What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.

After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.

Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:

On 3/15/08, Jeane Palfrey <jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com> wrote:

Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.

Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.

She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.

An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.

Wayne Madsen & Me

Where to begin with this guy? OK, I'm not going to, but at some point this well known crank got involved with the DC Madam case doing--I have no idea what the hell he did for Jeane, frankly, but it couldn't have been much since he wasn't hired by her to do general research for her defense. For several months I did this work for Jeane at her request (I had a co-researcher who had also been tapped for this work). 

Initially, we looked into what was then known as the "Poway Mafia," that is, former-and-convicted California congressman Randy Cunningham, convicted-and-former defense contractor Brent Wilkes, the convicted-and-former "number three" guy at the CIA, Kyle Foggo, and a few other players who Jeane felt were related to he case. There was a lot smoke there, but we were only able to go so far with limited resources and time. At the end of the project, we, that is me and my co-researcher, made reports as to the aforementioned--how these players related to her and the escort service and why she was being prosecuted in such a manner. Also, we looked deeply into subpoenaed Verizon phone records that went far deeper than the scanned copies that were and still are online, basically who had a specific phone number, and when, numbers that were in her records as potential client-callers. I was paid by the federal defender's office, normal for indigent defendants, then did the rest pro bono.

Jump to two weeks ago: the UK's paper the Guardian/Globe, without vetting his wacky, rumpled self mistakenly quoted Wayner in an article about an EU deal with the NSA allowing them to conduct massive surveillance. I don't even care about the details, because, yes, he was an NSA analyst at once time, ages ago, claims to still have "sources" inside, or in the intelligence community, writes crappy, baseless articles about it, and is generally ignored as a nut in DC and the rest of the sane, civilized world, and for good reason. If you're a normal, well-balanced human being, go read his writing and tell me he's not nutty as hell. I don't see it happening.

The Globe had to pull a front page article quoting Wayner. Of course, it being the UK, the rest of the press there swarmed around the publication and wrote about it, gleefully. I was a little shocked, but unsurprised, when Damian Thomspon wrote a pretty scathing blog piece at the Telegraph about Madsen and the Globe. I won't recount it and leave it to the reader to check it out and decide for themselves, but in my humble opinion, it's spot-on. 

I left this comment two weeks ago after reading it: 

Madsen tried to attach himself to the DC Madam case for a time as well. Where do I think he got the "Obama is gay" theory? From Larry Sinclair. Ironic that you have Moynihan's Twitter quote on here since he quoted me out of context in one of his inane editorials back in 2008 when Ms. Palfrey was still a name in the news.

I did general research for her on the case & was told by a few sources about a "big party" that Larry Flynt was holding for Jeane, to assist her in some way, and who was there but Wayne Madsen. One of my sources (author Bill Keisling) remarked at how slovenly & disheveled he was, wearing a rumpled suit and sounding like the nut described in this story. He also said it kept him awake at night thinking that someone like Madsen had been working for the NSA, ostensibly competent people hired to "protect" the security of the United States, scary.

Indeed, Mr. Madsen once wrote an article claiming that a "shadowy source (it's almost always that way, hence why no one credible listens to him) that the DC Madam had a CIA controller, something of that nature, but so inane and absurd it doesn't warrant further mention.

Then there's Montgomery Blair Sibley, who, as is generally known in DC, is an unhinged scion of old Beltway aristocracy, the Blairs & the Sibleys--they once owned and inhabited the Blair House before Truman's renovation of the White House, it was expropriated. That, I think, created some long-term crusade by Sibley and his late father to be a thorn in the side of the US Courts, one reason why he's currently disbarred.

But just over five years ago, he was representing the DC Madam, who abruptly fired him in January 2008. Not long after that, he was representing Larry Sinclair, the Obama accuser who claims that he & the now-president had sex and imbibed in cocaine in the back of a limo in Chicago in 1999, all a patent lie by a career-liar of another stripe.

I assume that Sibley and Madsen struck up a relationship during the DC Madam proceedings and that the connection between Sinclair probably emanates from that relationship, however, Sinclair got a lot of ink back in 2008 and is still trotted out by uninformed GOP occasionally to smear the current president, to no avail. 

And there it is, my opinion.Whatever this guy gets involved with loses its credibility. He has a negative-Midas touch--everything he touches turns to shit.
 Luckily, none of this wiped-off onto Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.

And so, here we are, two weeks later, and the Wayner responds with a predictably feeble "I know you are, but what am I?":

It would seem that it was Mr Janovic, who lives in Indiana far from the DC environs, who interjected himself on the Palfrey story and my investigation. The late Palfrey contacted me and this guy Janovic, who apparently blogs from a basement, decided to involve himself from afar and tried to obtain my sources and records as the following email will attest:

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Janovic [mailto:myboigie@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:56 PM
To: jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com
Subject: RE: Today's piece

Jeane:

They would have to tell us this, definitely, but that's about all they would tell us. Perhaps I can just ask them ourselves? Perhaps Mr. Madsen could direct me to the resources, links, directories. There are those who would know, it could accelerate this particular research.

warm regards, Matt Janovic

The email is real, by the way. His take on it is not. His take on my life is also inaccurate and childish, but that's Wayner for you.

