Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”
Yet in 2008, Sessions himself steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps.
What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf. Sessions spokeswoman Emily Davis defends the airship project as a worthwhile use of federal funds and says it could eventually lead to thousands of new jobs in Sessions’s Dallas-area district.
But the company that received the earmarked funds, Jim G. Ferguson & Associates, is based in the suburbs of Chicago, with another office in San Antonio — nearly 300 miles from Dallas. And while Sessions used a Dallas address for the company when he submitted his earmark request to the House Appropriations Committee last year, one of the two men who control the company says that address is merely the home of one of his close friends.
Jim G. Ferguson IV — the younger half of the father-son team behind Jim G. Ferguson & Associates — told POLITICO that he and his father are trying to build an airship with a “high fineness ratio” that can be used in both military and civilian applications.
Fineness ratio is the technical term for the relationship between an airship’s length and its diameter; the higher the fineness ratio, the longer and more slender the airship is. A blimp with a very high fineness ratio could fly faster and be able to stay aloft longer — the holy grail for airship designers during the past century.
Yet Ferguson acknowledged that neither he nor his father has a background in the defense or aviation industries, nor any engineering or research expertise.
According to a statement that Sessions included in the Congressional Record last September, slightly more than half of the $1.6 million earmark was to go toward research and engineering costs. The remainder was for overhead and administrative costs.
FEC records show that Ferguson contributed $5,000 to Sessions’s leadership PAC in October 2007. Overall, Ferguson and his father have given $18,500 to GOP lawmakers over the past six years.
Session's aide:
In 1997 Plesha was arrested for illegal possession of a handgun in Washington, after he shot a man who was burglarizing his apartment, according to court documents. Plesha claimed he had acted in self-defense, but the burglar said Plesha shot him three times in the back as he was running away. Plesha pled guilty to the handgun charge, was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and ordered to do 120 hours of community service.
Within a year, he was working as a campaign manager for Republican House candidate Charles Ball, who was running against then-Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.).
In that campaign, the FEC has said that Plesha created a fake Democratic committee to attack Tauscher. The FEC said the committee sent out 40,000 letters and made 10,000 phone calls to Democratic voters in Tauscher’s district just prior to the 1998 midterm elections suggesting that Democratic Rep. George Miller was opposing Tauscher’s reelection. According to the FEC and court documents, Plesha pled guilty to lying to investigators in the case. He was fined $5,000, placed on three years’ probation and ordered to do an additional 160 hours of community service, according to federal court documents. He also entered into a “conciliation agreement,” under which he was to pay a $60,000 civil penalty, the FEC said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090730/pl_politico/25599
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
