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Looking Past the Corruption. From the AP: "Cunningham case at start of sprawling federal probe":
Exactly. In some ways, Wilkes has a lot in common with Jack Abramoff, including their shared southern California GOP roots going back to the era that elevated Reagan and which accompanied him to Washington. Early on, Abramoff earned his anti-communist street credentials serving the apartheid cause in South Africa and maintaining support for it among a certain faction of Congress; Wilkes did his version of that lobbying targeted congressmen for support for arming and funding the contras in Central America. The common theme being picking the anti-communist team, no matter how morally unsavory, and backing them aggressively, even when Congress writ large had outlawed it. This was the price of admission to a certain club that flourished in the Reagan era, that has echoes in the present one. Abramoff eventually got tied in with DeLay. While Wilkes, through his San Diego College Republican connections, got tied in with Bill Lowery (who, the SDUT reports today, led the effort to get Congressional support for arming the contras), and several others from the southern California GOP delegation, including but not only Cunningham. And of course, Abramoff and Wilkes are both now at the center of separate wheels whose spokes touch various (and some mutual) congressmen now under investigative scrutiny for corruption.... The link in all these strands isn't Cunningham, who pleaded guilty to taking $2.4-million in bribes from defense contractors. It's San Diego businessman Brent Wilkes, who is described as an unindicted co-conspirator.
Prosecutors allege Wilkes paid Cunningham more than $626,000 in bribes from 2000 to 2004 to win government contracts for his companies. But it's Wilkes' links to other lawmakers and government officials that have expanded the case.
But what has particularly interested me about the Wilkes case is the controversial national security policies he has been connected to, via his lobbying and contracting work, recently and going back to the Reagan era. The fact that he and his former partner Wade were going for not just any federal contract that fell off the truck, but for defense and intelligence contracts, including increasingly in recent years off-the-books, "black" contracts. What is the common theme, if there is one, between the policies that generated those black and gray contracts, and the unusual degree of corruption that seemed to accompany them? I've been thinking about this a lot, and it's not an obvious one. Why is it in some ways the more prosaic, superficial issue -- the corruption -- that gets surfaced and investigated -- rather than the policies connected to it? Is it an easier, or politically safer, topic to investigate how they got the contracts, than to investigate the underlying purpose of some of the more controversial contracts doled out to Wilkes and Wade? Including, in an earlier era, the covert backing of the contras Wilkes (and Foggo) were involved with, and more recently, the Pentagon domestic intelligence program Cunningham co-conspirator Wade was contracted to perform, and the covert extraordinary rendition program -- conveying terror suspects for torture -- that Wilkes was allegedly in discussions to get a contract to provide a plane network for? I gave a go to thinking about that here. Garance Franke-Ruta offers her thoughts here.
Certainly the fact that black contracts -- along with the secret policies that generate them -- have zero public scrutiny is a factor in the accompanying propensity for corruption. 'We can get away with it, because who's going to know but us?' And Wilkes might have thought he was protected, because of the covert work he would seem to know about and discussed doing for the US government, and perhaps that made him take unnecessary risks other contractors might avoid. Or maybe corrupting some number of officials was even a deliberate strategy to build a measure of protection for himself. (Conceivably, Wilkes would seem to have information about public officials that a prosecutor might want to trade in exchange for leniency.) But I don't think any of these theories quite gets at what was going on here.
It seems there is perhaps something deeper, a mutual buying-into a philosophy of governance, combined with a set of deep common cultural experiences from a certain era in southern California Republican circles, that connects those who doled out these contracts to those who received them, lavishing favors in return. These people -- Cunningham, Wilkes, Foggo, Lowery, Brant "Nine Fingers" Bassett, and perhaps others -- were truly sympatico. They came from similar backgrounds, had many shared experiences, and were on the same wave length. One senses that in some way, they felt themselves to be part of a fraternity, this club that had as one of its principals unquestioning supporting for perhaps controversial national security policies (arming the contras, the anti communist cause, the extaordinary renditions, the Top Gun stuff, etc.). That's my theory, looking at how long and overlapping the history is, the common experiences in the southern California GOP and San Diego's Naval aviation community and the SDSU College Republicans, Wilkes' and Bassett's ancestral roots in Mormon Idaho, the common tour many of them took to central America to be part of the covert US effort to arm the contras, the later flocking together to almost a southern Californian/Hollywood idea of Washington power, from the Watergate to the houseboats, etc. They were their own sort of fraternity, with a fraternity's peculiar sort of self-selecting cultural insularity, debauchery, and ritual displays of machismo -- and a fraternity's tradition of helping each other out later professionally.
It will be interesting to see what comes out about the nature of some of the recent contracts Wilkes was pursuing as the various interrelated corruption cases proceed. It's also worth noting that one contract Wilkes was expecting to get was so big, he had already promised $40 million as a gift to his alma mater, according to a source with direct knowledge I've been in touch with. Think about that. To date, we have heard that Wilkes had received about $90 million total in US government contracts. Something in the pipeline apparently dwarfed that.
And then think about this: that the only reason we are learning any of this -- the allegedly largest Congressional corruption scandal in U.S. history, the disturbing nature of some of the contracts -- is because of a journalistic investigation launched by Marcus Stern. The news story did not follow a prosecutor's investigation. The prosecutor's investigation was prompted by the detailed revelations in a news story. Nothing else would seem to be proactively protecting the public from this type of behavior going on for years and years. And there's a policy correlary to that as well.
(Editor's note: This post has been updated).