Wade admits guilt, feds look at Goode.
Yesterday, when MZM CEO and founder Mitchell Wade pled guilty to conspiracy, election fraud, and bribery, Reuters was the first media outlet to parse the plea and run a story. The piece wasn’t particularly long, but I was interested to see that it focused on my very own Rep. Virgil Goode:
A spokesman for Goode was not immediately available for comment. According to the charges he received at least $46,000 in illegal contributions from MZM.
MZM operates several facilities in Goode’s south-central Virginia district, including one that conducts background checks on foreign-owned defense contractors.
A 2003 press release from Virginia’s governor at the time, Democrat Mark Warner, says Goode was “instrumental” in setting up the project.
Campaign finance expert Larry Noble said it was not unusual for lawmakers to want to bring jobs to their districts but added: “If you received money from MZM and those contracts went to MZM, given the Duke Cunningham situation obviously questions are going to be raised and Congressman Goode has to be prepared to answer questions about MZM.”
Wade is now facing over eleven years in prison on two separate matters, the first involving Congressman Goode and the second involving Charlottesville’s National Ground Intelligence Center.
Goode is not specifically named in the charges (PDF) — he’s instead referred to as “Representative A” — but it is, of course, Goode to whom the charges pertain.
In June I demonstrated that MZM’s contributions to Goode certainly looked coerced, and this plea makes clear that’s just what happened. On March 26, 2003, and March 4, 2005, Wade handed many of his employees $2,000 and instructed them to contribute the same value to Goode. This led to a total of $39 straw contributions from 19 employees and spouses, with Goode getting a whopping $46,000 in illegal contributions from MZM employees.
Save for the fact that Wade was compensating these employees for these contributions, this isn’t news, just confirmation of what seemed likely.
What is news is the close timing of these bundled contributions to Goode and MZM’s federal funding. From the charges:
In the spring of 2005, Wade asked that Representative A and his staff request appropriations funding for an MZM facility in Representative A’s district. In June 2005, Representative A’s staff confirmed to Wade that an appropriations bill would include $9 million for the facility and a related program. Wade thanked Representative A and his staff for their assistance.
This timeline and interaction is remarkably similar to former representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who has gone down for accepting bribes from MZM. The contractor gives tens of thousands of dollars to Goode. A few weeks later, they ask Goode for $9M. A few weeks after that, Goode gives it to them. With any company other than MZM, it would be possible to excuse this as a coincidence. Given the ever-increasing evidence that MZM’s existence is premised on bribery, it is perhaps more reasonable in this case to look at this as a pretty standard case of pay-for-play.
So is Goode a subject of the investigation? The Washington Post reports that prosecutors won’t say. In my (very limited) experience, when prosecutors won’t rule somebody out as a subject of an investigation, that means that there’s a better than even chance that they are a subject.
So what does Virgil Goode have to say about this? Nobody knows — he hasn’t responded to requests for comments by any media outlet. That’s Rep. Goode — always a day late and a dollar short. Or $90,000 ahead, as they case may be.
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