Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

A tale told by their e-mails

CARSON CITY - It's always the e-mails.

Warren Trepp was getting ready to take his friends, then-Rep. Jim Gibbons and his wife, Dawn, on an expensive cruise in 2005, a cruise Trepp had paid for, when his wife sent him a reminder e-mail:

"I know you are busy," Jal Trepp wrote, according to documents in possession of the Justice Department. "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn on the trip."

An alarmed Trepp responded: "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer now!"

The Sun has confirmed that the Justice Department is in possession of the e-mail, first reported in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. At stake is whether Trepp was trying to pay off Gibbons for help he provided in obtaining federal contracts for Trepp's company, eTreppid Technologies LLC.

An attorney for Trepp has questioned the authenticity of that e-mail and others.

According to The Wall Street Journal, those include an e-mail in which Len Glogauer, an executive for Trepp's company, tells Trepp: "Jim really hit the ground running on that one." He continued: "We need to take care of him like we discussed."

An FBI official confirmed that Gibbons is under federal investigation. He has been accused of accepting gifts or payment in exchange for helping to deliver top-secret defense contracts to Trepp's company while he was a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Gibbons denied the allegations Thursday and said he's unaware of any federal investigation.

"Much of what is in this news story is false," the governor said of The Wall Street Journal story. "I have no way to challenge it. You make assertions. The FBI has never called, never asked, never sent a letter, never communicated to me never, ever."

Gibbons told a Reno television station Thursday that he had nothing to do with contracts won by eTreppid. He said he "had nothing to do with any contract. I've never negotiated, never asked for and never proposed a contract for eTreppid. So the story that was reported in The Wall Street Journal is false."

In June 2004 Gibbons' congressional office sent out a press release saying that he had requested and obtained $3 million in federal money for eTreppid.

Gibbons also said he has never seen the e-mail in which Trepp's wife reminded her husband to bring money on the cruise. The governor said it may refer to campaign contributions.

Trepp and his business entities contributed $90,000 to Gibbons' campaign for governor.

The Gibbons-Trepp saga is cinematic and knotty and much of it contained in an explosive civil lawsuit filed against Trepp by his former business partner Dennis Montgomery, who alleges that Trepp tried to steal sensitive software highly sought after by the U.S. government in the war on terrorism.

Montgomery also alleges that Gibbons and Trepp leaned on Daniel Bogden, the U.S. attorney in Las Vegas, to order the local FBI office to raid Montgomery's home in Northern Nevada in an attempt to steal the software code.

The allegations are so explosive, and the issues so sensitive, that then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte asked that the case be sealed, and a judge agreed.

A U.S. magistrate judge, in a sealed ruling handed down late last year, found significant violations of the U.S. Constitution in the raid on Montgomery's home, and accused the local FBI of improperly inserting itself in a civil trial, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

(Bogden was fired late last year and is to leave office at the end of this month. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department denied that the raid and firing were related.)

Gibbons denied any involvement in the raid on Montgomery's house. He said it was "absolutely false."

"I do not know where Mr. Montgomery lives. I had no idea there was a dispute between him (Montgomery) and Warren Trepp."

Gibbons also denied contact with Bogden. "I would not know the U.S. attorney in Nevada if he walked in the office. I have never met him. To say that a U.S. attorney in Nevada is not getting reappointed or leaving his office has something to do with this is a stretch beyond even the wildest imagination."

Bogden told the Sun on Thursday that the FBI had not contacted him regarding a probe into Trepp and his dealings with Gibbons.

He also said that his departure as the top federal prosecutor in the state had nothing to do with any investigation of Trepp or Gibbons.

The public airing of the Gibbons-Trepp saga began with a November Wall Street Journal story in which it was revealed that Trepp took Gibbons and his family on a lavish cruise in 2005, and that Gibbons neglected to tell the House Ethics Committee or seek a waiver required to avoid breaking House ethics rules.

Trepp has long been on the periphery of some of the biggest financial and political scandals of the past 20 years. He made his first millions as chief trader for convicted junk bond king Michael Milken.

A friend of Trepp helped him sell a large bundle of stock in a collectibles business in 2002, and he wound up selling it to Tom Noe, a powerful Republican in Ohio recently convicted on multiple counts of fraud and larceny and laundering money to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.

Letitia White, a lobbyist said to be at the center of a bribery scandal involving defense contracts, listed eTreppid as a client, although she said Trepp never paid her.

Trepp has sued Montgomery for theft of intellectual property. He filed a defamation suit against Tom Collins, chairman of the Nevada Democratic Party, for comments he made about the case.

A lawyer for Trepp, Jeff Ross in San Francisco, said his client "has not been contacted by any federal prosecutor or federal investigator about this." Ross said Trepp wasn't aware of any federal investigation into Trepp's relationship with Gibbons until he saw Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

Ross said Trepp's relationship with Gibbons has been strictly above board. "Mr. Trepp and Gov. Gibbons have a long-standing relationship," he said, "but we absolutely deny that any payments were made."

Ultimately, the fate of Trepp and Gibbons might be decided by e-mails retrieved on computer hard drives.

For Gibbons, then, it's a bitter irony that he wrote an e-mail to an eTreppid executive in September 2003, according to The Wall Street Journal, asking that eTreppid communicate with him through a personal e-mail address, which would serve as "a direct link to my desk and does not go through anyone else."

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