. A camp spectacle in the House of Representative is Curt Weldon and then there is Indiana’s Dan Burton, who shot at melons in his backyard to prove that the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered. Tom Tancredo of Colorado once advocated that America “take out” Muslim holy sites. The list goes on and is topped by Pennsylvania’s Curt Weldon, who has a knack for uncovering fantastic government conspiracies. Word of this is finally getting around his suburban Philadelphia district, and he faces his first real challenge this fall, from Joe Sestak, a retired Navy vice admiral fed up with Republican national-security policy. Weldon’s reputation for screw-loose capers may be more than offset this time around by his ability to bring defense money into his district, with strings attached that should shame the average bear i.e. hiring of Weldon friends and family members. This race is worth watching for two reasons: as an electoral bellwether, and because a Weldon departure would restore a measure of sanity to Washington.
Weldon’s most notorious venture into the dark side is something known to insiders as “Able Danger,” an obscure and now defunct Pentagon data-mining program. Weldon claims the program identified the chief 9-11 hijacker months before the attacks. The villains in his theory are civil-liberties-minded Pentagon lawyers who supposedly blocked analysts from sharing their findings with the FBI. He has alleged that the 9-11 Commission conspired in a cover-up of the Able Danger findings. Iran is another area Weldon has consistently pushed his conspiracy theories for the biggest bang, by publishing a book on Iran titled Countdown to Terror, and went on Meet the Press to denounce the CIA for failing to hire his secret Iranian intelligence source, that turned out to be a business associate of a discredited former Iran-Contra arms dealer and intelligence peddler Manucher Ghorbanifar, who has been deemed a fabricator by the CIA and was looking to get on the U.S. payroll once again. In his latest headline-grabbing tirade, Weldon has insisted that the Bush administration actually suppressed evidence of weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq. At one point he even planned to fly to Iraq secretly and commandeer Army equipment to go dig the hidden arsenal up himself, according to Dave Gaubatz, who had planned to accompany him. The trip was called off when Gaubatz backed out, alarmed that Weldon was trying to politicize the project.
Weldon is known for questionable international crusades and business dealings, his taste for the odd dictator and his attraction to diplomatic freelancing and intelligence dabbling. During his 33 trips to Russia, Weldon has developed cozy ties with Russian defense contractors and energy companies. Two Russian firms have hired his daughter, Karen, for government-relations work. As reported by the LA Times, both Weldon’s daughter and his friend and real-estate agent, Cecelia Grimes, have reinvented themselves as lobbyists. Although neither of them has any Washington experience, they quickly attracted lucrative lobbying contracts from defense contractors and foreign business interests seeking federal contracts and favors.
Weldon has publicly praised Uzbekistan’s corrupt and brutal leader Islam Karimov, whose security services have been charged in State Department human-rights reports with systematic torture of dissidents and pro-democracy activists. A few years ago, Weldon introduced a young woman to Russian energy company officials at a Eurasia-oriented petroleum economics event in Washington, D.C., introducing her as someone who would do a great job in helping them with government affairs. A little media digging found out it was his daughter, Karen. Weldon is a go-to congressman for defense contractors seeking congressional support. His unsuccessful bids to chair committees, Armed Services and Homeland Security, underscore the point that the intelligence community does not take him seriously. Yet despite his reputation of being a loose cannon, this November is widely expected to be the most tumultuous midterm congressional race since 1994, and the fact that Weldon’s district went 53-47 for John Kerry in 2004, the Washington Post’s political analyst Chris Cilizza rated the Weldon-Sestak race the 20th most competitive in the country, as of the first week of September, even though the challenger has successfully raised a considerable war chest.
If you are asking why doesn’t his national reputation for anger mismanagement hurt him more at home, the answers may have a lot to do with Weldon’s relationship with the defense industry that has worked to create and keep jobs in and on the edges of his district. “The voters only care about one thing,” says a Washington observer of Weldon, “how much money does he get back into that district?” A case in point: Last year, with Weldon’s support, an Italian-led consortium, AgustaWestland-Lockheed, won a $1.6 billion Navy contract to build the next generation of presidential helicopters over a U.S. led consortium, that screwed American contracters. As part of its bid, AgustaWestland, the helicopter subsidiary of Italian defense giant Finmeccanica, expanded its Philadelphia plant operations. In true Weldon finagling, there was more to the deal than jobs for his district. According to Harper’s magazine reporter Ken Silverstein, AgustaWestland hired another Weldon daughter, Kim, to work in its public-relations department. Another Finmeccanica subsidiary, Oto Melara, hired the real-estate agent, Cecelia Grimes, as its lobbyist. Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense says Weldon promoted Grimes’ lobbying clients in other ways. “Her clients were being profiled at congressional hearings that Weldon ran,” Ashdown recalls.
Observers say Weldon is a perfect reflection of the corrupt political machine he has represented over the years. “Delaware County is, if not the most powerful, then one of the oldest and most successful political machines in the United States,” says former Weldon opponent Dave Landau. “And Weldon is only a functionary of the machine.”
In November is the test of whether the voters of Pennsylvania’s 7th District still think the machine delivers for them and they can continue looking the other way at the corruption. One sign Weldon’s worried: Shortly after Labor Day, he introduced a resolution that would give on-the-ground military commanders, instead of the president, the authority to decide when to bring American troops home from Iraq. Weldon, in true Weldon fashion, was attempting to position himself as independent of President Bush, whose Iraq policy he has mostly supported down the line. As a result, Weldon was forced to settle for a nonbinding resolution “after learning that legislation would conflict with the president’s constitutional war powers.” However, that’s not the sort of thing that’s usually stopped him in the past.
