Here's the latest on the Jane Harman/AIPAC story that I haven't previously discussed here. We know that she discussed the case against two AIPAC lobbyists with a suspected Israeli double agent, possibly Haim Saban, and made at least an implicit arrangement to push for the dropping of the case against the lobbyists in exchange for help getting appointed the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. It is unclear whether this actually represents a violation of the federal bribery statute (doing a favor in exchange for something of value), but according to the story by Jeff Stein at CQ Politics, the Justice Department felt they had Harman in a "completed crime." Nancy Pelosi was briefed that Harman had been picked up on a federal wiretap but was barred from disclosing it to her House colleague, and this could explain why Harman was not appointed to that Committee Chair. The reason that the DoJ failed to charge Harman was because Alberto Gonzales intervened on her behalf, because, among other things, he knew she would be helpful in the forthcoming battle over, amazingly enough, the Administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
A person who is familiar with Mr. Gonzales's account of the events said that the former attorney general had acknowledged having raised with Mr. Goss the idea that Ms. Harman was playing a helpful role in dealing with The Times.
But Mr. Gonzales's principal motive in delaying a briefing for Congressional leaders, the person said, was to keep Ms. Harman from learning of the investigation before she could be interviewed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A spokesman for Ms. Harman said the congresswoman had never been interviewed by the bureau.
There's also the charge that then-NSA Director Michael Hayden provided talking points for a Harman discussion with NY Times Washington editor Philip Taubman BEFORE THE 2004 election, to get the paper to squash the warrantless wiretapping story. And today, Stein advances the story by noting that a whistleblower informed then-Speaker Dennis Hastert about the Bush Administration suppression of the wiretapped Harman call (it's a violation of standard procedure to withhold information involving national security and a member of Congress from either Democratic and Republican leaders in the House).
Needless to say, this is a tangled web of intrigue, and with more disclosures it's likely to get worse. This has led to speculation that Harman would either not run for another term, or face a primary challenge. I can confirm that Marcy Winograd is likely to run if Harman does seek re-election. Winograd, who took 38% of the vote in 2006, was not planning a run until the AIPAC/wiretap revelations. But she is uncomfortable with Harman not being held to account, and saw no other option on the horizon. She has a federal account and will take the pulse of the district before a formal announcement.
"I think she's clearly in trouble and I think she knows it and is doing whatever she can to turn the tables on the situation," Winograd said. "And now she is the spokesperson for the ACLU or the Bill of Rights Foundation. It would be comical, if the stakes weren't so high." [...]
One of Winograd's first steps is going to be "taking the pulse" of the district on issues like military spending and single-payer health care, among other issues. It's entirely possible that Harman might bow out and try to annoint a successor. Or that another establishment Dem might try to take advantage of her weakened position. Which is why I wanted to get the word out as quickly as possible that there's a really credible progressive alternative. Winograd has already run a primary once in the district. Activists there know who she is, and a lot of them have already worked for her in 2006. This would not be a net-based candidacy, but it will certainly help to have it be net-supported.
In addition, the name of blogger John Amato has surfaced as a possible challenger.
(Howie) Klein said a group of bloggers met earlier this year to discuss challenging Harman in a primary, weeks before the recent revelations. He said many in the blogging community would like a fellow blogger, John Amato, to challenge Harman and that Amato is considering it.
Winograd said that she would step aside for the right candidate, and that she's taking up the mantle at least for now.
"I don't know who else will answer the call, if not me," she said. "People with great name recognition and track records in public office are not going to take her on."
I think Marcy feels the duty to run. At the same time, she agreed that there needs to be one progressive alternative to Harman. But my sense from people in the district is that Harman is unlikely to try another re-election campaign. Even the above-mentioned NYT article refers to this.
While the two women do not display overt hostility, Ms. Harman seems to have never quite gotten over the slight. Colleagues say that since Ms. Pelosi, 69, thwarted her ambitions for a more prominent role on security issues, Ms. Harman, 63, has grown weary of Congress and has been eyeing a post in the Obama administration, perhaps as an ambassador.
This tracks with everything I've heard from locals. She wanted the Intelligence Committee chair, and failing that she wanted an Administration job, and failing that she wants out.
