Curt Weldon: The Congressman Who Came In from the Cold
Was Pennsylvania's former congressman spying — knowingly or unknowingly — for the Kremlin?
From 1987 to 2007 Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon served in the U.S. House of Representatives, rising to assume the vice-chairmanship of the powerful Armed Services Committee. A Russia maven (he speaks the language), he also co-chaired the Duma-Congress Study Group, the official liaison between the American and Russian legislatures.
In November 2006, he was defeated by Democrat Joe Sestak, contributing to the Republican Party’s loss of control in the House. Part of the reason for his loss, no doubt, was the report – just a few months before the election – that he was being investigated by the Justice Department for corrupt influence peddling.
On October 15th, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the investigation began in response to a 2004 report in the Los Angeles Times about Weldon’s efforts to seek lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter Karen involving murky forces in Russia and Serbia. The day after the newspaper report blew their cover, FBI agents raided Karen’s home and office (as well as those of several other Weldon associates) and carted off boxes of evidence. Two days after that, the Washington Post reported that a grand jury had been impaneled
Now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that a former congressional aide of Weldon’s has “admitted in court proceedings that his wife received unreported payments from an arms-control group with ties to top security officials in the Russian government. Rep. Weldon had sought a federal grant for the Russian organization, known as International Exchange Group [IEG], according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Rep. Weldon’s former aide, Russell Caso, pleaded guilty in December to failing to disclose payments made to his wife, but the origin of the funds wasn’t identified.”
The WSJ concludes: “The Weldon inquiry is significant in part because it is an element of a broader U.S. Justice Department probe into what officials suspect are efforts by Russian-backed firms to gain influence or gather information in Washington.” That’s the polite way of saying that, knowingly or unknowingly, Weldon may have been spying for the Kremlin.
Arms control, of course, is crucial to Russia – just as it was to the USSR. Many believe that it was Ronald Reagan’s reinvigoration of the arms race that finally pushed the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, and today’s Russia is even less well position to wage such a struggle than was the USSR. And yet, it has an even stronger impulse than the USSR did for confrontation, being desirous of regaining hegemony in places like Ukraine and Georgia which have fled the Soviet sphere.
While serving on the Armed Services Committee, the WSJ says, Weldon heavily promoted IEG, headed by one Vladimir Petrosyan and “comprised of senior [Russian] military, intelligence and political officials. The group was established by President Vladimir Putin’s plenipotentiary representative to the Duma . . . [and] includes the key people who are personally friendly with Putin, including the deputy chief of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB.” That company, it now turns out, paid Weldon’s aide $19,000 for a no-show editing job.
And it gets worse. The WJS reports: “One person who dealt with Mr. Petrosyan said he used a business card with the House of Representatives seal that identified him as an adviser to Mr. Weldon. In addition to International Exchange Group, federal investigators are looking at Mr. Weldon’s actions on behalf of a natural-gas company, Itera International Energy LLC, which has longstanding connections to alleged Russian organized-crime figures, according to U.S. law-enforcement officials. Itera gave Mr. Weldon’s daughter Karen a $500,000 lobbying contract.”
Weldon has now transferred all the money he has left over from his last campaign to a legal defense fund. He remains under investigation but has not yet been charged.
In June 2001, U.S. President George Bush met Russian “President” Vladimir Putin for the first time, a summit in Slovenia. After the meeting, he declared: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.” Since then, Putin has flouted the spirit of the Russian constitution by jury-rigging the election of a hand-picked successor and then retaining the reins of power as prime minister. We now routinely see Russian nuclear bombers buzzing targets and causing the scrambling of fighters in the U.S., Japan, Norway and Britain. Is it any wonder that, given this “leadership” from the President, many of those who follow him have been led astray?
John McCain, by contrast, has boldly called for Russia’s ouster from the G-8, and is facing a smear campaign as a result, for instance on Salon.com from the likes of Fareed Zakaria. Some accuse McCain of not being a “real” Republican. But judged by the standard of the President Bush and Weldon, McCain is the second coming of Reagan.
Republicans would do well to remember that when the decide how fervently to support their party in November.
Kim Zigfeld is a New York City-based writer who publishes her own Russia specialty blog, La Russophobe. She also writes about Russia for the American Thinker and for Russia! magazine and is researching a book on the rise of dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.
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9 Comments
1. Curt Weldon: The Congressman Who Came In from the Cold:[...] Darren Murph wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWas Pennsylvania’s former Congressman — knowingly or unknowingly — spying for the Kremlin? [...]
Jun 12, 2008 - 10:00 am 2. Sandra M:I became a fervent Curt Weldon supporter because of his work on “Able Danger”, (google it) a superb data mining program which was totally destroyed by stupid or possibly traitorous bureaucrats.
Curt Weldon did what almost ALL democrats do and get away with (Obama (a million dollar earmark for the hospital his wife worked at tripled her salary) (Feinstein’s husband’s educational and then military supply businesses profited from her earmarks) (William Jefferson, ($90,000 in the freezer) because their constituencies don’t care how much they steal so long as they get some crumbs from the table.
Republican voters won’t allow Republican representatives to get away with that kind of graft. Weldon should have known better.
Weldon is no traitor. When he was doing business with the Russians they were still considered friends of ours.
Google ABLE DANGER. Losing that program was a major blow to us in the war on terror.
Jun 12, 2008 - 2:21 pm 3. Sandra M:The 911 Commission, and certain elements in the FBI and CIA feared and hated Curt Weldon and conspired to bring him down. The CIA didn’t want the ABLE DANGER data mining program to succeed because it would have “stolen their thunder”.
Look up ABLE DANGER, MOHAMMED ATTA, and Jamie Gorelick of the 9/11 Coimmission, the very person responsible for the FBI and CIA not sharing information (she was an assistant or deputy AG undere Clinton) then sitting in judgment on what went wrong on 9/11.
