Another criminal connection to the subverting of the Trust Fund?
Laura Rosen at War and Piece has pulled up a juicy tidbit in the Mitchell Wade/Duke Cunningham bribery case:
One very weird MZM contract. The first contract I can find that Cunningham co-conspirator Mitchell Wade's MZM Inc. received from the federal government is from a federal agency I had never heard of. The Minerals Management Service, Interior Franchise Fund, funded by the Executive Office of the President, awarded MZM a $25,000 contract on 10/15/2002 to provide it custom computer programming services.
Like many Americans (or, I should say, most non-Indian Americans), the MMS is a government agency with which Rosen is unfamiliar. But a quick unleashing of the Googling monkeys reveals:
The Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior, is the Federal agency that manages the nation's natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf (OCS). The agency also collects, accounts for and disburses more than $8 billion per year in revenues from Federal offshore mineral leases and from onshore mineral leases on Federal and Indian lands. The program is national in scope and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It includes two major programs, Offshore Minerals Management and Minerals Revenue Management. The Offshore program, which manages the mineral resources on the OCS, comprises three regions: Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific. The Minerals Revenue Management program is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but operationally based in Denver, Colorado.
Rosen wonders just whose palms at Interior or in Congress did Wade have to grease in order to get this contract. Any faithful Wampum readers care to guess who is at the top of my suspects list?
It should be noted as well that Judge Lamberth ordered the DoI computer systems shut down after Norton purportedly had them "fixed", as Lamberth's own hired hacks easily broke into the Trust Fund Management system and changed pertinent information. I don't know yet if this system was one included in the MZM contract, but it certainly provides me some bananas for the monkeys today.
(Thanks to Tom in comments and Dwight for the link)
VastLeft @ Corente offers you a tee that fails to be bipartisan and alarms the Villagers ...
Comments
That computer work was itself a mind-boggling boondoggle with a price tag of over $100 million. And Judge Lambreth still ordered it to shut down because, after all that money was thrown at it, a consultant for the plaintiff hacked into it within minutes.
Official hubris, defiance, exploitation, and no consequences makes it very unfair.
Contemptible, even to a conservative judge!
Posted by: jcrit | March 23, 2006 10:49 AM
I do hope that you and Laura can work on this one. I'm guessing she hasn't read your previous posts on the Interior Dept and mineral royalties.
A little behind the scenes coordination/communication might help open up this end of the Abramoff/Bushevik petrol-tariat profiteering at the expense of the tribes.
Posted by: Tom - Daai Tou Laam | March 24, 2006 02:15 AM
Ah...
She has this update today. Suggesting that it was just an intradepartmental money shuffle as someone at Interior was offering themselves as procurement agents for other agencies.
Posted by: Tom - Daai Tou Laam | March 24, 2006 02:20 AM