There would be a whole host of elected officials who would jump in if Harman retired. Ted Lieu, the Assemblyman in this district, could be enticed away from his Attorney General campaign. City Councilwoman Janice Hahn would take a look. And there would be others. But if Harman stays in, none of these electeds would run, avoiding what would be an expensive primary. Harman is the richest member of Congress and has no problem spending her own money to keep her seat.
Either way, there will be a contested race in CA-36 in June 2010. And I do believe that a primary would feature only one major challenger. The question is, who would that be?
This Jane Harman/AIPAC scandal continues to grow. It jumped from the inside the Beltway rag CQ Politics to The New York Times.
One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say.
The lawmaker, Representative Jane Harman of California, became the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee after the 2002 election and had ambitions to be its chairwoman when the party gained control of the House in 2006. One official who has seen transcripts of several wiretapped calls said she appeared to agree to intercede in exchange for help in persuading party leaders to give her the powerful post.
But that's not what advances the story today. Harman has denied contacting DoJ abut the AIPAC case, though she left out contacting the White House, and she did not deny that the phone call existed. Remember that a key part of the story concerned the idea that Harman was saved from prosecution on this by Alberto Gonzales, who "needed Jane" to help front for the Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. In today's article, the Times drops this bombshell:
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement Monday that Ms. Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004. Mr. Keller said she spoke to Mr. Taubman - apparently at the request of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A. director - and urged that The Times not publish the article.
"She did not speak to me," Mr. Keller said, "and I don't remember her being a significant factor in my decision."
Shortly before the article was published more than a year later, in December 2005, Mr. Taubman met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish.
Ultimately, it's on Bill Keller whether or not to publish, so I don't want to give Harman too much credit here. But as Greg Sargent notes, this is a startling turn of events. A Democratic Congresswoman acted on behalf of a Republican President's NSA director to spike a story about illegal activity in the executive branch before a close Presidential election. The ramifications are enormous.
This discussion between Harman and Taubman apparently happened before the wiretapped phone call between Harman and the Israeli agent, according to the TPM Muckraker timeline. So Gonzales knew that Harman could be counted on to support the warrantless wiretapping program, because she had years of experience doing so at that point.
This gets uglier and uglier. Small wonder that Harman was passed over for a position in the Obama Administration.
UPDATE: It is entirely possible that the CIA and Bush-era officials directed this set of leaks in a show of force. That of course has nothing to do with Harman's conversation with Taubman to try and get the NYT to spike the wiretapping story, which was confirmed by Bill Keller on the record.
UPDATE II: ...Harman has released a letter calling on the Attorney General to release all transcripts and investigative material related to her collected by the Justice Department in 2005 and 2006. This is a bit of misdirection, since by all accounts these were legal wiretaps of foreign agents. But given the revelations about continued illegal wiretapping at the NSA, I understand Harman's strategy.
I'm sitting here in Jane Harman's Congressional district right now. I could probably go out on the street and informally poll a dozen people about AIPAC, and I'm pretty certain nobody would know what I'm talking about. But inside the Beltway, AIPAC is sacrosanct and Israel practically the 51st state. So this blockbuster story is a perfect depiction of, as Attaturk says, the way Washington works. He simplifies it so I don't have to:
1. Congressman Jane Harman (D - CA) told a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby.
2. This was known because of an NSA Wiretap.
3. The suspected Israeli agent then promised to lobby Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections (she wasn't).
4. There were some reports of this influence peddling in 2006, but it was dropped for a "lack of evidence" by Alberto R. Gonzales, who intervened to stop the investigation.
5. Gonzales intervened because he wanted Harman to defend the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times.
This looks just terrible for Jane Harman. There's a trail of reporting on this going back to 2006, but the new material concerns Abu Gonzales stepping in to squash the investigation so Harman could parrot the Bush Administration line on warrantless wiretapping. And there's an even larger trail of reporting on Harman's fronting for Bush. The point is that the pieces all fit together.
It's a classic espionage story, right down to the part where Harman hangs up the phone with the Israeli agent after saying "This conversation doesn't exist." For her part, Harman is denying the story, but Stein has several sources who read the transcripts from the NSA wiretaps (apparently gathered legally, but who the hell knows). And he's right, at the end, about the utter futility of this exercise, on all counts:
Ironically, however, nothing much was gained by it.