I responded, and this piece will be my final one on this:

Mr. Madsen's reputation speaks for itself, however, besides his poor grammar, he's wrong: the late Ms. Palfrey approached me and the email there--which is one I sent to her--is being re-contextualized. This is how he works normally, to take information and to recast it as something else. He's a laughingstock in DC and rarely, if ever, reveals his sources because they're as bogus as he is.

As for me "trying to obtain" his sources, read the last sentence, I wouldn't want them. Also, I assume that Montgomery Blair Sibley supplied him with the email, fine, but Google his name for what he's been up to recently and you'll understand the sheer nuttiness I experienced having just nominal contact with these people. Right now, the disbarred Mr. Sibley is still trying to wrong-headedly obtain another fifteen minutes of fame doing more pointless court filings to "prove" that President Obama's birth certificate is fake. I wish I could make this up. Mr. Madsen is a conspiracy nut's conspiracy nut, I doubt he was especially good at his NSA analysis job, and what he writes is paranoiac drivel.

The fact is, Jeane approached me first, not the opposite, a week earlier. The above email wasn't an especially relevant one and I believe it was about her prosecutors--doesn't matter, it was a minor issue and isn't even remotely what he's saying it is. I would never want his research materials because he's not good at it, not good at analysis, and as this article makes plain, he has a roundly bad reputation as a crank.

Again, his contention that I "interjected" myself into the case is a bald misrepresentation of fact. His inaccurate personal attack is also a misrepresentation of what really happened, something he's well known for as this article makes plain. Most of his audience is mentally unwell. Frankly, this guy is making me laugh at such an incompetent response, but that's Wayner for you. 

I could go on about what a pain in the ass he's been over the years. In one case, he poisoned the well with Siegelman case in Alabama and maybe even sent other cranks my way to cause me problems, like Andrew Krieg, but it's not worth my or your time, rest assured.

Where it all ends:  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100224022/guardianobserver-pulls-front-page-nsa-story-after-source-turns-out-to-be-a-fruitloop-who-thinks-obama-is-gay/#comment-966678938

Trying to Get the Word out on the DC Madam case: Am I Being Hacked?

Ed.--This has been going on for more than a few months: I attempt to send an email to a journalist at one of their articles, say at The Telegraph, Disnfo.com, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo (this one took, no response--did it ever make it?), and numerous other progressive web sites and news publications. Either I cannot successfully send the filled-out form/message, or I get no replies, having no idea if they ever got the national security information about the DC Madam case I was apprising them of. I'm sure a few of them got it and reflected on their mortgages, sure. I've even had a semi-retired journalist who covered the intelligence beat who told me they contacted some of their other colleagues who are still working with no responses, no apparent interest. This, of course, is going on their word, a person I've never even spoken to on the phone, so there it is, I have only their word, and in these times, that ain't enough.

Do I know that I'm being hacked, can I prove it? No, but I was during the case and was surveilled, unquestionably, and it followed me onto Facebook and maybe now onto to Twitter, although it seems far more blunted. Now that we know Facebook was giving the NSA direct access, some of the harassment I was subjected to on there could be viewed in a new light. But like the victims of COINTELPRO and all the other government/private harassment programs targeting dissent in the US, I cannot prove it without herculean effort. We're talking numerous filings of FOIAs (Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on myself, whether I was being watched), but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of this knows the Government isn't going to cough it up without one hell of a fight.

What I'm asking my readers is this: I need your help in sending out this form email that I'll paste-in below. I just attempted to send it to the journalist James Fallows at The Atlantic without any luck. It could be nothing, it could be a glitch on their part, there could be a cookie in my browser doing it, but I cannot get to the bottom of it, there seems to be no other solution then to have others send these emails on my behalf. There's nothing in this email message that I haven't written or published here on this blog, it's generalized. If you know a serious journalist covering national security issues, or you simply read on the subject a lot and have a reasonably secure email account, I need you to submit this letter to news sites, blogs, journalists, progressive web sites, and so on, I need your help and would appreciate it greatly. Thank you.

