Sometimes good policy makes for good politics. And right now a politician of either party could do a lot of good for their country by digging into a subject that no one on Capitol Hill really seems to have the appetite to dig into — the vast morass or insiderism, rip-offs and outright corruption in homeland security, defense and intelligence contracting.

Let me give you just one funny (albeit in a ghastly sort of way) example that may serve as an ironic illustration of how bad the problem is.

Last week, Mitchell Wade finally pleaded out and cut a deal with federal prosecutors.

You remember him. Wade was “Coconspirator #2” in the Duke Cunningham case. Wade’s overpriced purchase of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s pre-mansion home was the bad act that started unraveling Duke’s web of corruption. And he was also the guy who set Duke (R-Calif.) up with that new yacht to live on — the Duke-Stir — down at the capital marina.

Those were the most newsworthy morsels. But the basic scam was that Wade would come up with unneeded or useless products to sell to the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies and then find corrupt members of Congress like Duke to force the Pentagon or the CIA or whomever to buy them. The scam was aided by the fact that Wade’s products tended toward the “black” sides of the military and intelligence budgets and were thus shielded from a lot of the scrutiny that gets focused on more public appropriations.

In any case, court papers filed in Wade’s plea last week referred to a father-and-son team that Wade had employed as part of his efforts to curry favor with Department of Defense (DoD) contracting officials.

To be specific, an unnamed DoD “official” got Wade to hire his son in exchange for help setting him up with sweetheart contracting deals. This corrupt exchange went on for at least a year. And then the unnamed official decided to cash in too and took a job working for Wade’s company, MZM, himself.

So who was the unnamed official?

A bunch of the best news outlets in town jumped to the conclusion that the unnamed contracting official was William S. Rich Jr. That made a lot of sense because the fact pattern I described above matched up pretty clearly with Rich’s. Wade had hired Rich’s son and then Rich himself, just as described in the court papers. In fact, The Washington Post had reported on the Wade and Rich connection last year. So the Rich story was already public knowledge.

But it turns out they got it wrong. Rich wasn’t the guy they were talking about.

How were they to know that Wade apparently made a habit of hiring sons of defense contracting officials to get help securing contracts and then hiring the contracting officials themselves? It was just Wade’s standard operating procedure.

The reference was actually to another father-and-son duo: Robert Fromm and his son. The father got the son a job at MZM in exchange for giving Wade sweetheart deals on contracts.

Now, believe me, I’m not making any excuses for journalists getting a story wrong. But when it’s hard to sort out which father-and-son DoD team a particular defense contracting crook has corrupted, you realize there’s a bit of a problem with the culture of the contracting bureaucracy in D.C., and particularly at the Pentagon.

And it turns out that the Wade case isn’t unique. There’s also Brent Wilkes, Duke Cunningham’s other big contracting crook, and a bunch of others.

Both World Wars and the Civil War witnessed egregious amounts of defense contracting fraud, with sweetheart deals and shoddy goods being passed off on American soldiers. But the confluence of the war on terrorism, the Iraq war and the effulgence of corruption in recent years under D.C.’s Republican political machine has created a veritable perfect storm of contracting corruption that is only beginning to be unearthed. The Cunningham story is only the first and possibly the most colorful example to come to light. But it won’t be the last.

Since both the executive branch and the GOP congressional majority are implicated in these scandals, for the Democrats, the political logic of pursuing them aggressively requires no explanation. But not only for them. With Tom DeLay dethroned and Republicans looking toward the post-Bush era, there’s plenty of room and plenty of political sense for Republicans to get serious about cracking down on the culture of corruption, not just on Capitol Hill but in Pentagon contracting too.

But all that said, why isn’t this wasted money and evidence of corruption enough to spur some serious outrage and genuine investigations up on Capitol Hill? Forget the politics. How about just on plain old patriotic grounds?

Defense contractors and public officials making corrupt profits off substandard or unneeded goods while soldiers are dying in the field have to be the most reprehensible folks around.

It’s time to crack down. Who’ll take up the cause?

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