Was Porter Goss Involved in Hookergate?

UPDATE III: This is going to end up being a very big story, going well beyond a simple resignation. I've offered many links to guide you through it, but Josh Marshall condenses what they've been covering since the beginning, especially over at TPM Muckraker. I said weeks ago that it was my new favorite site. If you haven't been reading it daily you're really missing out. Today brings the proof.

UPDATE II: Porter Goss' statement. Think blah-blah-blah, if you don't want to read it.

UPDATE: The CIA Director resigns, and all we get is Patrick
Kennedy's entrance into rehab at MSNBC? Doctors and a long-term disease,
but we get “drugs” and a radio host? Which is bigger news to you?
A CIA director whose number three man has been linked to hookers,
limos and selling out our national security for sex. Or a congressman
who has a history of depression, so he checks himself into the Mayo Clinic?
Allison Stewart didn't say one word about the possibility of the Duke Cunningham
scandal bringing down the CIA director. Why not? She didn't ask one question
about why all of a sudden Goss resigns late on a Friday. She had her show
planned and she's sticking to the script. They're going all the way back to
Andover! Ask MSNBC why a long-term illness of a congressman is more important
than the top spook in the nation suddenly resigning. Send
MSNBC an email.

Now we're hearing that it was DNI Director John Negroponte that asked Porter Goss to step down. We're also being told that it's all about Josh Bolten's power. So, like good little “reporters,” the cable crowd is parroting it all. Meanwhile, Fox “News” can't wait to get back to Patrick Kennedy, who will have a news conference soon. Nice try, but it's not every day the CIA director up and quits without any notice, because he likes hookers on the side.

We know that Republican Duke Cunningham was bribed with hookers and limos,
selling national
security for sex. However, that was just the beginning.

We know that Kyle
“Dusty” Foggo, the CIA's third highest ranking spook, liked
to party too.

Then Harper's
sent out alarms
that CIA Director Porter Goss could be playing
with prostitutes too. But Goss' guys denied it up and down, saying “This
is horribly irresponsible. He hasn't even been to the Watergate in decades.”
Millerwise Dyck said “It's horribly irresponsible. Flatly untrue.”

Mmmhmmm. We shall see. But why
the rush? Read my headline again. As Josh
says, TPM Muckraker has been all over this from the start. Rough transcript
from CNN, via TPM
Muckraker, though I've cleaned up some of the typos.

Bobb Barr: We've seen brewing out of the congressman Duke Cunningham scandal, probably now for several months. It's starting to reach into the CIA and that come very well like a sore that's been festering, that could very well burst out and maybe that's a reach into the top levels of the agency. Reporter: Are you saying the director himself, congressman? Bobb Barr: I can't imagine that. I know Porter, I've known him for many years and I can't imagine him part of that. But if you've got the top two or three people at an agency working under him and he's going to put them in there and place the faith and the trust of the government in these people and then he becomes tainted by this, it certainly reflects on the leadership.

Here's
more of the story.

Here are more details from ThinkProgess
(links available for the details below at Think Progress):

GOSS’ NO. 3 ADMITS ATTENDING PARTIES: The highest-ranking CIA official to admit he attended the poker parties thrown by Wilkes is Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s third-ranking official. (Foggo even “occasionally hosted the poker parties at his house in northern Virginia,” though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings.) Foggo’s connections to Wilkes and fellow contractor Mitchell Wade are now the focus of an investigation into CIA contracts by the agency’s inspector general, first made public in March. One of Wilkes’ companies, Archer Logistics, won a contract to provide supplies to CIA agents in Afghanistan and Iraq despite having “no previous experience with such work, having been founded a few months before the contract was granted.” GOSS CONNECTED? Last week, Harper’s magazine reported that party-goers “under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees — including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” CIA Director Porter Goss is perhaps the only individual who fits such a description. (Goss denied the accusations through a spokesperson.) But the alleged links between Goss, Foggo, and Wilkes led some to return to questions raised when Goss initially selected Foggo to be executive director in November 2004. At the time, the decision was viewed with skepticism since Foggo’s previous position was as a “midlevel procurement supervisor,” and because following his unexpected selection, “Porter Goss lieutenant Patrick Murray went to then-Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence Mary Margaret Graham and informed her that if anything leaked about other Goss appointments — in particular, Foggo’s — she would be held responsible.” Project on Government Oversight fellow Jason Vest reported last week that much of Foggo’s counterintelligence file “has to do with various social encounters over the years, none of which he’s been deceptive about when polygraphed, and all of which have been deemed to be of no threat to operational security — but are still the types of things that could be embarrassing for Goss and the Agency.” Vest suggests the latest reports raise important questions about the “relationship between Foggo and Wilkes, and the relationship of each with Goss.”