The Justice Department did not back away from charging Rosen and fellow AIPAC official Keith Weissman with espionage (for allegedly giving classified Pentagon documents to Israeli officials).
Gonzales was engulfed by the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal. (and the US Attorneys probe -ed.)
And Jane Harman was relegated to chairing a House Homeland Security subcommittee.
Josh Marshall asks a lot of the key questions, including whether Harman was being blackmailed by the Bush Administration to be their front person on wiretapping, having been wiretapped herself. And Ron Kampeas has a somewhat different take, suggesting that this is only coming out because the case against AIPAC officials Rosen and Weissman is faltering. There's one way to know for sure: a full-blown investigation, which Harman ought to welcome to clear her name.
Bruin Kid lets us know that Jerry Lewis will be seeking re-election next year. He's obviously pretty confident that his legal troubles and investigations into his corrupt earmarking will amount to nothing. I'm thinking this is why:
In Los Angeles, a federal criminal investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis, a California Republican, stalled for nearly six months due to a lack of funds, according to former prosecutors. The lead prosecutor on the inquiry and other lawyers departed the office, and vacancies couldn't be filled. George Cardona, the interim U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, declined to comment on specific cases but confirmed that lack of funds and unfilled vacancies caused delays in some investigations [...]
People with knowledge of the case said that by the time the investigation stalled in December 2006, it had branched out into other areas, including Mr. Lewis's June 2003 role in passing legislation that helped giant hedge fund Cerberus Capital Management. People associated with Cerberus around the same time gave at least $140,000 to a political action committee controlled by Mr. Lewis. Cerberus officials didn't respond to phone calls or emailed questions concerning the Lewis inquiry [...]
After the lead prosecutor in the Lewis case quit, others assigned to the case took time getting up to speed. Brian Hershman, a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles office's public corruption section, declined to comment on specific cases, but confirms that his group's work overall was derailed by the departure of experienced prosecutors. Like several others, he says he left for more money to support his family.
Replacements "are mostly rookies," he says. "It will be some time before they'll be able to restore the section to what it was before."
With additional funds recently made available by Congress, the Los Angeles office has filled 12 of 57 lawyer vacancies and is expecting an additional 12 lawyers to start soon. To jump-start the Lewis investigation, Mr. Cardona, the interim U.S. attorney, in June called on a veteran prosecutor, Michael Emmick, to revive and supervise the investigation, people with knowledge of the investigation say.
Day late and a dollar short on that one, I'd gather. This is approaching criminal conduct by the Justice Department. At a time when the investigation was expanding, Debra Wong Yang (the US Attorney for the region) suddenly jumped ship for the law firm representing Lewis. You can bet they never lacked funds; Yang received nearly $1.5 million. The law firm, Gibson Dunn, took the top assistant off the case as well. So the LA office was thrown into disarray precisely when the investigation was heating up, and the money for the office dried up at the same time. Pathetic. With or without Alberto Gonzales, we still have a DoJ protecting its own and politicized beyond control. And this is the time when Democratic leaders are seeking to call off the dogs in the US Attorney case?
I'm frankly frightened. The California Senators I relied on to protect my civil liberties caved. Is ducking the vote any better or worse than voting against your constituents' liberties? What rights do we lose next?
Under the assertion that "We need to protect ourselves from attack", the US Congress granted to George Bush a pardon for his ILLEGAL acts. This Congress, the Democratic Congress with the new ideas and the vow to stop the illegal acts of this President, cowed to the old rhetoric and made it legal for the Bush Administration to deny the citizens of this country the right to privacy, pardoned the Administration's illegal intrusions into citizens private electronic conversations, and permitted the abrogation of the rule of law, and the right to due process. And then, in a capping move that added insult to injury, they put Alberto Gonzales, George Bush and one other hand picked Bush flunky in charge of overseeing it. Yes, the same Gonzales who has defied a Congressional subpoena, the same Gonzales who believes it is perfectly ok to defy the Geneva Convention and torture citizens and non-citizens who he, in his infinite wisdom, designates as enemy combatants.The same Gonzales who refused to allow the US Surgeon General from reporting to the American people the results of life saving research on health and sexual practices and the same Gonzales who fired nine Federal prosecutors because they did not follow the party line--the Republican party that is. Indeed, our new Democratic Congress gave to George Bush their blessing in his bid to overthrow the Constitutional gifts and freedoms for which our forefathers, and all our brave men and women in uniform, fought and died, the right to due process under the law, the right to hold a private conversation beyond the prying eyes of the government, and the requirement that intrusions into these freedoms would only occur in extreme circumstances as determined by a duly appointed and unbiased court order.
