A Senate committee on Thursday will finally begin consideration of another top Pentagon nomination from President Trump, two months after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis became the first and only Senate-confirmed leader there.
Air Force secretary nominee Heather Wilson could add crucial administration presence to the big building across the river from D.C., since Mattis has been left with a skeleton crew and Obama administration holdovers. But the former New Mexico congresswoman will likely first face questioning from the Senate Armed Services Committee about hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments she accepted from nuclear weapons labs after leaving Congress.
In 2013, the inspector general for the Department of Energy found that four of its contractor-run nuclear labs made $450,000 worth of payments to a company owned by Wilson between 2009 and 2011.
Wilson was a Republican representing New Mexico before leaving the House in 2009 after a decade. The nature and details of the work provided by Heather Wilson and Company to the laboratories were unclear, the IG found.
“We discovered that the contractors made payments to [the company] based on invoices that lacked the detail necessary to support that the agreed-to services had been provided,” according to the published report.
The money was paid back to the government by the contractor-run nuclear labs, which included Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Nevada National Security Site, the IG reported.
Wilson could not be immediately contacted for this story. At the time, she told the Washington Post that the work was “done in full compliance with the contracts.”
The IG also found in 2014 that Sandia, which was run by Lockheed Martin, engaged with Wilson during an inappropriate lobbying effort of the Obama administration and Congress to extend its soon-to-expire $2.4 billion lab contract.
Lockheed Martin paid $4.7 million in 2015 to settle with the Department of Justice over the Sandia lab lobbying, which allegedly included $226,000 in consulting fees for Wilson, according to the Washington Post.
Wilson, an Air Force Academy graduate and Rhodes scholar, has been the president of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, a university that provides engineering and science degrees, since 2013.
As part of her ethics agreement, Wilson would quit the university and step down as a board member from Raven Industries, which produces agricultural products, aerostats and film sheeting, and Peabody Energy, a coal and mining company.
She would also divest from a raft of Defense Department contractor stocks including Raytheon, Husky Energy, Honeywell International, and IBM, according to documents filed by the Defense Department office of general counsel.
Financial entanglements led two other Trump secretary nominees to bow out in February. Vincent Viola, a billionaire who owns the Florida Panthers hockey team, withdrew from the Army secretary nomination and Philip Bilden, a businessman and Army Reserve intelligence officer, withdrew his Navy secretary bid. Trump has yet to submit new names to fill those positions.
