DHS official Marrone used private eye to spy on future Pennsylvania governor Rendell -- By Kelly Riddell and Jim Elhatton, The Washington Times

When his past in a Pennsylvania corruption case surfaced recently, Homeland Security chief of staff Christian Marrone’s defenders insisted he was a victim of a crooked politician who took advantage of his inexperience as a young legislative aide. Some even suggested that Mr. Marrone was a whistleblower for helping prosecutors convict his former boss.

But emails and documents obtained by The Washington Times from court files show Mr. Marrone initiated some of the very activities that captured prosecutors’ interest and led to the downfall of his former boss, state Sen. Vincent Fumo. Some of those activities even personally benefited Mr. Marrone in the process.

For instance, Mr. Marrone accepted $4,000 from a publicly funded nonprofit run by Fumo to pay the cost of his bar review course. The money from the tax-exempt charity was supposed to help revive blighted urban neighborhoods.

While collecting a taxpayer salary, Mr. Marrone also gave Fumo a suggestion to disguise the true source of a proposed political donation from a developer and conceived a plan to spy on Edward G. Rendell to find dirt that could undercut the Philadelphia mayor’s campaign for governor.

“I’d like to snoop around and see if we can dig up some info,” Mr. Marrone wrote in one 2001 email in which he proposed hiring a private investigator to spy on renovations at one of Mr. Rendell’s homes to determine whether he was using nonunion workers. He later asked Fumo for permission to turn over the private eye’s findings to Mr. Rendell’s political rival.

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