Last week, you’ll remember, TPMmuckraker was reporting on Shirlington Limousine, the limo company at the center of the ‘hookergate‘ scandal, and why a company with so many red flags managed to get a mega-contract from the Department of Homeland Security. (Shirlington has secured some $25 million in DHS contracts for shuttle service and executive limo driving, despite the company owner’s history of felonies and bankruptcies and the company’s record of poor service, repossessions, revoked transport licenses and other problems.)

On Friday, DHS officials insisted, in response to our questions, that the awards were on the “up-and-up.”

Now, last week a reader pointed out to me that in the federal contracting world, even if a company has some serious strikes against it, it can be difficult not to award them a given contract if they are the lowest bidder.

Point taken.

But today we get some more details from the Washington Post.

So did Shirlington provide the lowest bid? Turns out they didn’t, reports the Post. They got the award for “best value.”

(The award was challenged by a losing bidder on the grounds that Shirlington had falsely claimed to be located in a poor neighborhood, which would have increased its chances of winning the award.)

What’d DHS make of Shirlington’s getting canned for providing bad service to Howard University?

Hadn’t heard about it. Shirlington owner Christopher Baker didn’t mention it.

I guess they haven’t equipped DHS with that intel device Google.

His history of bankruptcies and vehicle repossessions? (According to records we’ve consulted, Baker was actually in bankruptcy for at least part of the time during which the contracts were awarded.)

Didn’t hear about that either apparently.

His numerous misdemeanor and two felony convictions? DHS doesn’t run background checks on contractors, they told the Post. They don’t run them against the terrorist watch list either.

Anybody wonder why this company got these contracts and whether it might have had something to do with his connections to Wilkes, Wade, Cunningham, et al.? Just wondering.

AP: “Prosecutors have e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay’s office knew lobbyist Jack Abramoff had arranged the financing for the GOP leader’s controversial European golfing trip in 2000 and was concerned ‘if someone starts asking questions.'”

Several new ‘Hookergate’ details out in a new story in the Times.

The House Committee on Homeland Security plans to investigate the questionable $25 million worth of contracts the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie maintains that the contract is “just perfect.”

Federal investigators have apparently interviewed prostitutes involved in the Wilkes-Wade parties.

You’ve got to be relatively deep in the “Hookergate” weeds to follow this one. But Newsweek has now positively identified the CIA party-attender “Nine Fingers” as Brant Bassett, ex-CIA official and former Goss Hill staffer.

If you’re watching the Sunday shows, keep your ears open for questions and comments regarding “Hookergate”, the Cunningham investigation’s expansion into the CIA and its relationship to Goss’s departure. If you hear stuff, drop us a line with the show, time, speaker, etc.

Big world, small world.

This is the group photograph of the Psi Upsilon fraternity from the 1960 Yale yearbook.

As you can see, there’s out-going CIA Director Porter Goss, current Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, and beside Goss is William “Bucky” Bush, the current president’s uncle.

Small world.

Bad news for Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). His former top aide, Neil Volz, just copped a plea. Plea documents here.

Exclusive: CIA nominee Hayden linked to Cunningham-Wade bribery firm MZM.

So why did Porter Goss resign as Director of the CIA?

Over the weekend there’s been a lot of amorphous talk about turf battles between Goss and DNI John Negroponte. We’ve heard that the White House has long doubted Goss’s leadership of the Agency. We’re hearing that Goss’s ouster is part of a planned overhaul of the entire beleaguered agency.

I don’t doubt that each of these stories are true, in some measure.

From the start, however, I’ve never believed that any of these overlapping explanations explain the jagged and sudden nature of Goss’s departure. And if you read the follow-on coverage closely you’ll see the taint and awareness of the underlying scandal spreading like ink in tissue paper.

Newsweek, for example, has a quizzical piece which lays the Foggo story right next to the Goss resignation without quite connecting the two. Interestingly, though, Newsweek says that it was Dusty Foggo was at the center of the turf battle with DNI John Negroponte — a point we’ll return to.