What a mess!
Good people’s careers were ruined by CYA Democrats, RINOs and bureaucrats. Lt. Col. Shaffer, Philpott and others over Able Danger.
Alas, Weldon saw most Democrats and even Republicans around him getting rich by funnelling earmark money to wives (Obama’s million dollar earmark to a hospital tripled his wife’s salary at that hospital) husbands, , et al and thought he could do the same for his daughter. But Republican voters, especially in Pennsylvania, won’t put up with that kind of corruption.
Alas, once he lost the election his website with priceless information and links on Able Danger has been taken down, but there is still a lot of information on Wikipedia and elsewhere (just google ABLE DANGER).
As to Russia, they had been our friends through the 90’s and it is thanks to Clinton’s urging of a Forgive and Forget policy towards the communists that they have wrested control once more. Bush was naive towards Putin but so was the press and it remains so till this day. When Putin remained on vacation and allowed 100 or more submariners to die rather than allow Americans to rescue them, then I knew who and what he was.
Weldon is a patriot and would never have willingly spied for the Russians.. The work he did against the Jihad was very effective, perhaps too much so (made others look bad ) and that was his downfall.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but having gained an insight into the CIA from the book CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR I noted that the CIA heroes responsible for winning that war, Gust Avrakotos and Michael Vickers were not promoted and left while others who came later got the promotions and the kudos. That’s the way of bureaucracy way too often.
This story needs further study.
Jun 12, 2008 - 3:00 pm 4. Rubicon:Sandra.. you are correct that Able Danger was a gold mine of info & its demise hurt America substantially. I cannot agree about PA voters as we continue to elect the likes of Specter & some others.
Jun 13, 2008 - 8:40 am 5. EdGi:Seems to me, some in the political arena have mastered the hide their own activities game, while gathering well placed allies to create the impressions of misdeeds among their political opponents.
You guess who is best at dirty deeds!
Weldon, whom I know from various good things, may have goofed on the Russian involvement, and I agree totally that he should have known that he cannot, in Delaware County, get away with the tricks Philly Democrats do, but indicting a jaywalker as a defacto capital offense criminal is self destructive in a democracy. Also, in fairness to Gorelich, she only combined then existing hodgepodge procedures. She did not write the bad laws involved. Able Danger went astray, apparently, by following the Chinese connections, for which they had no charter under the then existing intelligence laws, which forced the DOD, under the then existing laws, to destroy materials. Bashing Gorelich does not change dangerously bad laws.
Jun 14, 2008 - 3:55 pm 6. Kimterminator:In the Stalin time in the USSR any contact of a Russian citizen with a foreign party could be a case for the charge in spying or treason.
Kim Zigfeld, a notorious russophobic “writer”, has that Stalin’s KGB attitude towards anything that can be linked to Russia.
What was wrong that Weldon exactly did? Tried to establish a better control over Russian WMD sites? Tried to secure WMD non-proliferation? He recieved money from Russians? For what? Was that for selling sensitive information about the USA or for doing business with Russian companies? Doing business, promoting business interests and even lobbying are not crimes.
Walton remains under investigation, he has not yet been charged. He may come out a decent person, a good American.
Jun 14, 2008 - 10:38 pm 7. Rationalitate:Do not rush into accusations. There is Innocence presume after all.
While McCain might be the only candidate who understands Russia’s depravity of leadership, his solutions are all wrong. Russia lately has pursued a savvy policy of funding Islamic terrorism (Ayman al-Zawahiri) and rogue regimes (Venezuela and Iran), all the while egging the US on (in the broader war on terror, and in the Iraq war) in order to goad the US into stirring up trouble in oil- and gas-producing countries, so as to raise the price of energy commodities which Russia so desperately depends on. In this way, even though McCain might best understand how evil Putin and his cronies are, he will fall right into the trap and further Putin’s goals better than any of the other candidates could.
You’re great at the investigative stuff, and you’re witty, Kim, but your inability to conceive of a Russia that is heir to the most masterful spies in the world is troubling. Of course you say you understand, but you seriously underestimate the importance of Russia’s role in global terror, and what it’s trying to get out of it. It’s provocation, and you – the best English-language blogger on Russia I know – are falling for it!
Jun 14, 2008 - 11:14 pm 8. Rob:Able Danger always is worth another look. Able Danger appears to have identified some of the 9/11 plotters before hand. It appears that a very effective anti-terror program was shut down and that covered up by the DC establishment; Congress, media, CIA so on. This gives a glimpse of the hidden factions and power centers that we are not normally allowed to see. Walden exposed the wipe-out of the Able Danger program and then was thrown out of office by a sudden scandal just before the election.
All this is a little too pat.
Remember the Russians have the best spys in the world. Able Danger may have been the best tool for uncovering spys.
Check out Able Danger and keep looking.
Jun 15, 2008 - 10:46 am 9. mrs panstreppvn@hotmail.com:Weldon and his crony, John J. Gallagher, were doing business in Russia, period.
In 11/06, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Weldon helped Gallagher land a DoE contract to re-train Russian nuclear scientists. The problem: Gallagher’s company existed only on paper and Weldvn knew it.
The original Able Danger team was spying on the president and the vice-president of the United States and were looking to link Clinton and Gore with Chinese money at Weldon’s request. That’s why the Pentagon shut the program down.
No one seems to remember that Weldon spoke publicly about Able Danger finding links between Gore and Chinese government.
When Weldon revived the Able Danger issue, he was probably working on behalf of a defense contractor looking for a data mining contract. I know he had recently met with Rand before he gave his Able Danger speech on the House floor.
Weldon never did anything for anyone without a payoff.
Jun 19, 2008 - 5:14 am