Did the Bush-men fund vote fraud with money earmarked for rebuilding Iraq?

A poster to Democratic Underground offers a intriguing glimpse of a possible conspiracy to fund the G.O.P.'s 2004 election shennanigans. The scenario remains unproven and hypothetical. Still, we should tug on this thread to see how it unravels.

In essence: As coincidence -- and I think it is coincidence -- would have it, the lawyer for Matt Cooper (of Plame fame) not long ago had another interesting client: Custer Battles, a now-infamous firm accused of defrauding the U.S. taxpayers of $50 million earmarked for Iraq.

The firm was co-founded be a former CIA agent with the too-good-to-be-true name of Michael Battles. One report (which I have yet to verify) holds that he has also functioned as a talking head on -- but of course! -- Fox News. The "Custer" part of the name derives from Scott Custer, who also seems to be a "spooked up" sort of fellow. The sketchy accounts so far available to me indicate that both men served in the Special Forces.

For the meat of the matter, I cannot improve on the wording of the afore-cited D.U. poster:

...Custer Battles allegedly used offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and other "tax haven" countries.

...Bush refused to pursue the prosecution of Custer Battles.

...Michael Battles also coordinated fundraising for the Republican Party!

Wayne Madsen also mentioned Cayman Island accounts in his controversial and unverified (and, to a certain degree, debunked) pieces on the funding of vote fraud.

A site inspired by Madsen's work quotes a "Legal Times" piece on Custer Battles and its deft ways of separating the taxpayers from their dollars:

Documents unearthed as part of a whistleblower suit against Fairfax, Va.'s Custer Battles reveal for the first time the extent to which the defense contractor is accused of gouging the Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq following the U.S. invasion of the country in 2003.

Among those documents is a spreadsheet that appears to show the company billing the government nearly $10 million for dozens of items, including food, vehicles, and cooking pots. The total cost to Custer Battles, according to the spreadsheet, was less than $4 million -- a profit margin of 150 percent, far higher than the 25 percent margin allowed under its contract.

For critics of the Bush administration's handling of postwar Iraq, Custer Battles has become something of a symbol of contractor excess during the 14-month period that the Coalition Provisional Authority governed Iraq. The company was able to secure tens of millions of dollars' worth of security and logistical contracts from the CPA -- despite the fact that it didn't even exist until just months before the invasion of Iraq.

Last fall, Custer Battles was suspended from government contracting after Pentagon investigators documented evidence indicating that the company had defrauded the CPA by inflating its costs. The scheme, according to the investigation, involved a series of "sham" companies that were used to produce false invoices and hide the actual costs of items.

An excellent expose (complete with explanatory cartoon!) of the ways Custer Battles conducted its chicanery can be found here.

(Incidentally, some aver that Custer Battles' profiteering led to the death of four employees of the company.)

As noted above, Custer Battles (run by Rob Roy Trumble, another fellow with a name straight out of Thomas Pynchon novel) seems to have begun life as the "Talon News" of the security services field. That is to say, it was a "Potemkin Village" corporation which somehow prospered through powerful connections:

Founded by two Army veterans, Scott Custer and Michael Battles -- a former Republican candidate for Congress in Rhode Island -- the firm had little experience in private security and employed only a handful of people at the time. The two entrepreneurs, both in their mid-30s, made their first payroll with credit cards and personal loans. Since then, Custer Battles has landed security contracts totaling an estimated $100 million that include protecting IraqÂ’s new currency and training the Iraqi army.

But during those early months in Iraq, the company resorted to using crooked accounting and "sham" companies in far-flung countries including the Cayman Islands, Cyprus and Lebanon, to dramatically pump up charges on contracts by as much as 162 percent on equipment, construction supplies and services, claim plaintiffsÂ’ Robert Isakson and W.D."Pete" Baldwin, both of who worked for Custer Battles.

"When I see crooks come into a war zone where people are fighting and dying, I just turn them in," Isakson says. "In my opinion they were cheating the government and taxpayers and just being rewarded with more contracts."

We know fromm a Washington Post account that Battles speaks with certain unnamed individuals in the White House "almost daily."

Some of you may already be smelling a rat named Karl skulking in the shadows of this story...

Obviously, the most problematic aspect of the D.U. posting concerns the nature of the "fundraising" conducted by Michael Battles. I see no evidence suggesting that this fundraising had any direct connection to vote fraud. But before you dismiss the idea out of hand, ask yourself a few questions about Custer Battles and its Iraq adventures:

Where did the pilfered millions go? Obviously, wallets were fattened -- but the matter must go deeper than that.

Why did important Iraq contracts go to an untried start-up company? No doubt because Michael Battles had friends in the White House.

And why did those friends decide to do Battles so grand a favor? We may fairly surmise that they expected a favor in return.

Those hoping to research the matter further may want to concentrate their energies in two areas: 1. Possible links between Rove or his compatriots and Battles. 2. The exact nature of the "fundraising" conducted by Michael Battles. Where did he get the money, and where did it go?

Say what you will about Wayne Madsen, I think his instincts are correct in one regard: Nationwide election fraud requires cash -- lots of it -- for pay-offs. Follow the money, as Mr. Felt used to say.