Brent Wilkes, “Co-conspirator #1” in the Duke Cunningham scandal, has been pretty quiet lately, but he opened up to the New York Times, which ran a must-read story yesterday.
Mr. Wilkes had set up separate meetings with the lawmakers hoping to win a government contract, and he planned to punctuate each pitch with a campaign donation. But his hometown congressman, Representative Bill Lowery of San Diego, a Republican, told him that presenting the checks during the sessions was not how things were done, Mr. Wilkes recalled.
Instead, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lowery taught him the right way to do it: hand over the envelope in the hallway outside the suite, at least a few feet away.
That was the beginning of a career built on what Mr. Wilkes calls “transactional lobbying,” which made him a rich man but also landed him in the middle of a criminal investigation.
It’s hard not to enjoy the euphemisms of a Republican-dominated Washington. Up until recently, if a lobbyist paid a lawmaker to help win a government contract, it was called “bribery.” In 2006, it’s “transactional lobbying.”
Wilkes described a twisted system in which the appropriations process has become little more than a shakedown.
He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.
Mr. Wilkes described the system bluntly: “Lowery would always say, ‘It is a two-part deal,’ ” he recalled. ” ‘Jerry will make the request. Jerry will carry the vote. Jerry will have plenty of time for this. If you don’t want to make the contributions, chair the fund-raising event, you will get left behind.’ “
Dems may have largely given up on the “culture of corruption” as a campaign theme, but that doesn’t change the fact that under Republican “leadership,” the appropriations process was a pay-to-play enterprise.