The Curt Weldon Employment Agency

By Ken Silverstein

Representative Curt Weldon (R., Penn.), a powerful member of the House Armed Services Committee, has been a good friend to the Italian firm Finmeccanica, and it appears that his good deeds on its behalf have been rewarded. Last year, Weldon was a key supporter of a long-shot bid by AgustaWestland, Finmeccanica's helicopter unit, to land a $1.6-billion contract to build the new presidential helicopter. With Weldon's help, an AgustaWestland partnership with LockheedMartin beat out a bid from United Technologies Corp., which had been favored. On November 29, 2005, AgustaWestland broke ground on an addition to its Philadelphia-area plant. The project, said Weldon, who was on hand that day, “provides a direct and sustained stimulus to the regional economy by way of increased investment and job creation.”

One job at AgustaWestland has been filled by Weldon's daughter, Kim. Weldon's office declined to comment, but a source who declined to be identified but who is close to the Congressman said that Kim has worked in the firm's public relations office since the fall of 2005. “She got the job in the normal way,” he said. “The company [advertised the position] and she was among the tens or twenties or hundreds who applied. She went through a long process and was picked.”

My source said that Kim has a formal agreement with the company prohibiting her from lobbying Congress or making any contact with her father or his office on the company's behalf. “The company,” he explained, “apparently believes that they have done everything conceivable to ensure that this hire was consistent with their own employment regulations and that it did not hinge in any way upon her father's position in the House.”

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, finds that account hard to swallow. “It seems incredibly unlikely that Weldon's daughter was the one candidate that they happened to pick,” she said. “The coincidence is overwhelming.”

It doesn't stop there. Weldon's twenty-something daughter Karen was once hired by Boeing, one of the congressman's major campaign donors, and later became a high-powered lobbyist who built her company on her father's connections (a story I reported with a colleague in the February 20, 2004, L.A. Times). Weldon “family friend” and realtor-turned-lobbyist Cecelia Grimes was retained by Oto Melara, yet another subsidiary of Finmeccanica, and by several other firms with close ties to the congressman as well. Given all of this, Kim Weldon's new job looks less like an overwhelming coincidence and more like the continuation of a proud Weldon family tradition.

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