So, Curt Weldon likes to
pin medals and
give plaques to Moammar Al Qadhafi because Qadhafi once said in a speech that his terrorist past might not have been the best idea. Being from Syracuse,
a city that saw 35 of its residents murdered by Qadhafi-backed terrorists in the 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, let's just say that I am not exactly ready for the United States to become chummy with someone who still says Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth. The whole thing smacks of coddling terrorists, if you ask me.
But it would seem that Weldon has more shadowy friends than just Qadhafi who he likes to reward with items of a lot more value that pins and plaques.
TPM Muckracker has the story
The LA Times broke
the story back in 2004 that Weldon's daughter Karen, then in her late twenties, ran a lobbying firm that was raking in approximately $1 million a year - and by some strange coincidence, her three main clients all had developed a relationship with her father, Curt.
The clients? There was:
- "a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic." Weldon and his daughter worked, without any apparent success, to get them visas.
- a Russian aerospace manufacturer who paid Karen Weldon's firm $20,000 per month to promote its technologies, which included its "flying saucer." Her firm also was to get " a 10 percent finder's fee if the company '[struck] a deal from a lead supplied'" by them. That little bonus had to be taken out of the subsequent contract, however, when they realized that it was illegal for a lobbyist to take a cut of a government contract. Weldon worked hard to win a contract for the firm.
- a $500,000/year contract from a Russian natural gas company called Itera International Energy Corp. to "'create good public relations.'" She won the contract shortly before her father held a dinner at the Library Congress to honor the company's chairman.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the story is that before she ran a multi-million dollar foreign relations consulting firm, Karen Weldon was a special education teacher. Now, my mother is a special education teacher, and a darn good one, but I still can't imagine her suddenly switching careers to foreign relations consulting. Then again, her father was a mailman in Batavia, New York, not the chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee under Armed Services, and the Vice-chair of the Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Homeland Security (
source).
CREW filed a complaint on these activities back in 2004. Corruption, nepotism, conflicts of interest, insanity, telling another father where his four-year old cancer stricken daughter should receive treatment, giving medals and pins to terrorist-backing Qadhafi, helping buddies of Milosevic get visas--where does this all end? Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. Not by a long shot.
Curt Weldon is nuts and he should not be in Congress.
