Wilkes faces court date on Friday

Celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos is waging an aggressive defense of Brent Wilkes, a California businessman accused of bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).

{mosads}Wilkes and alleged co-conspirator John Michael are set to appear before a judge Friday to determine whether their trial will begin next week as planned. The hearing likely will be delayed due to a recent flurry of subpoenas issued by Geragos to House members, and possibly several senators, the White House chief of staff and top brass at the Defense Department.

Wilkes is accused of giving Cunningham hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gifts and favors, such as trips that included stays at luxurious hotels, antiques, boats and prostitutes, in exchange for help securing defense contracts. Cunningham is serving an eight-year sentence for accepting the bribes from Wilkes and others.

On Tuesday the House general counsel filed a motion to quash subpoenas for testimony and documents issued to 12 members of Congress last week, including: former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), John Doolittle (R-Calif.), Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), Jerry Weller (R-Ill.), John Murtha (D-Pa.), Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) and Norm Dicks (D-Wash.). A 13th subpoena, issued to Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), was withdrawn, the motion indicated. United States District Court Judge Larry Alan Burns will consider the motion Monday.

On the motion’s first page, the House general counsel refers to information, received from an investigator for Geragos, that Wilkes also has issued trial subpoenas for Sens. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), as well as White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England.

“We do not know whether any of these subpoenas have been served,” the House general counsel wrote.

Spokesmen for Craig, Levin, Inouye, Rockefeller and Bolten said they had not been served with any subpoenas in the case. Calls to the Pentagon and Geragos were not returned by press time.

The House general counsel’s motion rejected the subpoenas for “a host of reasons,” primarily because the information sought is protected under the Speech and Debate Clause, which bars members of Congress from being investigated for work related to legislative activity.

The motion notes that in Hunter’s and Lewis’s cases, the subpoenas sought documents related to appropriations, authorizations and earmark requests in three categories: a) those pertaining to programs of interest to Cunningham and Wilkes, b) documents related to Wilkes’s bribery of Cunningham, Hunter or Lewis, and c) documents “evidencing bribes ‘offered to you or accepted by you.’”

Hunter and Lewis have no documents responsive to categories B or C, the motion said, although Hunter “may have” some documents responsive to category A.

The general counsel’s motion also noted that it had already responded to the document subpoenas to Murtha and Reyes, chairmen of the Appropriations Defense subcommittee and the Intelligence Committee, respectively. In response to subpoenas from the San Diego U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Appropriations, Intelligence and Armed Services committees voluntarily allowed nearly 1,800 documents related to Cunningham “and/or certain Defense Department programs” to be reviewed.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office provided Wilkes’s legal team copies of that information, the motion said.