Whatever the final tally in November, when journalists and historians look back to tell the story of the 2006 elections, most of us probably think the name in the headlines will be Abramoff.

But maybe not.

It might just be Wade.

Mitchell Wade, you’ll remember, was co-conspirator No. 2 in the Duke Cunningham plea-agreement papers. Wade owned a defense and intelligence contracting company called MZM Inc. He bought Duke his boat down at the marina and a bunch of antiques and chipped in the key three-quarters of a million dollars for the fancy new house in Rancho Santa Fe.

Wade himself pleaded out to charges stemming from the Cunningham case in February. But little-noticed court papers filed last week point to a significance and scope of Wade’s cooperation that is still yet to be fully appreciated.

On May 10, federal prosecutors and Wade’s lawyers jointly petitioned U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina to put off discussion of pre-sentencing reports for Wade when the parties next meet with Judge Urbina in August. Wade’s cooperation is “on-going,” said the petition, and likely to “continue for quite some time.” Judge Urbina appears inclined to agree to an indefinite extension, which would likely put Wade’s sentencing back into sometime in 2007.

Since informed sources say that Wade began cooperating shortly after the Cunningham scandal broke in June 2005, that leaves quite a lot of time for cooperation. With that in mind, let’s review what Wade’s cooperation has already accomplished and who may be in the crosshairs in the months to come.

According to reports in San Diego’s North County Times and Union-Tribune, Cunningham’s cooperation with federal prosecutors was limited at best. And Pentagon investigators have now started publicly complaining that he isn’t helping their investigation, now that he is sitting in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.

What forced Cunningham to cop to a plea so quickly and head off to prison was Mitchell Wade? Cunningham appears to have done little more than fess up to the evidence of wrongdoing Wade provided.

Published reports also suggest that Brent Wilkes, the San Diego defense contractor named co-conspirator No. 1 in the plea documents, also hasn’t been cooperating with investigators and has to date resisted a plea agreement. Wade was Wilkes’s protégé in the defense contracting logrolling game. (He worked for Wilkes before MZM got up and rolling.) And he’s thus been able to supply detailed information on Wilkes’s contacts, contracts and methods of operation.

And that gets us to Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, Wilkes’s lifelong friend and former executive director of the CIA, who showed up at Langley on Friday only to be barred from entering the campus and stripped of his CIA badge. According to the Associated Press, it was Wade who told federal prosecutors that Wilkes provided prostitutes to Rep. Cunningham at the hospitality suites Wilkes ran for CIA personnel, members of Congress and congressional staffers at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels. Foggo denied any knowledge of prostitution but acknowledged that he was a frequent guest at Wilkes’s shindigs.

In the Foggo-Wilkes-CIA investigation, it’s important to distinguish between the salacious allegations of sex and the more mundane but significant allegations about crooked contracts. To date, the only clear prostitution-related allegations are that Wilkes supplied prostitutes for Cunningham.

But we do know that the FBI, the CIA and the IRS are investigating Foggo’s role in providing contracts to his pal Wilkes. That led to Foggo’s resignation from the CIA and the feds’ subsequent raids on his home and office.

Here the trail becomes more speculative. But Wade seems certain to have played an important role in getting that investigation going. If you think that ex-CIA chief Porter Goss resigned at least in part because of his role in promoting Foggo (which now seems increasingly likely), that means Wade probably gets credit for part of Goss’s hide too.

And if that weren’t enough, just look at Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the L.A. U.S. attorney’s office has started an inquiry into Lewis’s earmarks as part of the expanding Cunningham investigation.

As anyone who follows Southern California politics knows, Cunningham, Lewis, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and others had a tight web of big-ticket campaign donors and hometown companies they worked hard to get earmarks for. Nothing illegal or even unethical, mind you. And not too different from what you could find in other parts of the country — at least on the surface. But Wade’s information on Wilkes appears to have gotten federal prosecutors much more interested in those ties — particularly Lewis’s and Wilkes’s ties to former congressman and now lobbyist Bill Lowery.

Now the Appropriations Committee, Armed Services and Intel are each apparently being deluged by document requests from the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego.

So just a heads-up. When you get your subpoena, you may have Mitchell Wade to thank for it.

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