04/21/09 – Jeff Stein – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Of course, all the news is about Jeff Stein's report in Congressional Quarterly about a seeming obstruction of justice case involving the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and a Congresswoman from here in California named Jane Harmon.
Jeff Stein is the National Security Editor for Congressional Quarterly.
The website is cqpolitics.com.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you?
Thanks a lot.
Nice to be here.
All right.
So I guess first of all, the groundwork here is the Rosen-Weissman case.
Can you just briefly describe for the audience what that case is about for the background of what you've reported here?
These two gentlemen who were lobbyists for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, stand accused of espionage-related charges.
According to the charges, they received classified material from a Pentagon employee and supplied it to the Israeli government.
The Pentagon employee is now serving 12 and a half years in prison, and it could have been a lot longer except he agreed to cooperate with the government on the case.
So the trial of the two AIPAC officials is now scheduled to begin in June.
And now this is a very, well, despite the scant media coverage of it, it's a very high-profile case.
Wait a minute.
The New York Times lead story today confirms my story.
Oh, no.
I'm sorry.
I meant of the Rosen-Weissman case.
I'm just trying to get to the political import of that case, even though most Americans don't hear very much about it.
Yeah.
It's kind of esoteric.
It's kind of a Washington story.
It's about bureaucrats and Pentagon and the spies and influence peddling and all that stuff.
And it's gotten a lot of coverage, actually, but it's not the kind of thing that generally draws a large public following.
Right.
But it is the kind of thing where apparently, well, someone that you describe in your article as a suspected Israeli agent would work hard to make a deal with a congresswoman in order to put pressure on someone, I'm not sure, sir, to reduce the charges against these men.
Tell us about what happened here.
According to my sources, and now according to the New York Times' own sources, this unnamed suspected Israeli agent asked Representative Harman if she could lobby the Justice Department, call somebody at the Justice Department to get the charges against these two officials of AIPAC reduced.
And in exchange, the alleged Israeli agent said he would raise money for the top Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi, and try to get her out of gratitude to appoint Jane Harman chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee when the Democrats took Congress in the next election.
That is the allegation.
And now it's a bit unclear.
You have the phrase in here in quotes in your article, according to the police or national security people who listen to these wiretaps or read the transcripts, she completed a crime.
She did something apparently to influence, I think in your article you say it looked like she tried to influence lower level members of the Department of Justice, perhaps.
And then as you mentioned in the New York Times article on the front page this morning, they seem to indicate that she thought she would have better luck dealing with the White House.
Do you have any idea exactly what – can you I guess flesh these arguments out for us?
Well, first of all, let's start with this term, completed crime, which I'd never heard of before until I did this story.
And as it was described to me, it's a term of art, legal art.
And what it means is that there is a prima facie case that a crime was committed, and in this case that she did something in exchange for something.
In other words, a sort of pay for play or influence peddling kind of thing.
It was a prima facie case.
On the face of it, it looked like a crime had been committed.
So it wasn't just that she had been overheard saying, yeah, maybe we should do this.
It seems like she actually carried out the conspiracy to do something.
No, it says that it looks like by just merely promising to do that, merely promising to do that, she had committed a crime according to Justice Department attorneys who looked at the tape, listened to the tape.
So that doesn't mean she did.
It means that there's evidence on the face of it that she committed a crime by promising to exchange something for something in value.
In other words, to do a favor in exchange for something of value, which is to say to get appointed to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
Now, what happened is that that triggered an FBI investigation.
But before the investigation was to begin, according to my sources, the attorney general stepped in and stopped the investigation.
So she was never questioned.
So what we have here is that we don't know what really happened because the FBI investigation was stopped before it began.
So we'll never know.
I mean, Ms. Harmon may have all sorts of innocent explanations for this conversation, which I believe with 99 percent certainty that did happen in the way I described it and the way the New York Times is now describing it, that she did have this conversation.
But there may be a context to it in which it puts a less severe spin on what it looks like now and what it looked like to Justice Department officials when they heard it.
So that's the whole point here, is that justice was not allowed to take its course.
Well, and I want to get to the Gonzales thing in a second.
But in the first place, it was, you say in your article, a National Security Agency investigation, apparently not the same FBI investigation that nabbed Larry Franklin and Rosanna Weissman, and that this apparently wasn't Michael Hayden's illegal wiretapping program.
This actually was sanctioned by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It was an investigation of the suspected Israeli agent, not of the congresswoman.
Is that correct?
That's right.
I'll correct one thing.
I think this was a continuation of the investigation into AIPAC and the officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
I think it was at least an outgrowth of that, a continuation of that.
But yes, it had nothing to do, as far as I know, with the so-called warrantless wiretapping program being conducted by the National Security Agency.
It could very well have been that the National Security Agency, because of its technological prowess, was carrying out this investigation for this eavesdropping operation, or in collaboration with the FBI.
But it was not part of a warrantless program.
It was part of a court sanction.
The Justice Department went to this court and asked for an electronic intercept on this target and got the court's approval.
Then the electronic surveillance picked up this conversation with Representative Harmon on it.
Now, as we work our way toward Attorney General Gonzalez and his intervention, we have the question of the notification of the leaders of the House of Representatives due to separation of powers protocols.
It's interesting to me, I don't think this has made it into much of the reporting so far, but I guess while Laura Rosen at Foreign Policy says that Dennis Hastert would have been notified, as well as Pelosi, I'm not sure if she says she knows he was or he would have been, according to the protocol, but he was under investigation in this same investigation as part of the NSA and the FBI looking into the lobbies and their influence as David Rose reported in Vanity Fair back in 2005.
Yeah, that was a separate thing.
