You Can't make this *&%$ up, who is in charge? who is running the show? or better yet who has our backs?. If you or I were to attempt what these people have got away with we would be under the jail, but that's what happens to the average person who go's to work every day trying to make ends meet and take care of the family but all the wild doing it the right way. We all of us are not perfect trust me this I know but the thing is this for the most part, most of us would rather give up some creature comforts if it meant we could all have a decent life, but these people take greed to a new level, power to the next level. How much can one man need, don't get me wrong I like nice things as much as anyone this is not just wanting a good life this is pinky and the brain and I'll let you figure out who's who. It must be nice to be one of the good old boys, when I was in the army I was told what buddies do for one another, well I never had a buddie and it seems to me these guys are as thick as , hell they are.




October 18, 2006
Report Spells Out Abuses by Former Congressman
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — Former Representative Randy Cunningham pressured and intimidated staff members of the House Intelligence Committee to help steer more than $70 million in classified federal business to favored military contractors, according to a Congressional investigation made public on Tuesday.
The investigation found that Mr. Cunningham, a California Republican who is serving an eight-year prison sentence for bribery, repeatedly abused his position on the committee to authorize money for military projects, often over the objections of staff members who criticized some of the spending as wasteful.
The inquiry also found that despite numerous “red flags” about the propriety of a particular contract for work on a controversial Pentagon counterintelligence program, committee staff members for three years “continued to accept and support Mr. Cunningham’s growing requests for this project.”
Mr. Cunningham resigned from Congress in November after pleading guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes from military contractors. His plea was mainly related to his activities as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.
The investigation’s report lays out for the first time how Mr. Cunningham maneuvered within the classified world of the Intelligence Committee to win secret contracts for two friends, Brent R. Wilkes and Mitchell J. Wade, both contractors.
Lawyers for Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Wade declined to comment on the report. A lawyer for Mr. Wilkes was traveling outside the country.
The report is another embarrassment for Congressional Republicans, who, three weeks before Election Day, are trying to contain the damage from accusations that former Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, made sexually explicit remarks in e-mail messages to Congressional pages. The report on Mr. Cunningham was made public by Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Ms. Harman’s action drew a rebuke from Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the committee, who called the release “disturbing and beyond the pale.”
In an interview, Ms. Harman said Tuesday that the public had a right to see the conclusions of the inquiry, which was led by Michael Stern, an outside special counsel, and completed in May. She said she had been pushing for months for the committee to produce an unclassified version of the report.
“I thought it would be out in early August,” she said, “well ahead of the election season.”
Only the five-page executive summary of the report was released. The full 59-page report remains classified.
Several crucial witnesses, including Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Wade, were not interviewed for the investigation.
Mr. Cunningham’s positions on both the Intelligence Committee and the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee gave him an advantage in obtaining classified spending provisions called earmarks.
In theory, the Intelligence Committee is supposed to authorize classified expenses before the Appropriations Committee puts them into military spending bills. But in practice, the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee has sometimes originated classified earmarks on its own, and the Intelligence Committee depends on the appropriators for its spending requests. By serving on both panels, Mr. Cunningham had influence over the entire classified budget process.
The inquiry found no evidence that staff members of the Intelligence Committee had profited or expected to profit from Mr. Cunningham’s dealings. It also concluded that committee staff members had been suspicious of Mr. Wade and “disinclined to provide him any favorable treatment.”
At the same time, committee staff members repeatedly acceded to Mr. Cunningham’s demands to steer money to Mr. Wade’s company, MZM Inc. The report describes how Mr. Cunningham worked to gain support within the Intelligence Committee for a program run by MZM at the Counterintelligence Field Activity agency of the Pentagon.
The counterintelligence program has been criticized by civil liberties groups, which say it authorizes military officials to spy on Americans under the guise of protecting domestic military bases.
But as a result of a “corrupt conspiracy” between Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Wade, the inquiry found, the Intelligence Committee’s ability to monitor the counterintelligence program effectively “appears to have been seriously impeded.”
The report cited Mr. Wilkes’s close friendship with Kyle Foggo, formerly a top administrator at the "More articles about the Central Intelligence Agency." "http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/
central_intelligence_agency
/index.html?inline=nyt-org"> Central Intelligence Agency, who helped manage the agency’s dealings with contractors. The inquiry found that Mr. Foggo also worked with Intelligence Committee staff members, including Brant G. Bassett, a former C.I.A. officer, on classified projects relating to the management of the agency.
Mr. Bassett and Mr. Foggo provided Intelligence Committee members with “trinkets” to win favor for their efforts, including a carpet displaying the words “Global War on Terror.” The report said it was not clear whether these activities violated any regulation or law, but it recommended further inquiry.
The report suggested that Mr. Foggo, who is under investigation by federal authorities in San Diego for his dealings with Mr. Wilkes on a logistics contract, might be facing a broader inquiry than had been known. It said the investigation of Mr. Foggo also involved “several large contracts” managed by an unidentified contractor, who attended a dinner in June 2003 with Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes at the Capital Grille here.
Mr. Foggo’s lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, declined to comment.
David Johnston and David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.