And without being too prolix, here's the text of the letter. Anyone who sends it off in my name, unredacted and unaltered has my full permission:  

Good day, I was a member of the DC Madam's defense team back in late 2007, early 2008. We were granted wide-ranging subpoena powers over the telecoms as well as the intelligence community by Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler, who, I might add, was shortly after that replaced without any explanation by a board of judges (a board she was on!) by former FISA Court judge James Robertson. He quashed all of that once on board for reasons that I think were obvious: the case involved surveillance, most likely of her escort service which had a large percentage of defense/intelligence contractors, military and intelligence officers, and a whole lot more. No one seems to want to touch this element of what was erroneously defined by the MSM as a simple sex scandal--it was not, it was far more. I don't expect you to answer because I'm always meeting a wall of silence on this.

I was hired as a general researcher by the late Ms. Palfrey in December 2007 and paid by the federal defender's office for my work, but I did far more pro bono after that month. Indeed, we were going through the subpoenaed phone records that had been provided by one of her carriers, Verizon, but AT&T and Sprint had yet to comply when Judge Kessler was abruptly replaced in the middle of the night in late November. But, we had the records that went much deeper into who had a phone number and a cell or landline--the whens and wheres--and came up with a stunning array that represented the national security state and their contractors and employees on both fronts. One of them was Ret. Col. Ron Roughead, brother to now-retired CNO Gary Roughead. The former worked for SAIC the last I knew and that firm came up in materials and outside of them so many times as not to be coincidental. I could go on and on with the very solid connections between players, but I will leave you with one example: there was one call, and one call only, from a former Verizon engineer with a Muslim name who was also an early war on terror arrest, in the DC area. I won't name him here, but his story was in the press and articles can be found online.

I should also add that we found some indications of intelligence activities in a hack of her email account going back to fall of 1998--yes, it could have been anyone, but they were being forwarded all of the ingoing and outgoing items in it, beyond the sophistication of the average internet user that year. It was a Yahoo.uk account. We got bounce-backs that I identified when the surveillance account was closed. Oddly, the bounce-backs contained the text of a 419 scam, a Nigerian one that's well-known, a fake barrister's note. This wasn't directed at us and was a clear glitch. It has been written that--and I cannot speak to the veracity of it--419 scams have been known to be used as covers for intelligence operations. And there is more, much more. I wrote an account on the case that's heavily-detailed and contains literally hundreds of emails between the late Ms. Palfrey, myself, and others, primary documents, court filings, etc., down to her autopsy report. The story's not cold, incidentally, since no one ever got to the real dynamics of it, other than myself and a few others. The press was ill-equipped to do so, or unwilling, but I cannot say decisively.

This NSA story, I believe, has a direct relation to what happened to Ms. Palfrey and her escort service. I've experienced strange online harassment, visits from contractors to my blog (http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com), hacking of accounts--you name it, outside of physical confrontation and/or shadowing. I implore you to at least consider this story in light of recent events, to look deeper, or to pass some of this along, and this is just the tip of the iceberg here.

Regards, Matt Janovic, writer and private researcher

why every american should read let the dead bury the dead

Too often mislabeled as a “routine” sex scandal by the press, and a prostitution/racketeering/money laundering case by government prosecutors, the charges leveled against the “DC Madam” were a mockery of justice without precedent. This is a tale of institutionalized crony capitalism and the return of aristocracy into a corporate mold. Let the Dead Bury the Dead sheds new light on the investigation, legal proceedings and the phenomenon of the DC Madam, from a witness to history. Drawing from his direct involvement in the case—as well as from a significant array of primary historical materials never before seen by the public--the author will illustrate that there was nothing normal about how the charges against the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey were applied, quite the contrary. From the mainstream media’s attempts at defining and dismissing many explosive facts and patterns in the case to the legal proceedings and show trial, the DC Madam story illuminates textbook examples of prosecutorial misconduct, information warfare, judicial abuse, and political damage control. Possibly a harbinger of things to come, the subsequent death of the DC Madam stands as a shadow testament to the political crisis that ran riot in America under President George W. Bush, and that continues into the present. Media, government and the business sector colluded to bury the story, and for the most part, they have, until now.

              Many Readers Will Learn for the First Time that:

-The DC Madam's phone records are littered with phone calls from defense-intelligence contractors.

-Palfrey claimed to have received multiple calls from Brent Wilkes, the government contractor who bribed convicted California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

-Palfrey’s legal problems began innocuously thanks to a Postal Inspector, spiraling out of control from
there.

-Deborah Jeane Palfrey “knew” less than she let on and can be counted as an arbitrary victim of power.

-Palfrey was granted wide subpoena powers over the American intelligence community and all Beltway
law enforcement.

-There are more many more “big names” in her legendary phone records yet to be published.

-Porn publisher Larry Flynt assisted Palfrey more than previously thought, promising her a form of asylum in the aftermath of her trial.

-Palfrey was under periodic observation longer than previously reported by federal law enforcement and persons unknown.

