A World Of Secrets

24 Mar 2006 // As if playing a high-stakes card game, a few congressmen and two senators gather behind closed doors to settle a feud over who gets the tax dollars.

The money in play - $50 million - would be steered to a pair of military contractors by slipping a few words, largely unnoticed, into the language of a massive spending bill.

One senator wants a bigger cut for a company in his state. One congressman wants more for a company whose executive plied him with $630,000 in cash and favors.

This is what insiders call a "mediation session." It's done in secret, like most pork-barrel, or earmark, spending.

This skirmish, seven years ago, would have stayed secret - if not for a brief mention buried in documents from a bribery case this year against the congressman, California Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who resigned in November.

The unfolding investigation affords rare glimpses of the secret world in which lawmakers - 435 in the House, 100 in the Senate - wrangle over billions of tax dollars for contributors and pet causes.

Extraordinary disclosures by prosecutors and, lately, some members of Congress themselves suggest a larger, systemic condition beyond any particular corruption or campaign finance case.

"People want to say this is about a couple of bad apples, but basically we gave these guys to key to Fort Knox," said Keith Ashdown, a specialist in defense spending with Taxpayers for Common Sense.

"Because nobody's really watching outside 535 offices and key committee staff, they can give money to whoever their heart desires."

No Openness Required

In an unprecedented move this month, Rep. Katherine Harris made public a list of her requests for pork barrel spending over a three-year period, including her arguments for funding each project.

But the congresswoman from Longboat Key provided next to nothing on the request that links her to a defense contractor who may be headed to prison - an associate of Cunningham, the former war hero who just started serving an eight-year prison sentence.

Nothing requires Harris or any member of Congress to reveal their earmarks.

Between 2000 and 2005, defense contractor Mitchell J. Wade of MZM Inc. bribed Cunningham and made tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to Harris and Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode.

Wade, whom Harris met personally at least twice, once at the pricey Washington restaurant Citronelle, wanted help securing earmarks.

Both went to bat for Wade, though only Goode was successful at getting money. Little is publicly known about the role played by elected officials on behalf of MZM, a company that before fiscal 2002 lacked any prime federal contracts.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, it sprang from virtually nowhere to hold big contracts involving the military, intelligence, homeland security and the White House - a company capable of leveraging the ways by which the government buys goods and services.

The larger picture, for MZM and the earmark process overall, remains mostly in the shadows. No one expects much to change soon, despite recent unprecedented disclosures and proposals for reform.

The toughest proposals call for publicly listing approved earmarks in a way that identifies the politicians who asked for each, and the causes and companies that benefit. That still likely won't reveal everything politicians seek, on behalf of whom, or why.

"We'll have more information now," Ashdown predicted. "But we won't have it all."

Limited Release From Harris

Although Harris and Goode say they were unaware Wade's contributions were illegal, neither has been entirely forthcoming, or willing to speak publicly, about their roles in steering public dollars to Wade's company.

On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Harris, Jennifer G. Hickey, said additional MZM-related documents - such as request forms, correspondence or e-mail - would not be made public, nor would Harris make any more comments.

Wade personally handed Harris checks in 2004, and at a private dinner in 2005 asked her to seek a $10 million earmark benefiting MZM. Before her contact with Wade was made public this month, Harris argued for more openness.

She repeated this stand afterward when she became one of the first members of Congress to release even a partial list of requests for earmarks.

"I am supportive of bringing transparency to the appropriations process," she said.

Goode, too, has supported legislation calling for more openness.

About her own dealings with MZM, however, Harris has provided only limited information. Goode has provided none.

Harris released a list of her earmark requests. Among them was a brief, vague letter to an appropriations committee chairman seeking money for a Navy counterintelligence program. The letter, in effect, constituted a high-priority, special request for $10 million benefiting MZM.

Unlike most requests, including those from Harris, the congresswoman provided no arguments for spending public money n a pet cause.

In contrast, when seeking $3.8 million in defense money for a medicinal powder that stops bleeding, manufactured by a company in Harris' district, she argued that it would help the military in combat and was better than any other option.

In the $10 million request, Harris wrote only a brief two-paragraph letter advocating money for the Navy program, never making an argument for its necessity or mentioning MZM.

Wade said in a plea agreement that he gave one of Harris' congressional employees a proposal for the Navy counterintelligence program.

Harris has not made public other communications about the project, such as a copy of a standard request form often used by members of Congress to seek earmarks or communications with other offices.

She has not publicly explained the role of a former Harris office employee hired by MZM about the time Harris advanced the earmark request.

Two weeks ago, Kara Borie, then a spokeswoman for Harris, promised answers to such questions.

Borie also acknowledged as untrue an earlier statement to The Tribune and The Sarasota Herald-Tribune that any contacts between the office and its former employee, once the employee joined MZM, had been "purely on a social level."

"I no longer feel comfortable standing by that statement," Borie said recently. She no longer works for Harris.

Since she was included in Wade's guilty plea Feb. 24, identified as "Representative B," Harris has been attempting to revive a flagging campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Bill Nelson. She has made public appearances under controlled situations and, except for calling Wade "a bad guy," has dodged MZM-related questions from Florida reporters.

"There are no plans to supplement the release of appropriations requests with any additional documents or to comment further on the matter," Harris spokeswoman Hickey said Thursday.

Others' Disclosures

The MZM case has sparked a raft of other first-time disclosures, too, as some members of Congress volunteered limited information about instances in which they had sought earmarks for a variety of causes - and campaign contributors.

Before the past few weeks, politicians tended to make occasional announcements about earmarks that might garner positive press, such as getting money for a local highway project.

Now, some members have begun volunteering lists of their earmarks. The man Harris is challenging, Nelson, reported landing $1.1 billion in earmarks for last year alone.

The beneficiaries are projects in Florida and elsewhere, including defense contractors who have given money for the re-election efforts of Nelson and fellow members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nelson secured money for companies such as Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics.

Such companies have been good to Nelson, too.

For instance, since 2003, executives of Armor Holdings have given Nelson $15,000 for his campaign. Nelson helped the company get a $350 million contract to make Humvees more resistant to gunfire and bombs.

Nelson is declining to make public any earmark requests that were not successful.

"The public has a right to know how their tax dollars are getting spent," said Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin. "But an unfunded project would not be of consequence. It only is if one's intent is evil."

Because the process largely takes place behind closed doors, Tampa congressman Jim Davis said, "that has created temptations and abuse."

Davis won $56 million of the $243 million in earmarks he sought in 2005 - a relatively small take.

His achievement in directing money to causes such as the University of South Florida and shoal removal in Tampa harbor, however, illustrates the degree to which even a junior member of the minority party - Davis is a Democrat in the Republican-controlled Congress - can still extract some of the pie for what he wants.

Still, Davis said he would like to see the process changed: "It ought to be more open."