It's a great comfort to know that Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham - of the bribery scandal - and Congressman Ken Calvert, both (R-CA), didn't see fit to bring Thomas Kontogiannis, a.k.a alleged co-conspirator #3 in the Cunningham plea agreement, along with them for their classified briefings in Saudi Arabia. Reports the North County Times today in a story on Kontogiannis:

And while Kontogiannis did participate in some of the meetings that he and Cunningham had with Saudi ministers, Calvert said that Kontogiannis "wasn't involved in any classified or high-level information as far as I can recall."

"If I had known his background, I wouldn't have felt very comfortable, but I didn't know," he said.

And isn't it wonderful to know that Cunningham, who has admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors working through companies affiliated with Kontogiannis, sat on the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 Attacks? I mean, Cunningham could never have been bought off by Saudi interests, could he have?

Let's revisit Cunningham's remarks about Saudi Arabia that he placed into the Congressional Record on October 4, 2004:

The Government of Saudi Arabia has implemented a number of political and economic reforms to encourage political participation, promote economic growth, increase foreign investment and expand employment opportunities. The Kingdom has been updating and modernizing its academic curricula, and monitoring its religious schools. ...

It sure sounds like it was written by a Saudi PR firm. Not likely that Cunningham's staff wrote that -- it was a staff-free trip. Couldn't be, could it, that Cunningham was so indiscriminate in his bribetaking that he let Saudi interests influence his remarks, the way he let say $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors influence his defense appropriations recommendations?

And you know, it's not like anyone from San Diego such as former Rep. Cunningham and Rep. Calvert should be concerned about Saudi connections to the two Saudi 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego for several months before the attacks, right? Sponsored by members of the Saudi community in San Diego? Definitely nothing to look at here, I would think.

Update: One other point. Presumably former "defense contractor" Mitchell J. Wade, one of the alleged co-conspirators from whom Cunningham has admitted taking bribes, had a security clearance. After all, he formerly was an assistant to a Defense Department undersecretary during the first Bush administration, and 80% of the people in his former firm MZM had security clearances to work on some of the highly classified programs for which they had government contracts. So, apparently that clearance process didn't weed out the fact that Wade had bought a yacht that a Congressman was living on while steering contracts to Wade's firm. Nor that he had bought the same Congressman's house in Del Mar California, and sold it a month later for a $700,000 loss. One wonders what else might have been overlooked in such a security clearance process. For instance, who might Wade really have been working for? Might he himself have received what could be construed as bribes from someone? Did he in effect get reimbursed for his bribes to Cunningham by somebody else? Who might be interested in all of those counterintelligence contracts Wade's MZM was getting? And not just for their monetary value?

Posted by Laura at January 9, 2006 03:27 PM