Antiwar.com Blog

On Tuesday Scott Horton interviewed Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein for Antiwar Radio about his explosive new story about Rep. Jane Harman’s deal with an agent of the government of Israel to try to put pressure on the Department of Justice and/or the White House to have espionage charges against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, reduced.

The Congresswoman from California was apparently picked up on a phone tap by the National Security Agency, which was investigating the Israeli agent under Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court authorization. Harman allegedly promised to “waddle in” to the Rosen-Weissman case on behalf of the defense if the Israeli agent would use his influence to push then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi into making Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee after the upcoming election which her party was widely expected to win.

In a further twist, the reason the investigation never proceeded was apparently not due to a “lack of evidence” as reported by Time magazine back in 2006. Instead it was thwarted even before it could begin by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who, mindful of the then-impending New York Times piece about the illegal warrantless wiretapping program, said he “needed Jane” to help cover for the administration when the storm broke.

That, of course, is exactly what she did, as discussed in the interview.

Congresswoman Jane Harman is indignant. A National Security Agency wiretap reportedly picked up her conversation seeking favors from a suspected Israeli agent in return for Harman lobbying the Justice Department to drop the lawsuit against AIPAC’s former top officials.

Harman denies the charge and swears that her good name has been defiled. (Har!). Harman sent a letter today to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to release the transcripts of some of her NSA-tapped phone calls and to “investigate possible wiretapping of other Members of Congress and ‘selective leaks of investigative material which can be used for political purposes.’”

Harman was a champion of illegal wiretaps on average Americans. She even urged the New York Times not to publish its original expose on Bush’s massive domestic warrantless wiretaps, and she suggested that the New York Times should be prosecuted when they did finally uncork the story.

Jeff Stein’s superb CQ article on Sunday revealed that Attorney General Gonzales had rebuffed proposals to prosecute Harman after the wiretpped conversations in part because Harman became a vigorous cheerleader for Bush’s destruction of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable, warrantless searches.

The feds should release the records of Harman’s phone calls (at her request) – and all the other evidence regarding members of Congress, White House and other exeuctive branch officials, lobbyists, and other insider players who have sought to pull strings to squelch the trial of AIPAC’s former leaders.