-Palfrey was much fairer than the typical American employer by miles.

article/phone interview on dc madam case & account at internet chronicle

This is the very first article on the case and the book, among other topics. I spoke with their correspondent Tyler Bass today, and it was a pretty fruitful discussion on the case and its known and unknown aspects and meanings. I feel my perspective on the case was honestly represented and that he made a number of interesting observations, a few I'd never considered before.

That's typical of the case: some aspects of it look one way to one observer, another to someone else, and what you have is a patchwork that frequently defies explanation. There are always going to be a lot of mysteries swirling around this case, because it involved the secret world of intelligence. To what extent, I don't know, but it did.

As I told Tyler, were I to summarize the DC Madam case simply, I'd say that it was a branch of Hookergate, most likely the Randy Cunningham/Brent Wilkes/Kyle Foggo "Poway mafia," all of whom were busted over activities surrounding influence peddling, getting that pork back to San Diego and into their pockets first. How big is all of this? I don't know. What I do know is that there was a strong motive in sensationalizing the case to divert away from the real corruption staring us all in the face.

"Matt Janovic Opens Up Hookergate," The Internet Chronicle, January 26th, 2013: http://www.chronicle.su/news/matt-janovic-opens-up-hookergate/

Qualcomm being sued by NY State Comptroller over political donations

Without any prompting, Qualcomm came around my blog J to the Power of 7 on a word search over Montgomery Blair Sibley. This was around three years ago. I had no idea why they came around, but when I did a little research, I found that they also do intelligence and defense contracting…and they have a revolving door policy between their executives and those at Ernst & Young, a major corporate services firm that specializes in corporate audits, and yes, the books that get cooked.

The latter firm is involved in uncovering such things in corporate institutions, but also have had allegations thrown at them on several occasions that they helped to cover it up. What does that have to do with the DC Madam? It might not be anything specific beyond the fact that her former prosecutor, Jeffrey A. Taylor, a Bush II interim appointee who was never fired by incoming president-elect, Barack Obama, and went on to a cushy legalistic job at Ernst & Young. Now, why would someone at Qualcomm do that word search on Mr. Sibley? I have no idea and have never expected a straight answer out of them–don’t have the resources, or the inclination to bother looking into it, life’s too short. But the fact remains that both firms are very closely-linked, Taylor works for Ernst, and someone felt compelled at the sister firm of Qualcomm to do research over Mr. Sibley. When I brought it to his attention, he seemed pretty interested–as interested as I was. It was just one more bizarre “coincidence” from the case. I don’t know if Taylor is still working at Ernst & Young these days, but I would assume so. What’s of interest to me is the connection not only to computer chips and CPUs made by Qualcomm, but their relationship with the Pentagon and American intelligence community, perhaps one similar to SAIC’s, another major league contractor. Qualcomm was never in Jeane’s phone records, but I believe someone fucked up here and showed their hand, for which I thank them!

And now, the Comptroller of NY State, Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Democrat, is suing Qualcomm over political donations to force transparency. NY State is one of the biggest shareholders in the corporation, and is asserting her interest in the firm. This is reasonable since the risks are very high to public investors, especially when so many were burned in the banking crisis of 2008 thanks to widespread securities fraud. This is a major reason for the economic crisis in countries like Greece, for example, just one of many. Consider that when politicians in DC start screaming for austerity measures because of the deficit. Hundreds of billions were spent to keep a lot of crooks afloat. That's called being robbed twice.

Here’s more at the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/nyregion/new-york-comptroller-sues-qualcomm-for-data-on-political-giving.html?hpw&_r=1&

And my observations on them in relation to the DC Madam case (the earliest are most pertinent): http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/search?q=Qualcomm

and we have a facebook page!

Here it is, yo: http://www.facebook.com/LetTheDeadBuryTheDeadByMatthewJanovic

Thanks Andrea! I tried to give her a book for free, but nothing doing! Who wants to take bets on how fast DHS or trolls abusing the complaints system there get it taken down? Doesn't matter, all the content you need is right here, so hit those labels! (DC Madam, Palfrey, Montgomery Blair Sibley, Pamela Martin, David Vitter, Jack Burkman, Brent Wilkes, Randy Cunningham, Thomas Kontogiannis, and so on.)

2012 was the year...

This was quite a year for me, perhaps a watershed in some ways, but one that will at least allow me to truly move forward in my life and to be a free of the terrible stress expediting the completion of a historical account. There are no rules for that, and only a few guidelines. In the end, you're the only one who knows what you experienced, and even then, that's not always a given. You know what you were told. You know what information was conveyed to you. You know what you experienced during these interactions, but they're fragmented, obscured, and questionable in one way, completely credible in others. That's navigating a labyrinth. 

This wasn't just 2012 for me, it was the last five years of my life. What was real? I discovered many things that were, many more that were not, and more than all that combined that remains a mystery to myself and others. The terrible part is to then extricate yourself from the narrative continuum to continue on with your own life. There are apparently some out there who don't want this to happen, but I have news for them. It is going to happen.

