Mitch Wade and MZM are back in the news again, which means trouble for Virgil Goode:
The former head of a defense contracting company linked to more than $90,000 in campaign contributions to U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode pleaded guilty today to giving cash and illegal contributions to three members of Congress.Mitchell Wade, who resigned last year as chief executive officer of MZM Inc., admitted in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that he bribed Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California in exchange for government business being steered his way.
For the first time, authorities also disclosed that Wade made illegal contributions to two other lawmakers ? identified in court documents only as "Representative A" and "Representative B."
Language in the court records about Representative A bears a striking resemblance to Goode, R-Rocky Mount, who received more than $90,000 in campaign contributions from MZM?s political action committee, its employees and their spouses. Taken together, the MZM-linked donors represented Goode?s largest campaign contributor.
I'll let Hotline get into the details:
From the indictment: "His solution [to get around campaign finance laws] was to have his employees and their spouses make contributions to these two campaigns under their own names, then reimburse them -- a technique, known as "straw contributions" that is a felony under federal election law when the straw contributions amount to over ten thousand dollars. ... All in all, he made 39 different "straw" contributions, with 19 different employees or spouses. In order to maximize the impact of these contributions, Wade personally handed a number of the campaign contributions, in the form of personal checks from employees and their spouses, to one of the representatives."Who might those members be?
Well, a San Diego Union Tribune story from '05 suggests that Wade's employees were pressured to donate money to the campaigns of Cunningham, Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) and Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).
Cunningham and Goode were on the defense appropriations subcommittee in '04; Harris was not. At FECINFO.com, we searched for all contributions given by MZM employees in '04.
Remember - MZM bribed Duke Cunningham because he was on the appropriations subcommittee. Not a surprise that Virgil was also in the crosshairs.
We found several dozen --just like the indictment says -- totaling about $60K -- to Harris and Goode. This list does NOT include contributions that spouses of MZM employees made to the two. No other candidate -- not even Cunningham -- received nearly as much. The dates in the indictment concur with the dates of the illegal contributions.That last paragraph is important to note - Virgil wasn't aware of the illegality behind the fundraising. Virgil himself is "shocked and amazed" at Wade's nepharious activities and stresses that he "had no knowledge that any of the contributions by MZM persons to our campaign were illegal." I don't doubt that. But he's linked to Wade's bribery machine nonetheless, and we have to wonder whether some of Virgil's work on appropriations was for the good of the country ... or the good of his hefty campaign contributors over at MZM.The Wade plea agreement says that Wade did not inform the members that he was pressuring his employees to contribute to them and it's not at all clear whether the members are in any legal jeopardy.
A USA TODAY analysis of MZM-related campaign contributions shows how the company's growth and its political activities became intertwined at key moments. In more than 30 instances, donations from MZM's political action committee or company employees went to two members of the House Appropriations Committee — Cunningham and Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va. — in the days surrounding key votes or contract awards that helped MZM grow.
For example, MZM's political action committee gave Cunningham $5,000 in 2003 the day before his appointment to a congressional panel negotiating the final version of the defense budget. Ten days later, the day after the House passed the final Pentagon spending bill, Wade gave Cunningham $2,000.
Both lawmakers sit on the subcommittee overseeing the Pentagon's spending and have acknowledged putting language in bills that created or expanded contracts that went to MZM.
Larry Noble, an independent ethics expert with the Center for Responsive Politics, says the timing of the contributions creates the appearance that the company's political giving helped it get taxpayer-funded business from the Pentagon.
It is not illegal for defense industry political action committees or defense industry workers to make campaign donations, unless they are given with the intent of influencing Pentagon contract awards.
Political donations from military contractors are quite common, but timing those donations around contract decisions is not, said Noble, a former chief counsel for the Federal Election Commission.