Last week in this space we discussed the flurry of news reports alleging that one of the accused bribers of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) had for the past decade run a series of “hospitality suites” at D.C. hotels where CIA personnel and folks from the Hill could eat, drink, play poker and possibly get set up with prostitutes for more outlandish forms of entertainment.

All the merriment was allegedly in exchange for help bagging federal contracts. And the man in question was Brent Wilkes, an unindicted co-conspirator in the plea deals of Cunningham and confessed felon Mitchell Wade.

Since last week, the CIA has been rocked by two major resignations, first of Director Porter Goss on Friday and then of the agency’s executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo.

No one has accused Goss of any wrongdoing in the Wilkes-Cunningham contracting scandal, but the expansion of the investigation into the CIA probably still accounted, at least in part, for his rushed departure. That’s because the same lack of accusation cannot be said for Foggo. According to reports in The San Diego Union-Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, Foggo is now a target of the rapidly expanding bribery investigation.

Executive director is the No. 3 job at the agency. He’s in charge of running day-to-day operations. When Goss tapped Foggo for the position it surprised nearly everyone on both sides of the Potomac. Though Foggo was career CIA, nothing in his background suggested he was qualified for such a top leadership role. Thus, even if scandal doesn’t touch Goss personally, his role in hiring Foggo may have helped make his position at CIA unsustainable.

As a “senior law-enforcement official” told the New York Daily News when asked about Goss’s departure, “It’s all about the Duke Cunningham scandal.”

Wednesday brought more hints about what’s bubbling in the background.

On Wednesday, the western regional head of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service — the Pentagon’s law-enforcement agency — gave an on-the-record interview to San Diego’s North County Times. And he made a startling claim: Duke Cunningham isn’t cooperating.

Said the DCIS’s Rick Gwin: “In my opinion, he has not been cooperative and I have not gotten any information from him to further develop other targets. I was hoping that from a jail cell he might become more cooperative, but we just don’t have the cooperation that I think we should have.”

As a 64-year-old man who was just sentenced to more than eight years in prison, you’d think Cunningham would be doing everything possible to make nice with federal investigators.

And that’s not all Gwin said.

“This is much bigger and wider than just Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham,” he told the paper. “All that has just not come out yet, but it won’t be much longer, and then you will know just how widespread this is.”

Those are really extraordinary statements, not just because of what Gwin said but that he would say it at all.

As any reporter will tell you, it’s nearly impossible to get any federal investigator to talk specifics on the record about an ongoing criminal investigation, especially one as sensitive and politically explosive as this. And they seldom if ever drop suggestive hints that many more will be implicated.

Something’s up. But what is it? Gwin’s sending a message to someone. But to whom? Law-enforcement officials are telling reporters Goss’s resignation is tied to the Wilkes-Cunningham bribery scandal, if only because of Goss’s tie to Foggo. A federal investigator giving on-the-record interviews hinting the case is about to blow open.

From the beginning, there have been plenty of signs, for those willing to look, that the Duke Cunningham case didn’t stop with Duke Cunningham. Wilkes’s alleged contracting shenanigans spread into the CIA as well as the Pentagon. And Cunningham wasn’t Wilkes’s only supporter on Capitol Hill. Admitted Cunningham briber Mitchell Wade’s company, MZM, had multiple contracts with some of the Pentagon’s most controversial domestic spying operations.

There appears to be a behind-the-scenes battle between different arms of the federal government’s law-enforcement bureaucracy over how far to take the investigation. According to sources close to the Cunningham investigation, the San Diego U.S. attorney’s office has been much more aggressive in pursuing the case than D.C. And Foggo’s supporters at CIA have weighed in aggressively against expanding the investigation into the agency.

Now Foggo’s out at CIA and Pentagon investigators seem to be raising the temperature on Cunningham.

Stay tuned on this one. There’s much more to come.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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