I'll promote the book, and I'm open to interviews, all that's fine. However, I won't be dragged into other people's agendas, and there have already been attempts to do this, right out of the gate of the release of Let the Dead Bury the Dead. When else would it occur? There will be more. Interestingly, the phony cease and desists have halted, a form of harassment that I've experienced from the beginning of my involvement with Jeane's case to the present, several months ago, then once more just weeks ago. The fact that they've now become silent in their legal harassment from the shadows tells me what I always assumed: it was all predicated on scaring me out of publication. That was never going to work in a nation where prior restraint has been ruled unconstitutional so many times that it's solid precedent. A first year law student would know this, and so too would many millions outside of legal profession. Were I to discover their identity, I could sue them in a civil court, and maybe even hit them with criminal charges of harassment--that is, if it's not the government, then the funhouse rules come into play.

Is this a story many don't want to be told, Jeane's story, the information that I and others came into possession of? It was uncanny how often the information was coming to me, not the reverse. There were many times that Jeane would mistakenly send me entire email-chains between herself and counsel and others, and doing so when I wasn't even part of the defense as a researcher. Was she trying to let me bear witness? Sometimes, she was, unquestionably, but I don't think the chains always were. When she Cc'd her exchanges with journalist Jason Leopold, whom I bear no ill will mind you, she was most definitely doing this. There were other occasions, sometimes to bounce my opinion off of things counsel was conveying to her. What did I think of this crafted motion? Did I trust counsel? Did I know more about their and numerous other players' backgrounds, sometimes collective, interconnected ones? The answers were always varied. Sometimes I was able to find out, many other times, she was simply asking the impossible out of desperation. This all had to be written down and chronicled before it gradually vanished from my memory, and the memory of others, because so much is lost to history when this kind of action isn't taken immediately. It escapes into the Aether, subsumed by darkness, assimilated into the Abyss. You can bet that a lot more is sitting on a hard drive at some "fusion center" in the continental United States. An FOIA isn't going to free it up anytime soon.

I'll continue to answer questions to the best of my ability on the subject, because I think it was a far more important case than most of us realized at the time. It took a great deal of after-the-fact research on my part, a lot of reflection on what happened when Jeane was alive, what my role, my place, in it all really was, and to question, question question, and that includes myself, my assumptions. It turned out that many of my earliest ones were either correct, or that I was on the right trail.

The public has a right to know what's being done in their name and how their taxes are being spent. This is why my account is important. Besides being a historical chronicle for the historical record, it can be a starting-point for further inquiry. Because of the information I came across, I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to happen. Our political system is in what I consider terminal crisis that's borne out of the natural lifecycles of democratic societies. They have a shelf-life, and we're around the time of the expiration date. 

The cycle, as one would imagine, is a circle. I recommend looking at the democratic and republican experiments in ancient Greece and Rome. Western societies appear to begin with warrior king leadership that grows into some general form of feudalism, then to forms of republicanism where it's primarily based around land ownership, often headed by a senate, some parliamentary structure, and on into wider forms of democratic franchise, popular democracy of some sort. Unfortunately, and the ancients saw this firsthand, democracy is also the most fertile soil and prerequisite for tyranny, either by the masses or a dictatorship. Because the general population is usually uneducated, ignorant, stubborn--holding all the human frailties related to pride--there's a tendency towards an overemphasis on the military. Appetites, often arising out of inequality, must be fed in order to rule, and so, it's not simply leadership that demands empire, it's the people, the working-class wage slaves, the populi, the plebes. Military adventurism becomes a virtual inevitability. 

Because of the social reality of a minimum degree of democratic rights, the franchise, the vote, a say in how things are done, we must have bread and circuses, the mob must be placated and diverted away from a real voice in the operation of society ruled by some form of aristocracy. More often, people want to be told what to do thinking that it's easier, and too often, they want a strongman leader to show them the way. Sadly, I see us at the end of this cycle and heading towards dictatorship. The American public will hold just as much of the blame as the current rulers when things disintegrate into this. Can something better arise out of this? Eventually, if we can survive. The Greeks are still waiting for democracy, so there's a good idea of how long it might take.


Do I see much change in our course in the United States, to avert what no other democratic society was able to endure, besides maybe the Swiss? No, I'm afraid not. We're going to continue our military adventurism, until there's no more money left in the Treasury--what happened to Athenian democracy--or someone creams our ass, more likely a combination of both, which has many precedents. Democracies die of neglect. When the 17th and 18th century liberal thinkers spoke of revolution, it was as a warning, not a threat, that there must be reform or that things will collapse into chaos and violence. This is what the social contract is about. We either work together, looking out for each others' well-being, or we will surely die together. Apathy and indifference towards others is a ticking bomb, and it's why I have a serious problem with American Libertarianism, a subject barely worthy of comment for its obvious irrationality. Thinkers such as John Locke were saying that breakdowns of order happen when a society becomes so dysfunctional from misrule, and the missing-ingredient is the public, that people begin killing each other. But the public too often is unaware of their power. They're apathetic, divided over petty squabbling, generation after generation, making the exact same mistakes. Worse still, the public is very often wrong like their rulers. Now, you, the thoughtful reader, will know why my book is only going to reach so many people. The truth hurts. And now on to other related things that happened in my life this year...

