"There was an agreement as to what they wanted to look at, and that was not anything that could be looked at under the sun," said Michael Stern, a former attorney in the House counsel's office who was hired by the committee to lead the internal probe. "The language did not include the culpability or potential involvement of other members."
Stern said that the full, 59-page report he prepared a year ago was classified, but that he also provided the committee a 23-page version that had been scrubbed of classified material. The Times obtained the declassified version.
The document says that Cunningham began pressing to fund special projects from the moment he joined the House Intelligence Committee in 2001, and that his demands intensified.
Funding requests
One top committee aide, Michael Meermans, told investigators that "on probably two or three occasions [Cunningham] figuratively put a finger in my forehead and said, 'You are going to make this into the bill, right?' "
The funding requests were repeatedly granted, Meermans said, even though staffers "started smelling something really bad in the program."
Meermans and other staffers named in the report declined requests to comment or could not be reached.
Staffers said that Cunningham seemed more focused on who was getting the money than on the merits of the underlying projects, and that they were disturbed by his close ties with contractors who seemed unqualified for the projects they had won.
Aides said they acceded to Cunningham's demands "to keep him from going nuclear or ballistic" and because they considered him an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee who might retaliate by blocking intelligence committee funding priorities.
Current and former intelligence committee officials said staffers facing such pressure would almost certainly call the issue to the attention of their elected bosses.
Goss does not remember staff ever bringing the issue to his attention, although he felt that Cunningham had become overly partisan for a nonpartisan committee, according to an individual close to Goss. The individual asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
One project, a Pentagon counterintelligence program known as Project Fortress, was being handled by contractor Mitchell Wade, who has since pleaded guilty to paying bribes to Cunningham.
