posted on: Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Improved philanthropic disclosure shouldn’t have been—and shouldn’t be—a problem with the foundations associated with disgraced former California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. The Washington Post among other media sources noted that Top Gun Cunningham kept a menu of his bribes on Congressional stationery, with columns for the amount of military contracts that he could deliver in return for specific bribe amounts. It’s a bit like a spreadsheet detailing revenues and expenditures minus the Microsoft Excel software—and in this case, several of the rows highlight specific transactions with Mitchell Wade, owner of the defense contractor MZM. NCRP has previously detailed Wade’s transactions with the now ex-Congressman in the Summer 2005 issue of NCRP’s quarterly, Responsive Philanthropy, and the December 7th entry in the NCRP blog.

The philanthropic angle? Wade also has—or maybe now it might be “had”—a nonprofit called the Sure Foundation, which provided some sort of financial aid to refugee children. On Wade’s advisory committee were Cunningham’s wife and daughter. How unsurprising that this nestful of bribe-demanding and bribe-giving vipers would hover around a foundation with a mission statement emphasizing spiritual development, with grants made to a number of religious groups, and a name drawn from an 1851 translation of a seventh century church hymn (“Christ is made the sure foundation”). The Sure Foundation’s website has recently disappeared from the Internet, much like the evaporation of Abramoff’s Capital Athletic Foundation from the web as the press coverage multiplied.

Think we’ll find some skanky transactions camouflaged by the Sure Foundation’s 501(c)(3) status? Prosecutors do not seem to have included the $100,000 federal grant that the Sure Foundation landed to help children not in “war torn countries” abroad (from Sure’s now non-existent website), but in Washington DC’s inner city neighborhoods through arts enrichment. Part of the bribe scheme? Remember that Wade’s Foundation landed the grant as a result of Cunningham’s vice chairman role on the House Appropriations Committee’s District of Columbia Subcommittee, sort of the exact function that Cunningham served for Wade’s defense contractor through his House committee function controlling military expenditures. It’s not a coincidence that MZM and Sure had the same Washington DC address on New Hampshire Avenue. The Sure Foundation’s 990s, the 2004 edition likely to be the last ever to be filed, do not include reports on the $100,000 grant nor the reputed $10,000 per month consulting payments to Effi Barry, ex-wife of former Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry.

Revelations about Cunningham’s public perfidy emerge by the week. Duke’s charity whitewashing of some of his booty, his donating part of his swag to three San Diego area nonprofits, failed to bleach the press out of the story as his bribery thermometer climbed with each news report. The Sure Foundation dimension of the Cunningham story adds a distinctive dimension that is all too common, disreputable political and charity leaders wrapping themselves in the innocence of faith. They must have ignored the irony of the hymn:

Here vouchsafe to all thy servantswhat they ask of thee of gain;what they gain from thee, for everwith the blessèd to retain,and hereafter in thy gloryevermore with thee to reign.