2012 was the year that I:

...finished and published the manuscript of my experiences in the DC Madam case (and beyond it, stories never end, or ever die). Let the Dead Bury the Dead can be traced back to an exchange in the New Testament between Jesus and a disciple who said that he needed to bury a loved one before he could go with them on the road. I was unaware of this at the time I decided on the title. It has become an idiomatic phrase throughout the world over the centuries, and there is no agreement on what Jesus meant by it. Some say he meant to let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead in a dead, fallen world. Others say that it means to move on from the past, to not dwell on it, to not live in the past. I don't claim to know what he meant or originally said, but I think all the meanings relate to me and the book. This is when you begin to realize that you've hit on some very fundamental truths, and not merely artistic truth, but truth itself. So much of this has been serendipity to the point that it cancels itself out, it is no longer coincidence, but the truth, however terrible, liberating, or great. I can only feel humbled by it all.

...was asked to research the Wikileaks StratFor emails cache, along with many others of course. This didn't come to be, unfortunately, over technicalities I'll go into one day. To be asked was very exciting. My opinion of Assange is yet to be finalized. On an interpersonal level, I'm sure he can be a pushy asshole. On the other hand, it's probably worth it to kick people who aren't serious to the curb, which he has done on numerous occasions. The amount of information coming out of governments around the world? I can tolerate a lot there. The people Wikileaks is working against are the worst in the entire world.

...began watching the great works of cinema as much as I'd been wanting to for a very long time, and when I purchased a Blu-ray player when my old DVD-player croaked. Watching a cinematic classic in HD is maybe one of the few great technological achievements of the current era. If it serves the dissemination of the arts, information of value, in a better way, I'm all for it. There is nothing more important than cultural expression when it's the truth.

...noticed that for some reason I'm aging well. This is probably because I rarely drink and smoke and get regular exercise. Why stress didn't contribute more might have to do with the fact that my family has naturally low blood pressure. The other good side is that the more I grow older, the great my resemblance to Oscar Wilde, and that's not a jest.

...realized how wonderful my mother's parents really were, and how their home is truly my home. America is my home, I cannot leave her. As fucked up as she is, I still love her, or I wouldn't be trying to save her from herself. At some point, it doesn't matter what the odds are. You must act out of decency and honor, armed with knowledge and a sense of persistence and the long view.

...found that many of my fellow Americans are a pathetic embarrassment that far exceeded my worst opinions of them. This includes many Democratic voters and supporters who refuse to criticize the president for committing war crimes and wrecking the Constitution, all but gutting the 4th Amendment, the right to privacy. He has yet to restore habeas corpus. We are not facing the threat to public safety and order that President Lincoln had to when Southern politicians and officers committed treason over his election in 1861. Why doesn't anyone become alarmed by this? Congress just re-authorized the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program for another five years. See how well they can all get along when they want to? What the hell's wrong with the public, where's the outrage over these encroachments on our rights? Much of it is ignorance, but it's also the desire for a strongman leader who has "taken-off the gloves," who is no longer restrained by the law. These people are the worst kind of citizens of any society, in any era of human history, and are scoundrels. Many American look at politics like it's a football game. This makes these people incredibly stupid assholes.

...realized how much I value living outside of cities in what could be best described as a "light rural" area. I've been here for over a decade now and love the lack of many people.

...realized what a genius Pier Paolo Pasolini truly was, one of the greatest artists in the span of Western civilization.

...installed my Tor browser (thanks Wikileaks). I suggest everyone do the same and to learn more about encrypting your online communications.

...got to know my wonderful niece Zofia better. Picking her up from the bus stop every day for the first five months of the year is something that I'll always treasure. It showed me a little window into how my late grandparents, especially my mother's mother, loved spending time doting over us. She's a great kid, very intelligent.

...learned that blood not only isn't thicker than water, but that it's often the consistency of liquid-shit.

...remembered why I hated school, church services, and anything so boring that it begins to kill your soul: it's someone controlling your life, and wasting your precious time.

...recalled what an inhuman asshole my ex-wife really was in-sum.

...learned how much I love our new miniature schnauzer, Lily.

...found a lot of old books I thought I'd lost.

...stopped trusting almost anyone outside of my family and a small circle of friends.

