Connecting the Dots; Duke to Dick

Laura Rozen at The American Prospect reports: On or about August 30, 2002, just a month after receiving the $140,000 contract from the White House/OVP, "Wade paid $140,000 … to a third party" for a yacht he gave Duke Cunningham. Above and beyond the fact that a specific sum of money contracted by Dick Cheney's office was used expressly to bribe Duke Cunningham, Duke and Dick also have in common a friendly relationship with the money conduit Mitchell Wade. Wade, who pled guilty to bribing Cunningham, worked in Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's Pentagon from 1991 to 1993. In 2002, Wade's company MZM got its first ever federal government contract, a one-month, $140,000 paycheck from the White House, allegedly for providing computers, office furniture, and specialized computer programming services to the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Wade's company subsequently got three more contracts from the White House and tens of millions of dollars in contracts from the Defense Department and other federal agencies, many of them for classified intelligence work. And it was intelligence contracting scams for which Cunningham got busted. When Prosecutor Carol lam was fired, she had just indicted Brent Wilkes (a defense contractor and big money Bush/Cheney donor) and CIA executive director Kyle Dustin Foggo. Her investigation had only just begun. Could Carol Lam have been canned because she was also sniffing around the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney?