Investigation of Boeing contract awards widens

Air Force secretary asks Pentagon inspector general to look at contracts dating back to 2000; McCain calls for congressional hearings

CHICAGO -- The investigation into Boeing Co.'s deals with the Air Force is expanding.

Air Force Secretary James Roche said he asked the Pentagon inspector general to expand the inquiry into Boeing's 767 refueling tanker deal to include other major contract awards to the company as far back as 2000.

And U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who describes the relationship between the Air Force and Boeing as "incestuous," told the Chicago Tribune that he soon would arrange Senate hearings on the large number of high-ranking military officials who move on to jobs at defense contractors.

At the center of the controversy is Boeing's $20 billion deal to start replacing the Air Force's fleet of aerial refueling tankers.

The deal is on hold while the Pentagon investigates whether Darleen Druyun, then the Air Force's No. 2 acquisition official, gave Boeing proprietary data related to the lease proposal from another bidder, the European Aeronautic Space & Defense Co.

Roche said he asked that the inquiry include "any major programs with Boeing that Ms. Druyun was involved in" during the two years before she left the Air Force in December 2002.

Druyun, who joined Boeing in January, was fired by the company last month, along with Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears. Boeing said the pair broke company rules by discussing her hiring while she negotiated the tanker deal.

Roche said the Pentagon inquiry will probably include a $1.3 billion contract for upgrading NATO early warning surveillance aircraft, a $336 million deal for space programs, and a $47 million contract for a small-diameter smart bomb.

He said he also asked for a review of the 1998 competition between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in which Boeing was awarded 22 of 29 launches for a new rocket booster program worth up to $1.5 billion.

I don't have the URL for this article but Google likely has it. Regardless, the article sheds light on Daschle's aerospace lobbyist wife's corruption:

JANUARY 17 - 23, 2003

I¹m Linda, Fly Me
The real reason Tom Daschle didn¹t run for president
by Doug Ireland
Tom Daschle: Ambitions grounded
by his wife¹s baggage
(Photo by Chris Kleponis/ZU7MA)
The national press corps didn¹t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats¹ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn¹t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry¹s top lobbyists for two decades ‹ when she wasn¹t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off.
Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air Transport Association, the airline industry¹s main lobby; she then became the senior vice president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex¬Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker ‹ where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients. The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker, Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997 through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees). Northwest was already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.
Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle¹s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her husband pushed into law ‹ thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest contributor to Senator Daschle¹s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer Peter Fitzgerald, decried, ³The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders. The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.² So much for the populist noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle¹s mouth. The Daschles also made sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims. Moreover, the General Accounting Office found that the airline industry¹s representations to Congress to secure the bailout overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.
Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda¹s other clients, L-3 International (from which Linda¹s firm raked in $440,000 in the ¹97¬¹01 period). Under a provision Linda¹s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3¹s scanners for every one it purchased from the company¹s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found to be substandard by DOT¹s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the Dallas¬Fort Worth airport ‹ another of Linda¹s clients ‹ leaked radiation), which is a major reason DOT says it won¹t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to come.
In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA, putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left government service. She didn¹t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA, she awarded Loral Space Technologies (a major Democratic contributor that figured in the ¹96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda¹s services. When the FAA was pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees, Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move ‹ echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.
A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation clinic. Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew¹s firm should be banned from getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the business of inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations. An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles¹ assiduous efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew¹s planes were shredded by FAA officials under Linda¹s thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking, there¹s an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn¹t what¹s illegal, the real scandal is what¹s legal.
It¹s a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway¹s national press corps is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator¹s presidential withdrawal ‹ even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly¹s Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on newsstands. As she observed, ³It doesn¹t take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle¹s professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: ŒSen. Daschle¹s wife lobbyist for nation¹s most dangerous airline,¹ or Œmajority leader¹s wife lobbied to make airlines less safe.¹²
Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies ³are pretty junior and may or may not know who I am² ‹ a mind-boggling, risible assertion. But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife¹s tax returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns ‹ which would have spelled out just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.
And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the senator had sought the White House ‹ and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run.

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