WHEN IS A BRIBE TO A CONGRESSMAN NOT A BRIBE? AND HOW MANY YEARS IN PRISON SHOULD BE ATTACHED?

Republicans would like the trial and attendant media reports over and done with ASAP-- so that by the time voters go to the polls in November, 2008 the memory of all the corruption and bribes to Randy Duke Cunningham and as many as a dozen other Republican Congressman will have faded or, at least, been muddied by the GOP propaganda machine. One of the bribers, Republican rainmaker and defense contractor Brent Wilkes, went on trial yesterday in San Diego.

The prosecutor got the show on the road with a statement describing how Cunningham bullied the Pentagon into paying for Wilkes' contracting firm's shoddy work-- millions of dollars worth of wasteful, useless work the Pentagon had no interest in.

Appropriately, Wilkes has hired a showboat attorney with a reputation as one of the worst buckets of slime in the legal profession-- and that is saying a lot-- Mark Geragos. According to today's San Diego Union-Tribune Geragos claimed that none of the bribes Cunningham has admitted taking came from his client. “There was never any bribery,” he told the court.

Geragos did not tell jurors that in February, Cunningham told a different story to federal agents interviewing him in prison. There, Cunningham admitted that he accepted cash, gifts and trips in return for securing government contracts for Wilkes' company, ADCS Inc.

Cunningham has been in the downtown San Diego federal jail since July while cooperating with prosecutors. The Rancho Santa Fe Republican, who was elected to Congress in 1990, was sentenced to an eight-year federal prison term in 2006 after pleading guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion charges.

Geragos said he would show that what Wilkes did was not illegal. It's how business gets done in the nation's capital, he said.

Geragos certainly has a point there-- or at least half a point, It very much is how business gets done in the nation's capitol. But that doesn't make it "not bribery." Cunningham was one of scores of congressmen who were accepting "gifts" from business interests looking to profit from government contracts. Cunningham was far from the worst. Everyday names-- to Congress-watchers-- like Tom DeLay, Duncan Hunter (yeah, that one on TV yesterday with Giuliani, Romney, Frederick of Hollywood, McCain and the rest of the pathetic pygmies™), Jerry Lewis, John Doolittle, Virgil Goode, Ric Keller, Tom Feeney, were taking millions of dollars from contractors in return for special treatment. Were they "bribes?" Geragos hopes to confuse the jury and sow doubt with legalistic definitions.

Teri Figueroa is covering the trial for the North County Times and paints a sordid picture of how "fiscally conservative" Republicans handle taxpayer dollars. "The trial," she write, "promises to pull back the curtain on Capitol Hill lobbying and offer a primer on how individual members of Congress set aside federal money for pet projects." Each and every one of the crooked politicians subpoenaed to testify has refused, claiming congressional privilege. One of them, Idaho's Larry Wide Stance Craig, has gone back on his promise to resign-- on unrelated morals charges-- in order to avoid the subpoena.

"Federal prosecutors say Wilkes plied the Escondido-based Republican congressman with $700,000 in cash and gifts to secure more than $80 million in government contracts-- taxpayer funds-- for his now-defunct defense firm ADCS Inc."
Geragos told that jury, rather incredulously, that "Every single one of these transactions they're alleging is a bribe has an innocent explanation they don't want you to hear."

I have a feeling that in the next few weeks we'll all be hearing lots and lots of explanations, though not of the innocent kind.