In the last year, ever since Tom DeLay became embroiled in the
Jack Abramoff scandal, the Washington Post alone has
published 168 articles mentioning Abramoff and DeLay. The
Post’s dogged Abramoff investigator, Susan Schmidt, has
written 39 articles on Jack Abramoff in the last two years. Almost
half of those made page A1 of the Post, and most were over
1,000 words in length. The Post has written enough about
this scandal to fill a book — literally — and they probably
will.
Since Rep. John Murtha made his splash in November with his call
for an American troop withdrawal from Iraq, there have been no
stories about Robert C. “Kit” Murtha in the Post. In fact,
the Post has never mentioned Kit Murtha. A quick Lexis
Nexis search turns up only a dozen or so mentions of “Kit” Murtha,
Robert C. Murtha, or Robert Murtha in the last 15 years. Who is
“Kit” Murtha?
He’s John Murtha’s brother — a Washington lobbyist whose firm
reeled in more than $20 million for its defense contractor clients
in the 2004 Defense appropriations bill. And the Pennsylvania
congressman is the ranking Democrat on the Defense appropriations
subcommittee, which he also chaired for six years before Democrats
lost the House in 1994.
It’s a cozy relationship the likes of which are garnering heavy
attention these days in Washington. Roy Blunt’s family connections
to K Street have received extensive coverage, as have Harry Reid’s.
Yet despite a front page story in the Los Angeles Times last
June exposing Kit Murtha’s firm’s enormous success in steering
defense contracts to its clients, other newspapers have been mostly
silent: the Times has yet to follow up, and Murtha’s
lobbying ties have earned coverage by Roll Call and only single mentions in the
Village Voice, Investor’s Business Daily, and the
Boston Globe just this week.
If Murtha were a powerful Republican legislator, the media would
probably be all over this story. A former aide from John Murtha’s
office, Carmen V. Scialabba, is a top official at KSA Consulting,
where Kit Murtha is a senior partner. KSA has directly lobbied
Murtha’s office on behalf of defense clients that directly
benefited from the 2004 Defense bill. Murtha’s subcommittee staff
helps write Defense appropriations bills and oversees the lucrative
earmark requests forwarded by Democrats. The contracts for KSA
clients in the bill were entirely earmarks, the L.A. Times
found. The Times also reported that most of KSA’s defense
clients hired the firm only after Kit Murtha became a senior
partner in 2002.
The Hill reported in October that John Murtha is the top
House recipient of campaign contributions from the defense industry
for the past three years. As of the October 31, 2005 Federal
Election Commission report, Murtha had received over $200,000 from
defense firms in the 2006 election cycle, surpassing the next
highest recipient by over $60,000.
Kit Murtha has been lobbying for defense firms since at least
1986, when he became Westinghouse’s chief lobbyist in Harrisburg.
In 1994, National Journal reported, Westinghouse made Kit
Murtha its director of state and local government affairs, in which
role he would also lobby the Pennsylvania congressional delegation
in Washington. At that time, John Murtha chaired the defense
appropriations subcommittee.
And what’s more, Murtha’s no stranger to congressional
corruption scandals. Though eventually cleared by the House ethics
committee (which means nothing legally), John Murtha was an
unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam scandal. (Abscam was
an FBI sting operation of members of Congress from 1978 to 1980 in
which one senator and five representatives were convicted of
bribery and conspiracy.) As the Cybercast News Service recently
detailed, Murtha was videotaped telling an
undercover FBI agent, “I’m not interested. I’m sorry… at this
point.” When the House ethics committee cleared Murtha in 1981, CNS
reported, the committee’s lead counsel, E. Barrett Prettyman Jr.,
quickly resigned. When asked by Roll Call if he had
resigned because of the committee’s Murtha vote, he said that would
be “a logical conclusion.” Prettyman has otherwise declined to
comment on the Murtha case.
An ethically suspect member of Congress, with close, personal
connections to lobbyists whose clients are benefited by his
committee? What more could the Washington Post need to
begin sniffing around? And now that John Murtha’s a nationally
prominent politician, he should naturally attract closer
scrutiny.
Perhaps that national prominence is steering the major press
away. When Cybercast News Service asked Murtha about his Abscam
past, he answered, “Questions about my record are clearly an
attempt to distract attention from the real issue, which is that
our brave men and women in uniform are dying and being injured
every day in the middle of a civil war that can be resolved only by
the Iraqis themselves.” Rep. Murtha’s office said he was giving
interviews all day yesterday and would be unavailable for
comment.
John Murtha is apparently using a controversy he created in
November to shield himself from his ethical past. His comments
about the war in Iraq make for convenient cover in an increasingly
critical ethical atmosphere. The major media’s silence is
deafening.
