Duke’s Letter Revealed!The San Diego Union-Tribune published excerpts from a fiery letter it received from Duke Cunningham, the felonious ex-congressman the paper helped put in jail.
But, as clever Reader DH found, the paper secretly published the entire letter, hiding it in a PDF on its site.
You can read the four-page letter here. It’s clearly a response to Marcus Stern, the U-T reporter who broke the Duke scandal and now appears to be working on a book about the saga. “You write you book,” Cunningham wrote in a barely-legible scrawl, “and remember what forge [sic] got from [Mitchell] Wade [one of Duke’s main bribers] they you printed” he continued writing, “as truth will come out and you will find out how liablist [sic] you have & will be,” he finished.
Although he wrote early in the letter that he could not discuss his case, Duke dropped some tantalizing tidbits later on.
“Ask yourself why I kicked [Wade] off his own boat twice, told him I was not going to stay on his boat and put it up for sale,” Duke wrote. That appears to be a reference to the Duke-Stir, a boat which Wade bought and later gave to Cunningham.
He also appears to disclose classified information. “There is a secret paper in my file that the U.S. Airforce presented to me (both former Chiefs of USAF) to increase the MZM programs and the justification for doing so,” Duke wrote.
“It was funded at less than wanted & it will today save lives in the best Aviation Humit [sic] Program in existence now ever deployed with our training forces.”
Here’s the entire letter. Note: he doesn’t say anything about hookers.
