Contractor Faces New Charges in Earmarks Probe

The former head of a defense company with close links to Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) used one of the congressman’s earmarks to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to other Murtha-linked companies for work that was never done or was not related to the project, prosecutors charged Thursday.

Federal prosecutors alleged that the former president of Coherent Systems International, a Pennsylvania firm that had hired Murtha’s brother as a lobbyist, helped to fraudulently pay out some of the $8.2 million earmark that Murtha arranged in 2005 for an Air Force battlefield communications system. Coherent is now owned by Argon ST of Fairfax.

The former president, Richard Ianieri, has already agreed to plead guilty to charges in Pennsylvania that he took $200,000 in bribes from a Coherent subcontractor on another project. The new accusations, in Florida, come in the kind of legal filing that suggests Ianieri has already agreed to plead guilty to those charges as well.

Read more: (Carol D. Leonnig, “Earmarks Probe,” The Washington Post, 7/10/09)