John MercurioTuesday, Oct. 31, 2006
WASHINGTON -- In an October full of pre-election surprises, one bombshell stands out.
Not the Mark Foley scandal. Not the Jack Abramoff fiasco.
It's the one that landed in the middle of a House race between Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Curt Weldon and Democrat Joe Sestak – who, for a first-time political candidate, has some very powerful allies.
Perhaps even more powerful than he knows.
It was, quite fittingly, Friday the 13th when a McClatchy Newspaper reporter got a tip-off that Weldon, already in the biggest fight of his 30-year political career, was the target of a burgeoning federal investigation.
The charge: Trading his influence as a senior lawmaker on Capitol Hill for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts he allegedly steered to the lobbying shop of his 31-year-old daughter Karen and a longtime friend several years ago.
The story percolated over that weekend; Weldon's camp denied knowledge of any investigation.
The following Monday, however, FBI officials launched early morning raids at six locations in two states. Weldon's daughter and the longtime friend were among those whose homes were raided.
Officials apparently once again tipped off the press about the raids, which were captured on videotape.
Suddenly, instead of talking to voters about Iraq and the economy, a Republican congressman was talking to TV cameras outside his campaign headquarters, shell-shocked and outraged, and vehemently denying any wrongdoing.
Thanks to the bombshell FBI probe and suspiciously timed raids, Weldon now trails Sestak in several private polls.
How did it come to this for Weldon, a genial moderate who had consistently won re-election by double-digit margins in a district that voted solidly for John Kerry and Al Gore?
And why did the Justice Department break its own rules in taking provocative steps against a public official shortly before Election Day?
"What I find ironic, if there is an investigation," Weldon told the media the day the raids were conducted, "is that no one would tell me until three weeks before the election. The incident was two-and-a-half years ago."
The pre-election timing of the raids seems particularly suspicious to those who have followed Weldon's activist "Able Danger" crusade. Weldon says that a secret military unit called Able Danger had linked four of the 9/11 hijackers to al-Qaida more than a year prior to the terrorist attacks.
The allegations suggest malfeasance at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The Defense Department has ferociously denied Weldon's claims.
Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has told friends privately he believes his current predicament and the "official" investigations are related to his Able Danger probe.
Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, suggests that Weldon is the target of the political establishment of both parties, whom he alienated by arguing that the Defense Department could have averted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but failed to do so.
In his 2005 book, Weldon wrote that according to the recollections of officials involved in the Able Danger data-mining operation, photographs of terrorist Mohammed Atta were found on charts collected by military officials before 9/11. In other words, they had information about Atta in early 2001, but failed to act. Weldon has clearly alienated some powerful officials.
"I think certain forces do not want to see Weldon as chairman or Ranking Minority Member of the [House Armed Services] Committee," Weyrich wrote in his article, which Weldon posted on his campaign Web site last week.
A Justice Department under President Bush might seem an unlikely source for media leaks that would aid Democratic efforts to take back the House. But some Republicans are privately pointing to officials within the department's Public Integrity Section, which handles corruption cases, as the source of this and other leaks hurting Republicans this fall.
Some Republicans believe those bureaucrats are acting in part to protest public criticism from Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., of the May 20 FBI raid on the office of Rep. Bill Jefferson, D-La. Suspicions rose to such a fevered pitch in October that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was forced to address the issue of politically motivated leaks.
"What I can say with great confidence is that the men and women in the Department of Justice and all of its investigative agencies do not take political considerations into play when it comes to discharging their duty," McNulty said during a news conference.
Justice Dept. spokesman Bryan Sierra declined to comment further on the investigation when contacted by NewsMax.
Greg Gordon, the McClatchy reporter who broke the Weldon story, cited "individuals with specific knowledge of the existence of the investigation" as his sources, both of whom, he wrote, "declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of criminal investigations."
Spokesmen for the FBI and the Justice Department at the time declined Gordon's requests to confirm or deny that an inquiry was under way.
Sestak spokesman Ryan Rudominer says Weldon's problems have nothing to do with Sestak. "We read about it like everyone else did on Friday night when it first hit the wires," Rudominer says. "We have zero access to the Republican-led Justice Department."
Weldon has come out swinging, painting the leak as a pre-election dirty trick orchestrated by allies of Sestak, who built connections with national Democrats during the Clinton administration as a Navy admiral and a member of Clinton's National Security Council.
"This is dirty, partisan politics at its absolute worst," Weldon said earlier this month, targeting the head of a liberal-leaning watchdog group as the source of the leak.
He said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), formerly worked for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., "who, if the Democrats win, will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Her goal is to try to embarrass me or try to hurt me so that the Democrats will take control."
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