The Duke Cunningham scandal turned out to be as overdone, cartoonish and free of all ambiguity as the man himself. And Duke’s exit sounded more like the confession of a disgraced televangelist than the usually defiant send-offs of Washington pols caught in the webs of their own making.

Now Cunningham’s various ill-gotten gains — the fancy rugs, the candelabra, the ornate furniture and antiques — have been confiscated by the IRS and placed on display in a warehouse in San Diego where the now-former congressman’s constituents can ogle all the pricey gifts he bagged while purportedly representing him.

Soon, the IRS will sell the stuff off at auction.

But watch closely because this isn’t ending with Duke Cunningham.

According to my sources and a scattering of published reports, the Cunningham scandal appears to be evolving into a full-fledged defense and intelligence contracting scandal with Duke Cunningham just the most colorful character and the first to be taken down. As part of his plea agreement, Cunningham has agreed to assist prosecutors in their ongoing investigation. And, I’m told, one of the four unnamed “co-conspirators” mentioned in the charges against him has been cooperating with investigators pretty much from the beginning.

Most of the original attention in the Cunningham scandal focused on Mitchell Wade, owner of MZM Inc. He’s the one who bought Cunningham’s house at that comically inflated price and set in motion the chain of events that led to Cunningham’s downfall. But the person to focus on is the man identified in court documents as co-conspirator No. 1, Brent Wilkes. (Wade actually came up through Wilkes’s operation.)

Wilkes is commonly referred to as a “defense contractor,” but his real line of work seems a bit different. Wilkes specialized in finding companies or products for which the Department of Defense had little or no use and then lathering up a few members of Congress so that they’d force the Pentagon to buy his junk.

According to Cunningham’s guilty plea, entered last month in San Diego, the lathering included bribes to Cunningham. It also included the standard generous campaign contributions and, according to an article last weekend in The San Diego Union-Tribune, perhaps less traditional “hospitality suites” at hotels around Washington.

According to an Aug. 5 article in the same paper, Wilkes even rented a share of a private jet, most of which went to ferrying Duke and Tom DeLay and a few other Reps. around the country. On one campaign swing alone in July 2003, DeLay used up at least a quarter of Wilkes’s annual allotment of flying time on the jet. DeLay came in second to Cunningham, according to the Union-Tribune article, in the number of hours logged on Air Wilkes.

Good work if you can get it, and Wilkes got a lot of it.

My sources tell me that the investigation is now expanding into the contracting bureaucracy at the Pentagon — particularly those dealing with top-secret or “black” programs. And there may be a CIA component to the investigation as well.

As first reported by Laura Rozen in the American Prospect Online, Brent Wilkes — the inveterate schemer — is the longtime close, personal friend of a guy named Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo.

Foggo turns out to be the No. 3 man today at the CIA, specifically, the agency’s executive director.

When former Rep. Porter Goss (R.-Fla.) became CIA director last year, he made news and not a few enemies by clearing the decks at the agency and promoting a bunch of new people to top positions. Foggo was one of them.

In an article in The Washington Post from late last year, Walter Pincus wrote that retired CIA officials said that Foggo “had maintained a close relationship in recent years with several Republican staff members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence whom Goss, the panel’s former chairman, has brought to the agency as his top assistants.”

(Foggo reportedly also dissented from some of the contracting reforms initiated by his predecessor under George Tenet.)

Now, I know we’re juggling several balls here. But, remember, House Intel is a committee Duke Cunningham sat on. And that assignment was where Duke got a lot of the juice that made him so valuable to the defense/intel contractors like Wilkes and Mitch Wade who owned him.

Then just this week in Government Executive magazine, Jason Vest reported that “federal investigators in San Diego have made it clear that while just-resigned Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham pled guilty last week to taking bribes from defense contractors, their public corruption probe will not stop at Cunningham. Numerous current and retired CIA officials say they will not be surprised if the investigation touches the CIA in general, and its third-ranking official [Foggo] in particular.”

It seems unlikely that further developments in this story will have quite the opera buffa quality that probably only Duke Cunningham is capable of creating with his almost farcical and lightly concealed personal corruption.

But this story isn’t over. Stay tuned.

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