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Let me point your attention to something interesting. Today, the San Diego Union-Tribune/Copley News Service's Dean Calbreath and Jerry Kammer reported on the newly opened investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as of several other committee members. And their article highlights an interesting paragraph from the government's evidence of corruption in the Duke Cunningham plea agreement:
According to government and defense industry sources, Lewis and Cunningham worked together to help Poway military contractor Brent Wilkes as he pursued contracts on Capitol Hill. Cunningham admitted taking bribes from Wilkes, who has been identified as co-conspirator No. 1 in Cunningham's plea agreement.
On April 15, 1999, three months after Lewis was named chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, he received $17,000 in campaign contributions from Wilkes and his associates. At the time, Wilkes was vying for a project to digitize military documents in the Panama Canal Zone, which the United States was about to return to Panama. [...]
But the Panama project hit a snag. The Pentagon did not want to give Wilkes as much money as he requested.
On July 6, 1999, Wilkes wrote to Cunningham saying “We need $10 m(illion) more immediately . . . This is very important and if you cannot resolve this others will be calling also.”
Wilkes' memo – contained in federal documents accompanying Cunningham's guilty plea – then named two people whose names were blacked out by the prosecutors.
According to military and defense industry sources, Lewis and Cunningham got the money for Wilkes, founder of ADCS Inc., by using their clout to threaten the funding of the Pentagon's F-22 fighter jet.
I've posted the physical image below so you can see this for yourself (thanks to kevin drum as always for graphics help). Meantime, if you have Adobe Acrobat, click on this link, and scroll all the way down to page 75 as indicated in the .pdf document (Government Exhibit 15).
This is the July 6, 1999 fax from a staffer to alleged Cunningham co-conspirator one Brent Wilkes, founder and CEO of ADCS Inc., to Cunningham, providing Cunningham with "talking points" to get the Defense Department to make an additional $10 million available to Wilkes for the Panama project. "We need $10 million more immediately" you'll see in Point 1.
Point 3 is what I want to draw your attention to. "This is very important, and if you cannot resolve this, others will be calling also -- i.e. [two blacked out names."
Check out the two blacked out names. The second one begins with a "J" and looks to have about ten letters. Any guesses?
Update: Reader C says, "Duncan Hunter and Jerry Lewis."