We’ve heard too that while there was a power struggle between Negroponte and Goss, what tipped the scale was an intervention the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In its day one reportage, the Times said Goss’s “departure was hastened because a recent inquiry by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had found that current and former agency officers were sharply critical of Mr. Goss’s leadership.”

By Sunday, though, Richard Sisk of the New York Daily News, was reporting that the FIAB’s concerns centered on Foggo …

Bush had already gotten an earful from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the shortcomings of Goss, but the final push came from the “very alarmed” President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, intelligence and Congressional sources said.

Alarms were set off at the advisory board by a widening FBI sex and cronyism investigation that’s targeted Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, and also touched on Goss himself.

Now, successful cover stories must always contain at least a partial version of the truth. Otherwise, they can’t be credible. The issue is what they leave out. As we move forward, I think you can see that the official narrative intentionally leaves out the key details. And the White House’s inability to provide any reasonable explanation for the manner and timing of Goss’s departure points unmistakably the criminal investigation that began with Duke Cunningham and has now made its way into the CIA.

Let’s review what we know now about Dusty Foggo to provide context.

The Executive Director of the CIA runs the day to day operations of the Agency. It’s the third-ranking position in the organization. In corporate parlance, he’s the COO. Foggo was a career CIA officer. But before Goss’s arrival, he’d never had a leadership position in the organization. He worked in logistics and procurement.

Newsweek says Foggo was “a logistics expert well known to junketing congressmen who visited Frankfurt, Germany, where Foggo was based.” Foggo was in Frankfurt earlier in this decade, I believe. But a deeper look would reveal that he played a similar role in Central America in the 1980s. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last December, back in the mid-1980s one of Wilkes’ jobs was “was to accompany congressmen … to Central America to meet with Foggo and Contra leaders.”

When Goss tapped him for the #3 job, it surprised everyone, as you’d expect, given the background I just described.

Now, some are suggesting that the real actor here is one of the congressional staffers Goss brought with him to CIA. And I think there may be something to that. It’s quite possible that the only thing Goss did wrong was allow his staffers to make some very bad decisions on his behalf. There’s been a lot of chatter about whether Goss was at the Wilkes parties or whether he profited in any way from the Wilkes’ related corruption. To date I’ve seen no credible claims of either. But, politically and simply in terms of accountability, Goss is on the line for what his chief staffer does.

In any case, you have this lingering question of what prompted Goss to put Foggo in the number three job.

Now, fast forward to the present. We’ve known for more than six months that Duke Cunningham’s chief briber Brent Wilkes was a life-long friend of Dusty Foggo’s and that their careers were closely tied together. Given that the Justice Department claims that Wilkes gave more than $600,000 in bribes to a sitting member of Congress, the association, for better or worse, inevitably cast some taint on Foggo.

But now we know a lot more.

According to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News, Foggo himself is now a target of the expanded Cunningham investigation and federal prosecutors in San Diego are trying to build cases against both Foggo and Wilkes. As the Journal explains, the “criminal investigation centers on whether Mr. Foggo used his postings at the CIA to improperly steer contracts to Mr. Wilkes’s companies.”

The #3 at the CIA is about to resign because he’s being investigated for his role in one of the biggest congressional bribery scandals in decades. The Director hired him for the job and he quit last Friday. Do you think there’s a problem?

We’ve been focusing on the Wilkes-Wade dimensions of Porter Goss’s firing at CIA. Meanwhile, much of the criticism of CIA nominee Gen. Hayden, from both sides of the aisle, has been over the fact that he’s an Air Force General (not retired, but currently serving) and that his command over the CIA would bolster Don Rumsfeld’s efforts to consolidate control of the intel community in the Pentagon. Remember, in theory at least, as a general, Hayden works for Rumsfeld.

But Steve Clemons has a contrary view.

He thinks Hayden’s appointment may actually bolster John Negroponte in his efforts to resist Rumsfeld. There are a lot of different moving parts in what’s going on here — contending personalities, fights over the structure of the intel community, whether the balance of power will be at the Pentagon or elsewhere, etc. But on balance, blunting Rumsfeld in his efforts to run everything out of DOD seems like a good thing.

Steve also says that Steve Kappes, a key CIA player who was run out by Goss, will be coming back as Hayden’s deputy.