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AP: Senate Career Over, Burns Cashes In
Yet another senator who lost re-election because of his ties to lobbyists is heading to K Street:
Former Sen. Conrad Burns, whose ties to lobbyists helped sink his re-election bid, has landed at a new workplace: a Washington lobbying firm.Burns will work for his former chief of staff, Leo Giacometto, at the firm Gage, which has lobbied for Montana interests and several national technology companies, often making headlines for its connections to Burns and his staff.
Well, at least there Burns will be able to earn more than enough to pay his lawyers as prosecutors investigating the Abramoff scandal bear down... although he's still got plenty left over in his campaign fund.
Update: As anonymontucky comments below, Burns and Giacometto are under investigation by the FBI for Burns' earmarking shenanigans, as first reported by Roll Call (sub. req.).
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Comments (7)
anonymontucky wrote on January 10, 2007 2:19 PM:And it will make matters easier for the FBI since they are already investigating Giacometto.
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2006/10/25/news/local/news03.txt
Mrs Panstreppon wrote on January 10, 2007 4:09 PM:I am interested in what financial ties, if any, Conrad Burns has to a Butte-based company, MSE, Inc., a Gage client since 2004. Since 1999, MSE has hired several DC lobbyists in addition to Gage including Patton Boggs and Adam Emanuel.
In 2003, MSE, Inc.'s Newark DE based High Performance Materials Group was awarded a $2 million contract from the Department of the Interior.
Sometime in 2003, MSE appears to have either spun off or sold its High Performance Materials Group. In March 2003, High Performance Materials Group, LLC (HPMG) was registered in Delaware. In January 2004, HPMG was awarded a $5 million DoD contract to manufacture 20,000 ceramic body armor inserts despite having no manufacturing experience. After eleven months, HPMG only produced 346 inserts.
HPMG's successor, Dynamic Defense Materials, LLC, shelled out $60k to Media PA-based lobbyist, Cecilia Grimes and more than $30k in campaign contributions including $17k to Curt Weldon between 2005 and 2006.
HPMG ostensibly operated out of 1515 Garnet Mine Road in Boothwyn PA which is now the address of DDM. It is unlikely that HPMG actually manufactured any ceramic inserts at that site or that DDM mnaufactures inserts there today.
MSE's High Performance Materials Group was originally formed from a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Lanxide Corporation. Alanx Wear Solutions Inc. of Newark De, a Lanxide's investment,is now part of Ceramic Protection Corporation which has gone into the body armor business in a big way.
Heinz Schimmelbusch, Wayne-PA based Austrian financier, sold Alanx to CPC and now owns 15% of CPC. Schimmelbusch also owns a company that produces and markets magnesium. Katherine T. Leighton, DDM vice president who has long been associated with Lanxide and the High Performance Materials Group, recently applied for a patent involving the manufacture of magnesium-reinforced ceramic body armor.
What does any of this have to do with Conrad Burns? I don't know but HPMG's $5 million body armor contract has the stench of corruption about it and I can't figure out what happened to MSE, Inc.'s High Performance Materials Group.
DayDreamer wrote on January 10, 2007 4:40 PM:The release touts Burns' experience on the powerful Commerce and Appropriations Committees and says he has been praised as "one of the fathers of the modern Internet."
That's nonsense! It's an insult to our actual Internet fathers (and mothers), such as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel.
The modern Internet was a Democratic Party project. In the Senate, legislators such as Al Gore and Carl Levin provided leadership for the NSFnet and later Internet.
We had to fight Republicans every step of the way for funding. The Republicans had their own incumbent phone company sponsored alternative, called the "Open System Interconnect" (OSI), that was neither open nor interconnected to anything other than phone systems.
GameBoyMist wrote on January 17, 2007 7:06 AM:Hello
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Eagles wrote on December 12, 2007 11:32 PM:sale@mp3.com