Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Joseph Schmitz comes from one of the most bizarre, scandal-plagued, right-wing political families in U.S. history. For decades they have operated on the fringes of a landscape dominated by the likes of the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushes. The patriarch of the family, John G. Schmitz, was an ultraconservative California state politician who raised his family in a strict Catholic household. As a state lawmaker, he railed against sex education in schools, abortion, and income tax, and he was a fierce supporter of states’ rights. He regularly introduced measures supporting the “Liberty Amendment,” which would have required the federal government to get out of businesses that would have competed with private industry. 18At one point, he proposed selling the University of California. 19In the late 1960s, he accused then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, of wanting to “run socialism more efficiently” after a tax increase. 20A year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, John Schmitz led the opposition in the California State Senate to commemorating the slain civil rights leader. After winning a Congressional seat as a Republican from Orange County in the early 1970s, he soon “established himself as one of the country’s most right-wing and outspoken congressmen.” 21He ran for President against Richard Nixon in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party, founded in 1968 by segregationist politician George Wallace. 22The elder Schmitz also served as national director of the anti-communist John Birch Society before being kicked out for being too extreme. 23He made comments like, “Jews are like everybody else, only more so,” “Martin Luther King is a notorious liar,” “I may not be Hispanic, but I’m close. I’m Catholic with a mustache” 24and described the Watts riot as “a communist operation.” 25After President Richard Nixon announced he would visit “Red China” in 1971, Schmitz—who represented Nixon’s home district—called Nixon “pro-communist,” saying the visit was “surrendering to international communism. It wipes out any chance of overthrowing the [Peking] government.” 26Schmitz also said he had “disestablished diplomatic relations with the White House” 27and declared, “I have no objection to President Nixon going to China. I just object to his coming back.” 28Schmitz ultimately lost his seat in Congress and, after his failed presidential bid, returned to state politics. In 1981, he chaired a California State Senate committee hearing on abortion and described the audience as “hard, Jewish, and (arguably) female faces.” 29He also called feminist attorney Gloria Allred a “slick, butch lawyeress” during an attack on Allred’s support for abortion rights. 30Allred sued Schmitz, resulting in a $20,000 judgment against him and a public apology. 31His political career, spent preaching about family values, came to a crashing end after he acknowledged fathering at least two children out of wedlock. 32Eventually John G. Schmitz retired in the Washington, D.C., area, where he purchased the home of his hero, the anticommunist fanatic Senator Joseph McCarthy. 33Schmitz wrote two books, Stranger in the Arena: The Anatomy of an Amoral Decade 1964-1974 and The Viet Cong Front in the United States . He died in 2001 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. 34

Joseph Schmitz’s older brother, John Patrick, also a lawyer, was deputy counsel to George H. W. Bush from 1985 to 1993, during Bush’s time as both Vice President and President, 35and he played a key role in protecting Bush from the Iran-Contra investigation. In 1987, Bush received a request from the Office of the Independent Counsel to produce all documents that might be related to the investigation, including “all personal and official records of [Office of the Vice President] staff members.” 36Bush delegated the responsibility for this to his counsel, C. Boyden Gray, and deputy counsel John P. Schmitz. 37It wasn’t until five years later—a month after Bush was elected President—that Gray and Schmitz disclosed that Bush had kept a personal diary during the scandal that was clearly covered under the earlier document request. 38While they turned over the diary, Gray and Schmitz stalled in handing over documents related to the diary and failed to explain why it was not produced during the five crucial years of the investigation. 39Investigators interviewed all those who had something to do with producing documents from Bush’s office except Gray and Schmitz, who refused to comply. 40Schmitz refused to turn over his own diary, which covered 1987 to 1992, claiming it was a privileged work product, 41employing an obfuscatory tactic that would become de rigueur in George W. Bush’s executive branch. Even after Gray and Schmitz were both essentially offered immunity, they still refused to be interviewed; Schmitz left the administration in 1993. 42Joseph Schmitz had his own link to the Iran-Contra scandal, serving in 1987 as special assistant attorney general to Edwin Meese, 43who served under Reagan as Attorney General and, in Meese’s own words, tried “to limit the damage.” 44Prior to his time at the White House, John Patrick had clerked for then-U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Antonin Scalia. 45John Patrick went on to become a lobbyist /attorney with the Washington, D.C., firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw. 46Among his clients: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lockheed Martin, Enron, General Electric, Pfizer, and Bayer. 47He was also a “Major League Pioneer” funder of George W. Bush, donating thousands to his campaign coffers. 48

Perhaps the most famous member of the Schmitz family, though, is the least political: Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau. In 1997, the married schoolteacher and mother of four grabbed headlines after being charged with the child rape of Vili Fualaau, her thirteen-year-old student. 49Four months later, she gave birth to Fualaau’s daughter. 50The case was a tabloid obsession for years. After serving a seven-year prison term, during which time she gave birth to another child fathered by Fualaau, LeTourneau married her former sixth-grade student in 2004. 51While her father—the hysterical family-values politician who railed against feminists, homosexuals, and abortion—vigorously defended her, other family members kept a much lower profile about the case, which ran parallel to Joseph Schmitz’s ascension to a position in the Bush administration. 52

Joseph Schmitz was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had served in the Navy, mostly in the reserves, for twenty-seven years at the time of his nomination in the summer of 2001 to be the Pentagon Inspector General. 53His limited government work included the stint with Meese and as deputy senior inspector for the Naval Reserve intelligence program. Directly prior to his nomination, Schmitz was a partner at the high-powered and well-connected lobbying and law firm Patton Boggs, where he specialized in aviation law and international trade in high-tech goods, in militarily sensitive areas. 54During Schmitz’s time at the Pentagon, Patton Boggs launched its own “Iraq Reconstruction” practice, in June 2003. 55“An insider’s perspective is crucial… for companies seeking one of the many contracts to reconstruct Iraq,” read the copy on Patton Boggs’s reconstruction page, while the firm boasted of “an exceptionally high number of attorneys with extensive Hill experience and contacts, augmented by strong knowledge of key federal agencies involved in Iraq reconstruction” to help corporate clients procure lucrative contracts. 56Like many Bush officials, Schmitz was a well-connected loyalist and a crony appointment. A glimpse into his extreme, at times bizarre, politics can be found in a series of antiabortion letters he wrote to various D.C.-area newspapers, beginning in 1989. In one letter, Schmitz wrote, “As a man, the plight of pregnant rape and incest victims may be hypothetical but as a former fetus, the plight of aborted innocent human life is as real to me as rape is to most women.” 57In another, Schmitz calls Roe v. Wade “illegitimate federal legislation by unelected judges,” saying politicians should “leave political issues not addressed in the Constitution to the states and the people.” 58In yet another, Schmitz declared, “Most pro-lifers are not averse to taking an ‘unpopular position’ in the defense of human life, whether the life be that of a frozen embryo, a fetus, a vegetative old woman or a teen-age rape victim. After all, the God of most pro-lifers once said: ‘Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’” 59