...felt vindicated when former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was found guilty on over forty counts of being a pedophile. For anyone who's been a victim of this, you know what I mean. I'm hoping the SOB gets shanked in prison, or beaten to death. There's no reason to show mercy to these terminally-pathological pieces of shit. They should be watched and tracked all of the time once they've been identified by society.

...saw the combined effects of de-institutionalization of the mentally ill and the wide-availability of heavy weaponry on the lives of 20 schoolchildren, and six of their adult caretakers, in Newtown Connecticut. The time to reopen our state mental health institutions is now. We have no real mental healthcare system, and it must be part of a socialized medical infrastructure. 

...still hate the idea of ever going back to Seattle for any reason.

...was reminded that most so-called "upstanding citizens" are more criminally-minded than so-called "criminals." To be accused is not to be guilty. We have something called the right to due process. The public and the press seem to have no concept of this. Put the 6th Amendment on the same critical-list as the 4th, and more recently, the 1st with the attacks on dissent and independent journalism.

And there was more. There was a lot more. Wish us all luck in the next year, because we're going to need it.

an open letter to former pamela martin & associates escorts

Ladies, if I may be so forward, or so foolish, to address you as such:


You turned your back on Jeane. Maybe she wasn't the nicest human being to work for, but she was a human being, and you either knew or should have known what you were getting yourselves into. The fact that somewhere in the range of fifteen of you turned snitch to save your skins was despicable in light of how well you were paid. Admittedly, I only know so much about how you were treated, yet none of you were willing to come forward to educate me and others on any of the details but one, the woman who courageously attempted to establish contact with Ken Silverstein when he was an editor at Harper's. That woman was a hero and she has my deepest regards and respect.

As for the rest of you, the others that went into hiding, believe it or not, I get it. That being said, it doesn't excuse your kicking the late Ms. Palfrey to the curb. Many of you had moved on after more than a few years, and that's a good out, it's fair. Nonetheless, a number of you, the ones who testified against her, are scoundrels. You own a piece of her death, you are rats, scum, filth, indirect killers. I despise you. 

You see, what a number of you did helped bring PMA to its knees and Jeane to hang at the end of a rope. You are Judases. Not a lot of you were in any specific need to become escorts--there was little desperation involved in it, more a desire for a soft, materialistic life that you felt entitled to. That doesn't make you much different from the rest of the entitled whores that overpopulate this country, but it makes you lower than a streetwalker who's run out of options and finds themselves in the profession. Yes, I don't want to see the government and some of the elements you serviced victimizing you further, there's no point to that, and there's been enough suffering in all of this. But the fact remains that some of you, some of the over one hundred and thirty escorts that worked for PMA over the years, are going to have to live with what you did.

I was fair to you in my book, maybe too fair. But don't expect that I was letting you all off-the-hook completely, because I didn't. For the dozen-plus of you who turned informant, you have no sense of honor. It pleases me that this will cause you a certain degree of pain for the rest of your natural lives. A woman died, as you know, as we all know, and there's no going back from what happened. My hope is that some of you learned something from this and changed, but I'm not an optimist about people and their ways. My assumption is that this will haunt some of you psychologically in some way, yet it won't result in any real shift or transformation in who and what you are, selfish pigs, and that you're going to continue on your merry, indifferent ways just as before. How lovely for you.

Some idiot claiming to be one of you, Andrea Detty, made a limp attempt at undermining the book by suggesting that I hadn't contacted you, therefore, how solid could my attempt to chronicle what happened. That wasn't my job. My job was to tell what I experienced and learned, my part of the puzzle and to try to make as much sense of that as I could. That included obtaining more information. A lot of this was so that I was able to move on from my role in the last year of Jeane's very short life. That kind of an attempt is the act of a scoundrel, a liar, and a psychopath, exactly what I'd expect out of a genuine informant. There's nothing lower than that. Who is this magical person or persons that was able to speak extensively with the former escorts? If they exist outside of a government job, they're sitting on it, and at this point, now that a lot of the smoke has cleared, their behavior is incredibly unethical. I put out requests long ago on this blog for information from you women with no results whatsoever. The onus is on you. It wasn't even a nice try, "Andrea."

You women are the past, and what's past is prologue. I you want to clarify things, great, then do it, otherwise, shut the fuck up, forever, you have no legs to stand on, no credibility.

I could go on endlessly about you, but let me sum it all up: life is short, and the truth will one day come to light. One day we'll know precisely who the worst were, who were the heroes, who at least tried under terrible circumstances to do what was right at the time, and really, who the fucking animals were. Jeane is dead, and I am one of the caretakers of her legacy, one of the few who can bring her voice back from the grave, one of the only people in the world who can at least begin the process of allowing her to point her dead hand at the guilty. There never be a place to run. There is no place to hide from a sun that never sets. Dwell on that for the holidays.

