Dems say AG Gonzales lied to Congress about the NSA massive call database program. And it looks to us like he did. Read the testimony for yourself.
Over at Muckraker we’ve done a few pieces today on just whether Duke Cunningham really ever cooperated with federal investigators or did much more than admitting to what they already knew. This leaves the distinct possibility that the only one of the principals in the case — Duke, the four co-conspirators — to have cooperated with investigators in any material way is Mitchell Wade, whom various published reports say began cooperating early and extensively.
I’m pretty certain from my reporting that they’ve gotten nothing from Wilkes or Tommy Kontogiannis, the other two co-conspirators.
So if the feds never got Duke to cough up his accomplices, what went wrong?
The other question is what to make of these statements from the west coast head of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, claiming that Cunningham isn’t cooperating and hinting that the scandal is far more extensive than people realize. We’ve had a hard time figuring out just what he means by that. But my hunch is that there’s some conflict between the DOD and DOJ investigators about how far to take this. More on this soon.
Okay, I think we got one wrong here. The sentence the feds are requesting for phone-jammer James Tobin is well below the statutory maximum for the offense. But the prosecutors are apparently asking for a longer sentence than the federal sentencing guidelines would dictate.
I haven’t been able to confirm this myself yet. But a number of TPM Lawyer Readers have chimed in to this effect. And their unanimity suggests to me that they’re correct.
We’ll get up more details on this on Muckraker. But I didn’t want to let this error stand. Here’s the government sentencing memorandum itself for those of you who’d like to peruse.
Time: “The number three official at the Central Intelligence Agency, who 
announced this week he is stepping down as his boss Director Porter Goss leaves later this month, cleared defense contractor Brent Wilkes in for at least one visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., within the last 12 months, sources tell TIME.The visit occurred before Wilkes was cited — though not charged — in ex-congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s November guilty plea as an unindicted co-conspirator who provided over $600,000 of the $2.4 million in bribes that Cunningham admitted accepting from defense contractors … A former CIA official said it was highly unusual to help a friend get access to headquarters.”
I’m eager for more detail on precise dates. Duke didn’t get charged — and Wilkes cited — until November of last year. But the scandal popped in early June 2005 — about 11 months ago.
Wilkes name first surfaced in scandal in mid-July. He was clearly tied to Duke’s scams in early August. And his offices were raided by the Feds on August 16th.
So this new Time piece really leaves me wanting to know whether Foggo was waiving Wilkes into the CIA complex after the Feds were raiding his office back in California.
Hmmm. That didn’t take long.
Bush at 29%. Harris Interactive’s new poll, just out.
This line, packed a decent way down into the article in the Washington Post, jumped out at me as the most significant …
Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening.
This seems key.
This isn’t yet another program with civil liberties concerns hanging around it. It’s an integral part of one program. This is the initial cull, from which targets of interest — that wouldn’t be able to meet ‘probable cause’ standards — are chosen for actual monitoring.
David Ignatius has a good column in the Post tomorrow about Dusty Foggo, Patrick Murray and the mix of ineptitude, paybackism and mismanagement that did vast damage to the CIA under Porter Goss’s leadership. Ignatius views Foggo’s alleged corruption as a secondary part of the story. In that I suspect he’s mistaken, that we’ll come to see it was integrally connected to his other forms of ridiculousness. But the stuff he describes is bad enough. Give this one a read and absorb what it means about what’s been occupying the time of our intelligence agencies while we’re supposedly fighting a war on terror.
The Times also has a good run-down of Foggo’s increasing centrality to the expanded Cunningham investigation and a slew of new details fleshing out various aspects of the story.
The Times also came up with a new name for TPMmuckraker. They’re calling it ‘the Internet.’ See below …
Mr. Foggo was one of many C.I.A. officials close to Mr. Wilkes. In May 2000, Mr. Wilkes paid Brant G. Bassett, a retired German-speaking C.I.A. official known as Nine Fingers, a $5,000 fee to travel to Germany for five days as a consultant on a business deal that Mr. Wilkes was negotiating with a German software engineer, according to a former agency official aware of the arrangement. The official was granted anonymity to speak about the business deal.
Documents revealing the $5,000 payment to Mr. Bassett from Mr. Wilkes first appeared on the Internet on Tuesday.
Here’s the story. Here are the documents.
The Post was more specific.