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Federal agents yesterday searched the CIA offices and Northern Virginia home of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the spy agency's No. 3 official who was forced to resign this week amid a widening criminal investigation into allegations of government corruption and bribery. ...Aside from well-publicized espionage cases, veteran intelligence officers said they could not recall another time when FBI agents picked through offices at the CIA's Langley headquarters..Earlier this year, however, he was placed under investigation by the CIA inspector general and federal prosecutors after allegations that he helped a high school friend, Brent R. Wilkes, obtain CIA contracts and improperly accepted...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail. The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure. The surprising vote came on the eve of the...

Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the former North County congressman convicted of taking bribes while in office, should be a free man today. His 100-month sentence completed, the 71-year-old Navy ace is due to be released from a halfway house in New Orleans. Attempts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful, but he’s said in various letters over the years that he plans to live in Arkansas, where he has family.

The now-70-year-old Cunningham wrote that he plans to live with his brother and mother in rural Arkansas after his prison release. He said he wants to restore his gun rights so he can hunt and compete in sport shooting contests.

This isn't exactly the kind of endorsement the Romney campaign is looking for. It's probably even less welcome than the purported nod for Newt Gingrich from crooked GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham sent from his jail cell. Speaking in Davos, gathering place for the global elites and upscale chattering classes, billionaire investor George Soros - loathed by conservative activists for his "zillion-dollar left-wing radical agenda machine" - seemed to be pretty much OK with the notion of a Romney presidency. "Well, look, either you’ll have an extremist conservative, be it Gingrich or Santorum, in which case I think it will...

A reporter asks Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) if an average American citizen "went through similar circumstances as yourself that they may be punished in a worse way?" Rangel lashed out at the reporter: "Please, I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't deal in average American citizens." "I'll come back to you when you have a good question," he added. The House overwhelmingly voted to censure Rep. Rangel.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A former CIA agent rose to the agency's No. 3 rank despite a record of misconduct that stretched over 20 years, prosecutors said, until his career came to an end with his conviction in a bribery scheme. In court papers, prosecutors describe how Kyle "Dusty" Foggo was investigated in the late 1980s for punching a bicyclist in a traffic dispute and for numerous relationships with foreign women that could have compromised security. ... Instead, Foggo is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria after pleading guilty to a single count of fraud as...

With a backlog of applications piled up at the Justice Department, high-profile criminals and their well-connected lawyers increasingly are appealing directly to President Bush for special consideration on pardons and clemency, according to people involved in the process. Among those seeking presidential action are former junk-bond salesman Michael Milken, who hired former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, one of the nation's most prominent GOP lawyers, to plead his case for a pardon on 1980s-era securities fraud charges. Two politicians convicted of public corruption, former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) and four-term Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards (D), are asking Bush...

A federal prosecutor in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham case calls it a coincidence that the daughter of a key witness in the scandal purchased a home from the prosecutor's late uncle. Assistant U.S. Attorney Phillip Halpern, one of four prosecutors in the case, had not seen his father's brother, Leonard Halpern, for about four years prior to the uncle's death in 2003. Further, he was not an heir to his uncle's estate and received no money from the sale of the Nassau County, N.Y, property in 2005. The details are contained in court papers filed Wednesday by prosecutors asking a...

WASHINGTON – In two days of prison interviews with federal agents this year, former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham described a level of corruption on his part more extensive than previously known and dealt a potentially devastating blow to the defense being waged by one of the contractors alleged to have bribed him.

NORTH COUNTY ---- What may be his last contract with the federal government has run out. Most of his employees have quit or been laid off. He owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in back property taxes on his company's multimilllion-dollar Poway headquarters, a 97,000-square-foot building he is negotiating to sell. And in the latest blow to defense contractor Brent Wilkes ---- one of the men identified as an alleged co-conspirator of Randy "Duke" Cunningham in the bribery scandal that put the former congressman in prison ---- the Poway resident is being sued by two companies accusing him of breach...