Matt Janovic

dc madam trial transcripts

Ed.--These files are not complete, although they're complete within themselves. There is no voir dire. I also believe the evidence was poorly documented, but it wasn't necessary to the documents. Insofar as I know, this will be the first time anyone, anywhere online has uploaded these for public consumption. Read 'em and weep, I did. The trial was a farce, hence why the transcripts aren't readily available, in my opinion. I don't give a shit who has a problem with it. The bottom document is related and covers a lien placed on Jeane's former residence over legal bills. Once again, you may not have fries with that.

 March 19, 2008 pretrial hearing (.txt file): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92CiyYXlpZVRHblduMmM/edit

April 8, 2008 (day two/ .txt file): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92CiyRXRveGY2c3ZzYUk/edit

April 9, 2008 (day three/ .txt file): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92Ciyd1pLc1oxbm9VakE/edit

April 10, 2008 (day four/ PDF): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92CiyXzVuMDA4Sm1UME0/edit

April 14, 2008 (final day/PDF): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92CiyRkJHWGFGSXk5VlU/edit

December 10, 2008 Court lien order over Palfrey estate legal debts to Montgomery Blair Sibley (PDF): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3zDKjQ92CiyaWJCNlRTV0YyVFE/edit

Postscript, 12.22.2012:  Does any of this read like a real trial where Anglo-American principles of justice were being applied? If so, I have a bridge and swampland to sell you. What the hell was Preston Burton thinking beyond having to work with his peers again after this bullshit charade? This is where Sibley was at least genuinely adversarial. What did Burton do to convince Jeane to lay down and die, to agree to mounting no goddamned defense at all? 

To be fair, and I can only look at this as a layman, his cross-examinations of the witnesses were solid, appropriate, what you'd expect, but little more was done beyond that. Was he on the side of the defendant at all? This wasn't a trial, it was theater, the political kind, to cover for the GOP and various selfish interests. Shame. Pathetic. This is how not only democracy dies but the human race. You got it: no one gives a shit. RIP America.

And, for a better understanding of them:  
http://www.amazon.com/Let-Dead-Bury-Madam-account/dp/1480297437/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353888194&sr=1-10&keywords=Let+the+Dead+Bury+the+Dead

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Let-Dead-Bury-Madam-account/dp/1480297437/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355242478&sr=1-1  

http://www.amazon.fr/Let-Dead-Bury-Madam-account/dp/1480297437/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355243316&sr=8-1

  http://www.amazon.de/Let-Dead-Bury-Madam-account/dp/1480297437/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1355243200&sr=1-1-catcorr

  http://www.amazon.it/Let-Dead-Bury-Madam-account/dp/1480297437/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355243385&sr=8-1

 https://www.createspace.com/4056731

what to expect from let the dead bury the dead

Ed.–There will be some excerpts on this site, coming soon.

Too often mislabeled as a “routine” sex scandal by the press, and a prostitution/racketeering/money laundering case by government prosecutors, the charges leveled against the “DC Madam” were a mockery of justice without precedent. This is a tale of institutionalized crony capitalism and the return of aristocracy into a corporate mold. Let the Dead Bury the Dead sheds new light on the investigation, legal proceedings and the phenomenon of the DC Madam, from a witness to history. Drawing from his direct involvement in the case—as well as from a significant array of primary historical materials never before seen by the public–the author will illustrate that there was nothing normal about how the charges against the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey were applied, quite the contrary. 

From the mainstream media’s attempts at defining and dismissing many explosive facts and patterns in the case to the legal proceedings and show trial, the DC Madam story illuminates textbook examples of prosecutorial misconduct, information warfare, judicial abuse, and political damage control. Possibly a harbinger of things to come, the subsequent death of the DC Madam stands as a shadow testament to the political crisis that ran riot in America under President George W. Bush, and that continues into the present. Media, government and the business sector colluded to bury the story, and for the most part, they have, until now.

Many readers will learn for the first time that:

-The DC Madam’s phone records are littered with phone calls from defense-intelligence contractors.

-Palfrey claimed to have received multiple calls from Brent Wilkes, the government contractor who bribed convicted California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

-Palfrey’s legal problems began innocuously thanks to a diligent Postal Inspector…and it spiraled out of control from there.

-Deborah Jeane Palfrey knew less than she let on and can be counted as another victim of arbitrary power.

-Palfrey was granted wide, unprecedented subpoena powers over the American intelligence community and Beltway law enforcement.

-There are more “big names” in her legendary phone records yet to be published.

-Porn publisher Larry Flynt assisted Palfrey more than previously thought, promising her a form of asylum in the aftermath of her trial.

-Palfrey was under periodic observation longer than previously reported, by federal law enforcement, and persons unknown.

-Palfrey was much fairer than the typical American employer by miles, which isn’t difficult in an oligarchy…