In 2008, Pete Sessions steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Exclusive: Earmark critic steered cash to blimp research

Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”

Yet in 2008, Sessions himself steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps.


What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf.

Sessions spokeswoman Emily Davis defends the airship project as a worthwhile use of federal funds and says it could eventually lead to thousands of new jobs in Sessions’s Dallas-area district.

But the company that received the earmarked funds, Jim G. Ferguson & Associates, is based in the suburbs of Chicago, with another office in San Antonio — nearly 300 miles from Dallas. And while Sessions used a Dallas address for the company when he submitted his earmark request to the House Appropriations Committee last year, one of the two men who control the company says that address is merely the home of one of his close friends.

Jim G. Ferguson IV — the younger half of the father-son team behind Jim G. Ferguson & Associates — told POLITICO that he and his father are trying to build an airship with a “high fineness ratio” that can be used in both military and civilian applications.

Fineness ratio is the technical term for the relationship between an airship’s length and its diameter; the higher the fineness ratio, the longer and more slender the airship is. A blimp with a very high fineness ratio could fly faster and be able to stay aloft longer — the holy grail for airship designers during the past century.

Yet Ferguson acknowledged that neither he nor his father has a background in the defense or aviation industries, nor any engineering or research expertise.

A search of publicly available records shows no history of the Fergusons ever being involved with the airship industry other than their attendance at a February 2005 Pentagon conference on the subject.

Jim G. Ferguson IV said in an interview that he and his father “were business people” and had acquired the patents for building an advanced airship prototype. He said that the two men are playing a supervisory role in the project and “have obtained world-class experts to work for us.”

According to a statement that Sessions included in the Congressional Record last September, slightly more than half of the $1.6 million earmark was to go toward research and engineering costs. The remainder was for overhead and administrative costs.

“This particular project is focused on study and analysis of the high fineness ratio multimission airship for implementation and deployment in support of the persistent [Defense Department] wide shortfall in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability,” Ferguson said in a statement.

The elder Ferguson declined to talk with POLITICO. His son would not provide details on his professional career but did say that he first came to Washington in 1991 to work in the Transportation Department under Secretary Samuel Skinner. He then did advance work for the White House when Skinner became White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush.

On Federal Election Commission forms, Ferguson’s occupation has been listed at various times as lobbyist, rancher or self-employed investor. When asked about his activities since the first Bush administration, Ferguson said he was “just working, doing a bunch of different stuff.”

He has also donated money to Sessions and other Republicans. FEC records show that Ferguson contributed $5,000 to Sessions’s leadership PAC in October 2007. Overall, Ferguson and his father have given $18,500 to GOP lawmakers over the past six years.

Ferguson declined to describe his relationship with Plesha.

“I’ve known him for a long time,” Ferguson said. “As you know, [Washington] is a small town.”

Likewise, Plesha would not comment about his work with the Fergusons or about any interactions he may have had with Sessions or his office concerning the earmark.

“As a policy, I never discuss anything regarding my clients other than what is already publicly available or required to be disclosed by law — especially for a client such as this where their technology is very much sought after by the larger defense and corporate shipping firms,” Plesha said in a statement provided to POLITICO.

In 1997 — before going to work for Sessions — Plesha was arrested for illegal possession of a handgun in Washington, after he shot a man who was burglarizing his apartment, according to court documents. Plesha claimed he had acted in self-defense, but the burglar said Plesha shot him three times in the back as he was running away. Plesha pled guilty to the handgun charge, was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and ordered to do 120 hours of community service.

Within a year, he was working as a campaign manager for Republican House candidate Charles Ball, who was running against then-Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.).

In that campaign, the FEC has said that Plesha created a fake Democratic committee to attack Tauscher. The FEC said the committee sent out 40,000 letters and made 10,000 phone calls to Democratic voters in Tauscher’s district just prior to the 1998 midterm elections suggesting that Democratic Rep. George Miller was opposing Tauscher’s reelection.

But Miller was, in fact, backing Tauscher. The FEC launched an investigation. And in a 2004 news release, the FEC said that Plesha had not only “authorized and distributed the fabricated letters and calls” but also “knowingly made false statements to the FEC” about them, “denying involvement in or knowledge of this scheme.”

According to the FEC and court documents, Plesha pled guilty to lying to investigators in the case. He was fined $5,000, placed on three years’ probation and ordered to do an additional 160 hours of community service, according to federal court documents. He also entered into a “conciliation agreement,” under which he was to pay a $60,000 civil penalty, the FEC said.

Lobbying disclosure records show that, beginning in November 2005, Ferguson and Plesha lobbied on behalf of Sphere Communications, a division of NEC Corp., the Japanese telecommunications giant. Plesha also worked for a time for a San Francisco-based defense contractor whose employees, FEC records show, had contributed heavily to Sessions and his PAC.

By 2006, lobbying disclosure forms show that Plesha was working for the Fergusons. The records show that he collected $51,400 in fees from the Fergusons during the last six months of 2006; nearly $292,000 more in 2007; and $64,500 in 2008.

The records show that the Fergusons are, by far, Plesha’s most lucrative lobbying clients.

Sessions’s office said Plesha wasn’t given any special access to his former boss.

“His role is clear: He and his client presented a position (i.e., briefing) to the congressman and his staff,” said a Sessions aide. “As with any project request, Congressman Sessions evaluates the merits of the project and accordingly makes a decision to either support or decline the request. Based on the project’s represented merits, ... Sessions decided to submit the request to the Appropriations Committee for its review and determination.”

And the Texas Republican still believes in the project, his staff said.

“Based on briefings that Congressman Sessions and his staff have received, projected applications of the technology include military surveillance, fuel-efficient military cargo transportation (especially into areas without adequate infrastructure) and missile defense,” Davis, the congressman’s spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Davis also noted that Sessions has supported a moratorium on all earmarks since the start of the 111th Congress, after the earmark for the Fergusons was approved.