Judge Revokes Lay's ConvictionRuling Rankles Enron Workers, Investors
By Carrie JohnsonWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, October 18, 2006;
A federal judge in Houston yesterday wiped away the fraud and conspiracy conviction of Kenneth L. Lay, the Enron Corp. founder who died of heart disease in July, bowing to decades of legal precedent but frustrating government attempts to seize nearly $44 million from his family.
The ruling worried employees and investors who lost billions of dollars when the Houston energy-trading company filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001. It also came more than a week after Congress recessed for the November elections without acting on a last-ditch Justice Department proposal that would have changed the law to allow prosecutors to seize millions of dollars in investments and other assets that Lay controlled.
With the judge's order, Lay's conviction on 10 criminal charges will be erased from the record. "The indictment against Kenneth L. Lay is dismissed," U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III wrote in a spare, 13-page order.
Legal analysts said Lake's ruling closely hewed to a long-held doctrine called abatement, which allows a conviction to be vacated if defendants die before they are able to exercise their right to appeal. Courts typically rule that defendants' constitutional rights to challenge their convictions outweigh other considerations, and the law hesitates to punish the dead, the analysts said.
Samuel J. Buffone, a Washington-based lawyer for Lay, said the family was pleased with the ruling. "As far as we're concerned, this is the last step," Buffone said. "It's as if the indictment never occurred."
But governance experts said Lay's name forever will be linked with the era's most complex and far-reaching corporate fraud.
"A lot of lives were ruined, both the perpetrators' and the victims,' " University of Tennessee corporate governance expert Joseph V. Carcello said. "This happened on his watch. Even if he's not legally culpable, he's culpable as a manager."
Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission still may pursue their civil case against Lay's estate, but their task will be more difficult because they can no longer introduce the fact of his conviction and instead must prove again, in a resource-intensive trial, that he broke the law. The SEC case has been stayed pending resolution of the status of Lay's criminal conviction. The agency's five commissioners must decide in the weeks to come whether to proceed against Lay's estate.
The court ruling shifts the spotlight onto former Enron chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling, 52, who is to be sentenced Monday on 19 fraud, conspiracy and false-filings charges. Skilling, Lay's protégé and fellow defendant, handled day-to-day operations at Enron until his resignation in the summer of 2001 and faces more than two decades in prison.
Skilling is the sole survivor from Enron's top management ranks and the one most likely to pay a heavy price for his decision to vigorously fight the charges against him. Earlier this month, Skilling laid out several avenues for appeal, including jury bias, faulty instructions by the judge and what he called overreaching by prosecutors that infringed on his constitutional rights.
Former finance chief Andrew S. Fastow, whom Skilling has painted as the man most responsible for the company's downfall, pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges and gave damaging testimony against his onetime patrons. A separate federal judge in Houston last month sentenced him to six years in prison, a 40 percent reduction from the seemingly iron-clad deal his defense team had struck with the government. The leader of an Enron employees group later called the benefit to Fastow "a slap in the face."
The lead plaintiffs in a separate shareholder lawsuit against former Enron executives and other advisers accused of helping the company conceal its financial problems already have said they intend to focus their attentions not on Lay's family, but on investment banks with deeper pockets.
Days before Lay's death, prosecutors had filed court papers seeking to extract $43.5 million from his financial holdings, including $6 million in a recently matured investment and at least $1.5 million more that Lay used to cover part of the mortgage on a luxury apartment in Houston. The government said it intended to set aside the money in a special fund for Enron investors and employees. Now, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold Skilling responsible for Lay's share, over Skilling's objections.
Separately yesterday, lawyers for the Lay family asked the court to release a $5 million bond that had been secured by the homes of several of Lay's five children. Federal prosecutors at the Enron Task Force declined to comment.
"Today's ruling does not change the fact that Mr. Lay was found guilty after a four-month jury trial and a separate bench trial," Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said. "We will continue to pursue all remedies available for restitution on behalf of the victims of the fraud at Enron."
Lay, 64, collapsed in a rental home near Aspen, Colo., about a month after a Houston jury found him guilty of conspiring to mislead employees and investors about Enron's mounting financial problems. His death unleashed vicious criticism on the Internet and prompted conspiracy theories that were dispelled by a coroner's report and sheriff's deputies.
A man accustomed to flying in private jets and mingling with the Bush family, foreign diplomats and owners of professional sports teams, Lay was brought low by a widening scandal after disclosures that Enron had disguised billions of dollars in debt and manufactured revenue. He told the jury at his trial earlier this year that he was in the hole $250,000 after years of spending lavishly on homes, vacations and his five children.
Federal prosecutors baited Lay into displaying a short temper and a flair for micromanagement on the witness stand, and pounced when Lay could not explain why he sold more than $77 million in Enron shares back to the company in the months before its demise.
In recent weeks, Lay's family paid an undisclosed sum to settle a smaller civil case filed by former Enron employees over their pension and retirement funds.
Ken Horton, a former Enron manager who was laid off alongside thousands of others in December 2001, said he had steeled himself for the conviction to be extinguished after word of Lay's death three months ago. But Horton, who pegged his retirement and savings plan losses in the six-figure range, expressed "great" concern that he and former colleagues would never be made whole financially. Horton said he has received only $4,000 to date.
"If I got 10 cents on the dollar, I would be elated," Horton said.