Six Degrees of Alan Mollohan
Roll Call Staff
“We had a lot of help from a lot of people,” Hartzell told the Daily Mail newspaper in Charleston, W.Va. “We had political pats on the back and encouragement from Mollohan, Sen. Byrd, Underwood. They really helped, introducing us to others.”
In that same story, Hartzell notes that his accounting firm, Toothman Rice, extended the firm credit in its early days. Toothman Rice provides bookkeeping services for several Mollohan-related organizations, including the family foundation and WVHTC, and has an office in the Mollohan Innovation Center.
According to the Dominion Post newspaper in Morgantown, W.Va., Mollohan “secured $3.75 million in the 2004 and 2005 Defense Department spending bills” to design and build a robot to disarm roadside bombs. Azimuth and the WVHTC were two of the partners who built the devices, and the Post reported that WVHTC would produce 2,500 of them as part of a $9.6 million contract between the Navy and Innovative Response Technologies Inc., a WVHTC subsidiary. Innovative Response Technologies is registered with the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office as a for-profit corporation with Jim Estep as its president.
Last year, Azimuth received a $2.4 million earmark from Mollohan to provide electronics for a Navy project, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Hartzell family members and Azimuth employees have given Mollohan just more than $54,000 in campaign contributions since 1998.
Azimuth has been described as a “founding member” of the WVHTC, and Hartzell was a member of the 2000 task force that Mollohan chartered to overhaul the organization.
In 2006, Azimuth donated $10,000 to the Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation, and Azimuth participates in the foundation’s internship program.
In 2005, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Mollohan “West Virginia’s Veteran Small Business Champion” on the nomination of Hartzell.
Azimuth’s lobbying firm is Robison International.
Electronic Warfare Associates Inc.
A 2003 article in the WVHTC magazine Journal of Innovation reported that in the late 1980s, “Congressman Alan B. Mollohan was looking for large, established organizations to locate in West Virginia and help nurture and grow native businesses. Electronic Warfare Associates, an electronics and software engineering company based in Virginia, was among the first organizations to accept the Congressman’s offer and opened a branch office in Fairmont.”
EWA President and CEO Carl Guerreri and EWA employees have donated at least $118,000 to Mollohan’s campaign and PAC since 1998. Guerreri family members — including Bart Guerreri, whose Massachusetts-based DSD Laboratories Inc. has also opened an office in Fairmont — have donated about $43,000 during that time.
In March 2007, Mollohan requested $5 million for a Special Operations Forces radio receiver to be built by EWA Government Systems Inc. (Congress ultimately approved $4 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.)
A year later, Mollohan requested funding for the EWA to provide training systems to the military.
Mollohan’s request letters for both of these earmarks provide the EWA’s address as the Mollohan Innovation Center; last September Mollohan joined Carl Guerreri for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the EWA’s new offices in a building on the same campus. Signage around the building in December indicated that it was being built in part by the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, an agency under the jurisdiction of Mollohan’s subcommittee.
The EWA contributed $25,000 to the Mollohan foundation in 2006, and the company provides internships for students through the foundation. The Mollohan foundation also has a scholarship named after John Spears, the former director of DSD Laboratories and member of a WVHTC advisory board.
Frank Blake, a vice president at the EWA, chaired Mollohan’s task force for reorganizing the high-tech foundation in 2000 and served as a board member for the Institute for Scientific Research, where Carl Guerreri was listed as a director.
Bart Guerreri declined to speak with Roll Call, but Carl Guerreri said there is nothing untoward about the EWA’s long affiliation with West Virginia. “We were in West Virginia before I even knew Mr. Mollohan,” Guerreri said, explaining that he opened an office there in the 1980s to take advantage of the fact that West Virginia University was teaching students an obscure computer language that the Defense Department used.
Schumer Advocates for Many on Panel
Nov. 16, 12 a.m.
As Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson once said of the Joint Economic Committee, “It’s as useless as tits on a bull.” But as that panel’s chairman during the 110th Congress, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) seized the opportunity to elevate the traditionally low-profile post to the forefront of shaping policy. Read Full Article
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