Duke put up, shuts up? [and more! update]

Incompetence in the federal government? Yeah, right. So maybe "Duke" Cunningham won't be talking anymore after all.

TPMMuckraker points out that the way Duke's case and sentencing was handled gives him no incentive and maybe a disincentive to tell anymore. Basically, you don't sentence and imprison the convict until after you have extracted needed information.

Suspicious? Thinking that the corruption doesn't seem to begin and end with Rep. Cunningham? Remember that this prosecution was run by Rumsfeld's Pentagon. If there was an arm of The Regime to trust less than the Department of Justice (OK, and less than HUD ... and FDA ... and EPA-- yes, it's a long list), then it would surely be the Pentagon

It took a remarkably short amount of time for prosecutors to tie up the Cunningham case. The San Diego Union Tribune broke the story on June 12, 2005. By November
28, Duke had pled guilty. He was sentenced to 8 years, 4 months incarceration March 3, 2006. From start to finish, the investigation and prosecution lasted less than 9 months.

"They stopped looking very quickly. They stopped digging," [Melanie] Sloan [a former federal prosecutor and the Executive Director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] said, pointing out that Cunningham had been accepting bribes for years - for at least six years, according to the prosecutors. Since the investigation ran its course so quickly, she doubted that they'd really gone back to explore the breadth of Duke's corruption.

Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, agreed: "This was not handled in a way that would normally be done for an ongoing investigation."

"Cunningham's greed may have been more obvious than other members of Congress, but it's clear that there is a wider circle of individuals involved in this scandal. The fact is Duke Cunningham became the designated defendant for D.C.... From the beginning, the fix was in on this investigation."

I was having fun with analogies to the Sopranos and the Mafia in an earlier post. Not anymore. You can't even try to keep ahead of these people.

[UPDATE] TPMMuckraker has even more, about the seriousnesss of Cunningham's actions and the limitations of the prosectution. They cite a journalist, Marcus Stern, of the San Diego Union Tribune, who wrote back in March:

When the prosecution argued for a stiff jail sentence for Cunningham, it said Cunningham had cost the country financially and had harmed it. But it never said how much Cunningham's crimes had cost the country or how much damage had been done.

That's because nobody knows.

Most of the money Cunningham directed to Wade and Wilkes involved classified programs. Many of these so-called "black" or secret programs were funded in response to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Because these programs are part of the nation's black budget, there is almost no way for Cunningham's colleagues to have fully known the details of the earmarking he was doing as both a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the defense appropriations committee.

Now do we wonder why the Pentagon-led prosecution did not go too deeply? It would have cost them too much.