WASHINGTON The investigation stemming from the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., will continue well past the November midterm elections under a federal court schedule set Monday. The development came at a status hearing for defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors after pleading guilty in February to bribing Cunningham in exchange for government contracts. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina agreed to delay sentencing proceedings against Wade and set the next status hearing in his case for March 12. That will allow Wade's cooperation to continue in the investigation, which still has several unresolved...

The wife of disgraced former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham felt deceived about the extent of her now-estranged husband's corruption, she said in her first public interview since the scandal broke last year. Nancy Cunningham told The New Republic magazine that she didn't question junkets paid by defense contractors because other senior congressional figures, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, joined in. "How can it be illegal or unethical if the most important man in Congress is doing it?" she asked interviewer Kitty Kelley, the celebrity biographer. Duke Cunningham, who held seats on powerful House intelligence and appropriations committees, resigned from Congress last...

andy "Duke" Cunningham stumbled to the microphone. Heavily medicated, the former congressman from San Diego had to be propped up by federal marshals. He had lost 90 pounds since he pleaded guilty, and his rumpled suit hung on him like a deflated parachute silk. The fearless aviator and war hero who claimed to be the inspiration for the cocky ace played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun had vanished. Standing in his stead on March 3, 2006, was an aging criminal whose droopy hound-dog face crumbled as he admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. "I did it...

WASHINGTON – Eight months after former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham confessed to taking massive bribes in exchange for providing at least $230 million in questionable defense and intelligence contracts, the Defense Department inspector general still has not determined whether any of those projects were improper. This week, the Pentagon announced that it would not renew one contract related to the scandal. But officials have been tight-lipped about the status of other taxpayer-funded work that may have been tainted, including a secret counterintelligence program. In fact, although several other Defense Department public affairs personnel and a congressional press aide have said...

WASHINGTON - An independent investigation has found that imprisoned former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham took advantage of secrecy and badgered congressional aides to help slip items into classified bills that would benefit him and his associates. The finding comes from Michael Stern, an outside investigator hired by the House Intelligence Committee to look into how Cunningham was able to carry out the scheme. Stern is working with the committee to fix vulnerabilities in the way top-secret legislation is written, said congressional officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the committee still is being briefed on Stern's findings. Cunningham's case...

SAN DIEGO – The prosecutors who sent former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham to jail for taking bribes now are focusing their attention on his friend Brent Wilkes, a San Diego defense contractor who won nearly $100 million in contracts in the past decade. Wilkes also has links to other corruption investigations. Cunningham was sentenced in March to more than eight years in prison after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes – including payments for a 7,628-square-foot mansion, a Rolls-Royce and a 65-foot yacht – in return for funneling contracts to certain companies. Wilkes' lawyers have confirmed he...

A former Republican congressman narrowly beat his Democratic rival early Wednesday for the right to fill the House seat once held by imprisoned Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a race closely watched as a possible early barometer of next fall's vote. Republican Brian Bilbray emerged victorious after a costly and contentious race against Democrat Francine Busby, a local school board member who ran against Cunningham in 2004. With 90 percent of precincts reporting, Bilbray had 56,016 votes or 49.5 percent. Busby trailed with 51,202 votes or 45 percent. "I think that we're going back to Washington," Bilbray told a cheering crowd of...

   You Have To Wonder June 1, 2006 In 1994 current Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert signed the Contract With America...by 2007, he destroyed it. You have to wonder what kind of a person wins the trust of the American electorate by signing a Contract “to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives” and then heads in the opposite direction. Pledging “To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves” Hastert promised to “FIRST, require all laws that apply...

I’ll be brief this time about Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. Due to stupidity and incompetence, he did not carry out the evacuation plan for his city. As a result, more than a thousand of his constituents died, and tens of thousands suffered personal disaster, and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and the National Guard. There was an established evacuation plan for Southern Louisiana, dated 1 January, 2004. Local and national media were incompetent in not reporting this plan and its details. The salient point was that the mandatory evacuation had to be called early, to...