keeping Jack Abramoff up to date on events in Guam, around the time Abramoff took credit for getting an investigation into his work on the island deep-sixed. We already know that at Abramoff’s behest Mehlman killed an appointment at the State Department because the would-be appointee, Allen Stayman, wasn’t good news for Abramoff’s sweat-shop owner clients in the Marianas islands.
At a certain point you start to detect a pattern, no? Mehlman was a fixer for Abramoff while Mehlman was political director at the Bush White House. And now he says he barely knew Jack Abramoff.
Maybe this deserves some follow-up?
Oh the pace quickens.
Only weeks ago, 
scandal-plagued House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) issued a categorical denial that he’d ever “recommended a lobbyist to any constituent, contractor or anyone seeking federal funds.”
Now documentary evidence surfaces that Lewis lied.
And when I say ‘documentary evidence’ I would be referring to a letter from Lewis to a constituent recommending the lobbying services of Tom Skancke of The Skancke Company.
In Lewis’s letter to the County of San Bernardino (the county I grew up in, by the way and which Lewis represents), he wrote “It is a pleasure to be writing this letter on Tom’s behalf and strongly recommend San Bernardino County’s retaining The Skancke Company’s services.”
I’m not sure which is more upsetting: Lewis’s lies and corruption or that someone has to go through life with the name Skancke.
One way or another, it ain’t pretty.
Late Update: My apologies! He didn’t just lie once. He lied twice. I was thinking of when Lewis told NBC in early June that “I have never recommended a lobbyist to any constituent, contractor or anyone seeking federal funds.” But I didn’t know that Lewis also lied in early May when he said “I have never told a local representative or someone seeking to work on a federal project that they must have a lobbyist representing them. It is an ironclad rule in my office that we do not recommend lobbyists, even if a constituent asks for that recommendation.” Again, my apologies.
The Duke Cunningham investigation has generated as many spinoffs as All in the Family.
Much of the focus lately has been on the links among U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the Copeland Lowery lobbying firm, and congressional earmarks. Remember that the Duke is connected to the unfolding Lewis investigation in a number of ways, most notably through alleged briber Brent Wilkes, who was a Copeland Lowery client.
On Friday came a reminder that the Duke investigation began as a defense contracting scandal and that investigators are still pursuing the Pentagon angle. Federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia filed a bill of information against Richard A. Berglund, a retired lieutenant colonel who worked for defense contractor MZM. Berglund stands accused of making illegal contributions in early 2005 to the re-election campaign of U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).
As the Washington Post suggests, the filing of a bill of information signals that Berglund has probably worked out a plea deal with prosecutors that will include his agreement to cooperate with investigators.
Why should that worry some folks in the Pentagon? Well, remember that MZM founder Mitchell Wade has already pleaded guilty in connection with his bribing of Duke Cunningham. In fact, as alleged in Wade’s plea agreement and Friday’s bill of information, it was Wade who was orchestrating the illegal campaign contributions. (Katherine Harris (R-FL) was one of the recipients of those contributions; neither she nor Goode has been charged with any wrongdoing and both have denied having any knowledge of the illegal nature of the contributions.) Wade has been cooperating with investigators, apparently extensively.
So flipping Berglund doesn’t get the feds any closer to Wade. They already have Wade. But Berglund, a former military officer, could help point the way into the Pentagon. He was the program manager for MZM’s Martinsville, Va., facility (in Goode’s district), which handled defense-related work. Stay tuned.
What U.S. strategic interest is served by Israel’s seizing of elected Palestinian officials and bombing of the offices of the Palestinian prime minister?
Others have aptly noted the disproportionate Israeli response to the capture of one of its soldiers. When measured not just against the incident that precipated the current escalation of violence but also against international norms, Israel’s conduct has been disproportionate–and self-defeating. (If this report is true, then Israel’s conduct is beyond disproportionate.)
But with the United States bogged down in Iraq, another important measuring stick, at least for us, is U.S. strategic interest. By that measure, Israel’s actions this past week have been a disaster.
There seems to be a tendency for the United States to continue to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the old perspective, when we often served the role of a benevolent uncle who didn’t hesitate to knock his nephews heads together to enforce good behavior. But thanks to our excursion into Iraq, we now have a greater stake in the region than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and perhaps since the creation of Israel. Although President Bush is loath to admit it, our heightened level of involvement may very well continue for decades to come.
Caught between warring factions and the target of insurgents, we are in a virtually untenable situation in Iraq, tactically and strategically. One of the few things that could possibly worsen the dire circumstances in Iraq is for Israel to inflame Iraqis and the region further with the sort of conduct it has exhibited this past week.
If you are one of the few people who takes seriously the President’s stated strategic objective of bringing democracy to the Middle East, then you won’t cheer Israeli military strikes on the fledgling institutions of a tenuous democracy (if that’s not being too charitable toward the Palestinian government).
In fairness to Israel, it is not clear to anyone, including the President, what our strategic objectives in Iraq are. We can hardly expect our allies to closely coordinate their policies with ours, which, as the President himself has declared, consists of waiting around for his successor to take office so the next guy (or gal) can figure out what to do. It’s a hapless situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into, and for that Israel is not to blame.