Lewis Had Close Ties to Cunningham Briber Wilkes (But Do Feds Care?)

Since the LA Times reported in May that the Feds are probing Rep. Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, folks have assumed prosecutors are hunting for evidence of crimes involving his connections to lobbyist Bill Lowery. The operating theory is that Lowery’s firm, Copeland Lowery, shared a symbiotic relationship with Lewis, giving him hefty campaign donations and other favors in exchange for earmarks.

Maybe that’s it. But all the attention going to his relationship with Lowery detracts from a very real issue for him, and one which I’m surprised the Feds aren’t more curious about: his possible involvement with former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s (R-CA) scams, or at least his awareness of them.

In a nutshell: Lewis had to approve every single one of the earmarks Cunningham inserted on behalf of Brent Wilkes. His staff had to review them. When the Pentagon didn’t want Wilkes working for them, they would have called Lewis to complain. I’ve spoken with a number of Hill experts — former appropriations staffers and clerks — who agree on these points.

Moreover, Lewis was (despite his recent protestations) friends with Brent Wilkes. He knew the man for many years, traveling with him on a number of occasions — to Guatemala in the late 1980s, on a scuba trip to Belize in the early 1990s, and in 1998 for a tour of his San Diego offices.

Lewis cops to trips and meetings with Wilkes for which reporters can produce records, but says he either doesn’t recall talking with Wilkes, or insists he remembers only that they did not talk about business. Others have a longer memory, and they tell a different story. One former Wilkes colleague in particular told me Wilkes would refer to Lewis as “my man in Congress.” When Wilkes introduced him to Lewis, he said they appeared to be “very good friends.”

So, you tell me: From 1999 to 2005, Lewis sat in the chairman’s seat of the House defense approps subcommittee and approved a steady stream of requests from Duke to send earmarks to Wilkes’ company — by 2005 the total value had topped $60 million. Lewis personally intervened for Wilkes at one point, holding up funding for a major defense project until the Pentagon stopped complaining about working with Wilkes.

Meanwhile, Lewis cashed $60,000 worth of checks from Wilkes to his campaign, making Lewis one of the top three recipients of Wilkes’ largesse. And he watched Wilkes go from being a relative Washington novice in 1993 to flying GOP leaders around in his private jet, spreading hundreds of thousands of dollars around Washington, working out of a swank $11 million custom-built office building, and generally living a Beltway-savvy Life of Riley by the time the Cunningham corruption bubble burst last year.

Do you believe Lewis didn’t have a clue what was going on?

More importantly, do the Feds care? I can’t tell. The subpoenas we’ve heard about have pointed only to interest in Copeland Lowery. However, we don’t know what Duke Cunningham may be telling investigators, nor what kind of scoops Mitchell Wade (a former Wilkes associate, and fellow briber) has been giving the Feds about Lewis, if any. And the subpoenas to the cities may not be targeting Lewis but his compromised underlings, former staffers Jeff Shockey and Letitia White. Investigators may plan to catch them, force plea bargains, and use those longtime trusted aides of Lewis to learn about the congressman’s dealings with Cunningham and Wilkes.