I don't know about that, but I do know that under the protocol, when a member of Congress is about to be investigated in a national security investigation, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, CIA, go to the leaders of Congress, the top Democratic Congress person and the top Republican, and notify them in confidence that they're about to launch this investigation.
The reason for that is basically the member of Congress may have access to classified information and they want to tip off these top congressmen that they don't want this person to have access to classified information, but it's also a way to protect the investigative agencies from running afoul of the Constitution by investigating a member of Congress.
It's a very sensitive area, of course.
But yes, Denny Hastert, who was then the Speaker of the House, would have been notified, and so would have Nancy Pelosi, who was the Democratic leader or minority leader at that time of the House.
Okay, and now here's where we get to Alberto Gonzalez.
I guess I'm still a bit fuzzy.
Is it your understanding that the Department of Justice lawyers were preparing to go ahead and convene a grand jury at this point before the Attorney General intervened?
And then how did he intervene exactly?
No, I didn't report anything about a grand jury convening.
I reported only that lawyers in the public integrity section of the Justice Department who had reviewed the wiretap intercept thought there was evidence here, prima facie evidence of a crime having been committed, and they wanted the FBI to go out and investigate.
It's after the investigation that you go to a grand jury and get the grand jury to issue an indictment.
You can't have an indictment until there's an investigation, i.e. until evidence has been gathered.
I see.
So this was killed very early in its crib here, this investigation.
It never even started, according to my sources.
And this was because, according to your sources, Alberto Gonzalez said, We need Jane.
Why did Alberto Gonzalez need Jane?
Here's where the story really gets convoluted, more like a movie, a thriller about Washington.
About this time that all this was happening, the New York Times was preparing a story.
It was about to release a story about revealing this whole, vast, warrantless wiretapping program run by the NSA through the telephone companies, which they were listening to virtually all American email traffic and telephone calls.
And that was about to be a huge scandal, and according to my sources, the Attorney General needed a prominent Democrat on the Hill who was above reproach to help defend the administration in a bipartisan way on this warrantless wiretapping program.
So according to my sources, the Attorney General told the intelligence agencies to stand down, to not go ahead and notify Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the House, and Nancy Pelosi, then the Democratic leader of the House, to not notify them, because he didn't want any dirt on Jane Harman to be made public.
He didn't want an investigation of her ongoing, and ironically, having been picked up by a wiretapper herself, allegedly trading favors with a foreign agent.
He didn't want that coming out.
At the same time, he needed her to be defending very publicly and vociferously the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
And so, in fact, she did.
She came out very much in support of the administration and denounced the New York Times for revealing the existence of that wiretapping program.
So she did do that.
Whether she did that as a favor or whether she felt that anyway, we don't know.
Again, justice was aborted here.
The FBI was not allowed to investigate and thrash this out.
And this is just an aside from me.
The problem for Representative Harman now is that she may have done nothing wrong, and yet she's under a class suspicion because the investigation was aborted.
Right.
Well, and as you mentioned on your blog this morning at CQPolitics.com, Glenn Greenwald pointed out and went back over some of the history on his blog that she really was the worst in terms of being, or I guess the best from Gonzalez's point of view, in terms of being a loyal Democrat and defending the program after it came out.
That's right.
And, in fact, I don't think this made it by press time of your blog entry, but apparently this blog plumb line this morning is confirming that Harman, in fact, did pressure the New York Times twice, two different times.
And according to Keller's second statement now, the first time was in late October or early November 2004, just in time to apparently bury a story and help George Bush win re-election over her guy.
That's right.
So it's a very convoluted story.
In fact, when one of my sources was first, one of my principals was first describing this, including the quote that Jane Harman allegedly said, this conversation does not exist.
I said, oh, man, that sounds like a bad, bad movie, you know?
And he said it does.
In fact, the whole thing sounds like a bad, like a Washington thriller, sort of like that one that just came out in a state of play or whatever.
It's sort of a thriller, and I'm hoping someone buys the movie rights.
Or at least, you know, pick it up like the Times has done today and continue reporting on it.
When does your follow-up article come out?
I'm following it.
I haven't written anything yet.
I wrote a blog about what had been written for today, as you saw and you mentioned.
I'm continuing to investigate the story.
We have not identified with any certainty yet who was the target of the wiretap, who was the suspected Israeli double agent.
We haven't identified that person yet.
That's just for starters.
There's lots of questions to be answered here.
Yeah, indeed.
I guess it was the Times story of 2006 brought up this guy Haim Saban, but your reporting doesn't indicate to you that he's the suspected Israeli agent that we're talking about here?
I do not have that.
In fact, I was told by one of my sources that he was not the target.
I see.
Do the cops that you talked to, did they think, which, you know, maybe this is a stretch of a question, but are they under the impression, I guess, that she knew the guy that she was making this deal with was actually an agent of the Israeli government rather than just an influential lobbyist of some kind?
That's a really interesting question which hasn't been answered yet, and I hope to be able to answer that.
Again, if the FBI had been allowed to investigate, we might have found out.
Well, and have you talked to any lawyers?
Are they saying that this looks like, because I'm no lawyer, that's the other Scott Horton that's got all the credentials, but it seems to me like this is what you call a prima facie case for obstruction of justice on the part of the former Attorney General, right?
And perhaps this Congresswoman.
I'll let other people characterize it.
I'm just reporting what happened.
I see.
All right.
That's fair enough.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for calling me.
I appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's Jeff Stein.
He's the National Security Editor for Congressional Quarterly.
That's cqpolitics.com.
And he has broken the gigantic news story.
Sources.
Wiretap recorded Rep Harmon promising to intervene for AIPAC.
It's Antiwar Radio on chaos in Austin, and we'll be right back.