The Wilkes trial

I don't know why I haven't linked to it before, but Seth Hettana has been doing some great blogging from the Wilkes trial. This is his coverage of the testimony given by Wilkes' aide (and nephew) Joel Combs:

Through Combs’ testimony, Wilkes emerges as a savvy operator who had Cunningham’s number. Duke’s limited intelligence was something of a joke to Wilkes, Combs said. Wilkes instructed his employees to laugh at the Duke’s jokes, to find him interesting and pretend to be in awe of him. Wilkes told his employee to lose to Duke at poker and he yelled at one man who wasn’t losing enough.

Re: Mitchell Wade's testimony:

What Wade learned from Wilkes convinced him he could expand his own business and he began to cultivate his own relationship with the congressman in 2001, without telling Wilkes. When Duke asked him for $50,000 at the end of 2001, Wade viewed it as an opportunity. “I wanted to solicit the same favors and benefits that Brent did,” he said.

Wade soon had his own stash of blank stationery from Cunningham’s congressional office upon which he could write missives in Duke’s name to bully whomever he wanted. And Duke started the appropriations flowing to Wade’s company, MZM Inc. The one-man consultancy grew into a sizable defense contractor headquartered near DuPont Circle in a few years.

Amazingly, Wade was still working for Wilkes while this was going on. Eventually, Wilkes’ government contracts started going to Wade, and the game was up. But Wade was raking it in. He and Wilkes delivered worthless crap like off-the-shelf computer equipment to the government and then marked it up as much as 600 percent. The bureaucrats who knew what was going were too scared to stop it.

All of this confirm my original thesis. Wilkes not only bribed a congressman to get contracts, he did not provide any useful services to the government. Any actual work that did come in was subcontracted to lowball bidders.