by TChris

The culture of corruption morphs into a culture of decadence as federal investigators search for evidence that a defense contractor provided former Rep. Duke Cunningham and other legislators with prostitutes.

A limousine would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and take them to the ADCS hospitality suite, Wade reportedly told investigators. Federal agents are investigating whether other legislators had similar arrangements with Wilkes or Wade, a business associate of Wilkes who ran his own defense contracting company, MZM Inc. [emphasis added]

Caution: Mitchell Wade will soon be sentenced for bribing Cunningham. People who accuse others to save themselves should be viewed with suspicion. Wade's account is partially corroborated, and the corroboration provides an interesting connection that may also merit the investigators' attention:

Two of Wilkes' former business associates say they were present on several occasions when Shirlington Limousine & Transportation Service of northern Virginia brought prostitutes to the suite. ...

Last year, Shirlington won a $21 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security.

by TChris

A juror in the trial of Hamid Hayat regrets her vote to convict. Arcelia Lopez swore in an affidavit that she was pressured to put an end to the jury's deliberations by casting the final vote to return a guilty verdict. Lopez said she "never once throughout the deliberation process and the reading of the verdict believed Hamid Hayat to be guilty."

Lopez said she went to a medical clinic Saturday with a migraine headache and believed "my health and physical well-being were being affected by the pressure from the other jurors to change my vote."

It isn't unusual for jurors to succumb to pressure -- jurors don't like to spend days in a small room eating stale pizza -- and it's almost impossible to overcome a verdict with the testimony of a juror who has second thoughts about the outcome. This report, however, suggests that the jury may have been exposed to media accounts of the trial -- the kind of extraneous influence that would provide a more fruitful ground for attacking the verdict.

There's follow-up news on the Duke Lacrosse player accuser's filing of a report in 1996 claiming three men raped her in 1993, when she was 14. Her ex-husband now says he encouraged her to file the report. The accuser's father, meanwhile, said the earlier rape didn't happen -- or at least he never heard about it.

Kenneth McNeil, a Durham man who was married to the woman for 17 months, said in an interview Friday that three years after the incident, he urged her to make the report to Creedmoor police to help her overcome the trauma. "I wanted them to pay for what they did," said McNeil, who was then engaged to the woman.

He has no first hand-knowledge of the incident, which occurred when the accuser was in high school. Here's what he says she told him during their engagement:

I'm back to connecting dots and reading between the lines of recent news reports. The New York Times reported Friday:

A lawyer with knowledge of the case said that Mr. Rove had known for more than a month that he was likely to make another appearance before the grand jury.

It was one month ago on March 28 that Andrew Card resigned, with no plausible reasons given and no future plans announced.

On September 29, 2003, the Justice Department decided to launch a full investigation into the Valerie Plame leak and then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales told White House officials to preserve all e-mails, telephone records and logs-- but gave them a 12 hour heads up.

Rolling Stone Keith Richards has been hospitalized for a concussion in New Zealand. He fell out of a palm tree during a vacation at the Wakua Club in Fiji.

If you'd like to know more about his vacation, Thursday I happened to run into a woman I know who spent the week at the same resort and had just returned the night before. There were only 6 guests that week (it's on a private island): Keith and his wife Patti Hansen, Ron Woods and his wife and Nancy and her husband. I wrote up her account of the week over at 5280.com, where I blog about Colorado issues.

She reports Keith and Ron were great company. They went in the water, lounged around, read books, drank and yakked it up with the island's other four guests. The rockers shared bottles of vodka during the day and switched to rum drinks at night. Bob, a doctor, even made a housecall to their burre one night.

Too bad Nancy and Bob didn't stay an extra day -- Bob could have been on hand Thursday when Keith fell.

Our hosting company had a denial of service attack which made us inaccessible this morning and again tonight. We're back online now, but if we go out again, you'll know why.

The Mexican Congress has passed legislation decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs

Under the legislation, police will not penalize people for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin or 500 milligrams of cocaine. People caught with larger quantities of drugs will be treated as narcotics dealers and face increased jail terms under the plan.

...The object of this law is to not put consumers in jail, but rather those who sell and poison," said Sen. Jorge Zermeno of the ruling National Action Party.

Also decriminalized: small amounts of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines and peyote.

Smart move. The U.S. should take a look at doing the same. For those of you fluent in Spanish, here is the text of the new law.

The Palm Beach Sheriff's office announced today that Rush Limbaugh turned himself in on an arrest warrant for prescription fraud charges connected to the doctor-shopping charges. He was there for an hour and posted a $3,000.00 bond.

Talk about cops milking arrests for publicity....The case is settled. Limbaugh is getting a deferrred prosecution. The charges will be dismissed in 18 months. That's even better than a deferred judgment which requires a guilty plea.

The State Attorney has filed a single charge of doctor shopping with the Court. The charge is being held in abeyance under the terms of an agreement between the State and Mr. Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh has filed a plea of "Not Guilty" with the Court.

They should have let him surrender on a summons. The only reason they insisted Rush turn himself in on the arrest warrant and get booked was to shame him. Shame on them.

Bump and Update: Raw Storywrites that MSNBC's David Schuster will report today that Rove's lawyers have been told there will be no announcements for at least ten days. [Raw Story now has the report details here.]

Update: TomPaine cites the MSM party line position today that this is all about Rove's failure to disclose the call with Cooper. I'm not buying it.

This is all coming from sources close to Luskin. Don't forget the 250 pages of e-mails turned over since his last grand jury appearance. That's a new development as well. The e-mails are from the vice-president's office according to what Libby's lawyer told the Court at the Feb. 24 Libby hearing (pdf) and in pleadings. They were being turned over to Libby that day.

Libby's lawyer:

I may say we are also told that there are an additional approximately 250 pages of documents that are emails from the office of the vice president. Your Honor, may recall that in earlier filings it was represented or alluded to that certain e-mails had not been preserved in the White House. That turns out not to be true. There were some e-mails that weren't archived in the normal process but the office of the vice president or the office of administration I guess it is....

Regardless of whether Rove led them to the e-mails, I'd bet he was grilled about some of them Wednesday at the grand jury. The e-mails are critical for all the players, because they could result in an obstruction of justice charge as well as perjury and false statements. And they could bring in new players.

The site outage is over. All sites at our hosting company were inaccessible this morning due to problems with the networks connecting into their site, in other words, it wasn't at their end.

But, I'm out of time to blog for a few hours....so how about taking over for me?

Thanks much.

Update: BradBlog has a streaming version of just the single, "Let's Impeach the President."

It's here. Living With War by Neil Young, including "Let's Impeach the President" which has Bush speaking his lies in the middle.

It's awesome. Go listen.

Listen to the album here

Note: You can only listen to the whole album via streaming, not any particular song.

It seems inescapable to me that Karl Rove will be charged with making at least one false statement to federal officials under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001.

Rove was interviewed by the FBI in October, 2003. This was before Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel and before a grand jury was convened.

Rove did not tell the agents that that he had spoken with Robert Novak prior to his column being published on July 14, 2003, or that he had been one of the two "senior administration officials" cited in Novak's column as having confirmed Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and CIA employment.

But we know now that Rove spoke to Robert Novak on July 8. In that conversation, they discussed Wilson's wife's employment with the CIA. Novak's version is that Rove reportedly replied that he had heard this too.