What battle cry then will draw the American people to fight our enemies when the cry "Let Freedom Ring" can no longer be spoken?
A federal appeals panel yesterday heard arguments regarding the power of executive branch federal prosecutors to declare judicial branch court records as classified. At issue for the three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the case of Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Thomas Kontogiannis who has pled guilty to laundering bribes heading from defense contractors to Duke Cunningham (R-Tucson Federal Correctional Institution). So what are federal prosecutors after?
In trying to keep the information about the plea secret, government lawyers invoked a law dealing with the handling of classified information. At least one transcript of a hearing was stamped "classified" by the government - a move that was criticized by U.S. District Judge Larry Burns, who is presiding over the case and initially agreed to the secret proceedings.
Burns moved to lift the seal in June. Prosecutors, however, objected and took the case to the appellate court. Their reasons for secrecy are unknown because the objections were filed under seal.
I apologize for inaccuracies contained in any earlier correspondence. I want to set the record straight on my actions. I am a co-sponsor of two bills to remove Gonzales from office. On May 22, I co-sponsored H. Res. 417, which declares that the House of Representatives and the American people have lost confidence in Attorney General Gonzales. It calls on the President to nominate a new candidate capable of serving as the head of the Department of Justice. Additionally, I am a co-sponsor of H. Res. 589, introduced yesterday by Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington, which directs the House Judiciary Committee to initiate an impeachment investigation of the Attorney General. The resolution requests a formal investigation of the facts surrounding the Attorney General's actions in order to allow Congress to determine whether articles of impeachment are appropriate [...]
You have to appreciate someone who can admit they were wrong.
(Today's NYT calls for impeachment of Abu Gonzales if he doesn't appoint a special prosecutor. So, why didn't the Democratic Party of California do the same a few weeks ago exactly? - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
and it goes out to the Resolutions Committee and anyone else that may have voted against Bob Silver's amendment to resubstitute the word "impeachment" into the watered-down "immediate resignation" resolution about Attorney General Gonzales that the Committee passed on my behalf at the last e-board.
The question is...now that Senate Democrats are calling for an investigation into Gonazales' overt perjury, and even RedState.com's Pejman Yousefzadeh is calling for Gonzo's removal...
Do you still think that calling for the impeachment of Gonzales is not pragmatic, would create "bad media", and make us seem too radical?
The one, and perhaps only, hard piece of accountability that has come out of the widening US Attorney scandal is that the Congress passed legislation striking out the provision in the PATRIOT Act that allowed the Justice Department to appoint replacement federal prosecutors without seeking Senate confirmation. The new law passed in both Houses with expansive, veto-proof majorities (94-2 in the Senate, 306-114 in the House). Any veto would be overridden, so the President has no choice but to sign the bill.
Except he hasn't yet, and the hip-pocket veto has enabled Abu G to strike again - right in our own backyard of Los Angeles.
While San Diego has the rockstar of the fired US Attorneys, the Bay Area got its own taste of the Firings. Certainly Kevin Ryan was no saint, but well, neither is the new US Attorney, Scott Schools.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer demanded to know who in the Justice Department made the decision to continue pursuing Ed Rosenthal, whose conviction was overturned last year. Newly appointed U.S. Attorney Scott Schools made the decision, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney George Bevan. Bevan said he was unsure whether Justice Department officials in Washington were involved.(AP 4/13/07)
So, do you think the smackdown of a federal judge will look very good when he has to appear before the senate to be confirmed? What about losing a civil trial for vindictive prosecution?
Syndicated columnist and member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board Ruben Navarrette Jr. has been fluffing up Alberto Gonzales a lot recently (March 7, March 21), so it should come as no suprise that he's continuing to shovel muck today in a special CNN commentary. What's shocking is the entirely new level to which he takes the insanity.
