Mitchell Wade is the defense and intelligence contractor who paid the bribes to former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) that eventually led to both men pleading guilty to multiple felonies. Cunningham has already served a year in prison and Wade still awaits sentencing. Only weeks after the Duke story broke, reporters noted that Wade’s company, MZM Inc., had gotten its first-ever federal contract from the White House itself.  

The contract, signed on July 15, 2002, was for $140,000 worth of “office furniture.” A December 2005 Los Angeles Times article added a bit more detail, reporting that the contract was “to provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Cheney.”

Now, given Wade’s modus operandi, which was essentially to corrupt executive-branch and congressional officials in order to obtain pricey intel and defense contracts, this contract has long been a subject of speculation and bemused disbelief on the part of those who have followed the scandal closely. MZM had only been approved for federal contracting two months earlier, and the first contract it gets is to deliver desks and chairs and PCs to Vice President Cheney’s office. Add to the mix the fact that Wade had long bragged about his pull with the vice president and his aides, and the whole deal starts to sound more than a little fishy.

Indeed, on Monday of this week, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asking for details about the mystery contract.

But I can clear up a bit of the mystery. The answer to what the contract was for is revealed in an upcoming book on the Cunningham scandal written by the guy who broke the story, Marcus Stern, and his colleagues at Copley News Service, Jerry Kammer, Dean Calbreath and George E. Condon Jr., who as a team led coverage on the story for the next year.

The book’s called The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught. And earlier this week I got a glance at a key passage. It reports that the contract was not for “office furniture” but for screening the president’s mail. That is, as in screening it for anthrax and other biohazards. Remember, this was in mid-2002, not too long after the anthrax scare on Capitol Hill.  

After learning this from the Duke book I independently confirmed that this was the case. According to a knowledgeable source, the text of the contract itself refers to “threat mail technology insertion” which I believe is spook-speak for screening technology for anthrax and other biohazards.

But that’s not the end of the story.

If you’re a Cunningham case aficionado, you know that in early 2002 Mitchell Wade was still acting as a cutout for his corruption mentor Brent Wilkes — who’s now awaiting trial in the Cunningham case. And around the same time Wilkes was up on the Hill making friends and handing out campaign contributions trying to get into the anthrax mail-screening racket himself.

Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) chatted up colleagues in the House Administration Committee about a sham company Wilkes had dubbed Mailsafe, which could screen congressional mail.

Now-imprisoned Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) also seemed to have Wilkes’s back. Ney, of course, was chairman of the committee, which had jurisdiction over Hill mail. And like he had done for Jack Abramoff business associate Adam Kidan, Ney read into the record an encomium lauding Wilkes’s charitable efforts.  

So it all comes back to the same question: Why did a company like Wade’s, which had no track record whatsoever and had only been approved to receive federal government contracts two months earlier, get a contract from the White House to screen the mail of the president of the United States? Was Wade actually working in concert with, or as the cutout for, accused fellow Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes? And what roles might Doolittle and Ney have played? What about Wade’s claims of having pull with the vice president? Is that what got him the deal?

As Wade’s plea agreement states and the Wilkes indictment alleges, the Wilkes-Wade business model was corrupting members of Congress and the executive branch in order to obtain pricey government contracts, often but not always for worthless products and services, and almost always stashed away in classified programs where the light of day could never expose their corrupt practices. And Wade’s first contract was with the White House itself. So whose palm got greased?

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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