Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif, who was reportedly overheard on a 2005 NSA wiretap agreeing to lobby Bush administration officials on behalf of two accused Israeli agents, released a letter from the Department of Justice today that she says clears her of any wrongdoing.
......But in claiming absolution from the Justice Department, Harman has continued a public relations tack of effectively denying something she was never charged with.
No one ever said she was under investigation by the Justice Department for anything.
Reports in April, first here, and subsequently corroborated by The New York Times and Washington Post, revealed that Harman had been overheard during a foreign intelligence investigation of a suspected Israeli operative, whose name has yet to surface.
According to three former national security officials with first-hand knowledge of the wiretap transcript, Harman promised the target of the court-approved wiretap that she would lobby the Bush Justice Department to reduce charges against two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who had been accused of violating the Espionage Act.
In exchange, according to those reports, the suspected Israel agent promised to help Harman get the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 congressional elections, which the Democrats were expected to win, by raising campaign money for then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who would make the appointment.
The post would have given Harman access to the nation's most sensitive secrets. In the end, because of Pelosi's wrath at Harman's strenuous campaigning for the job, she ended up with a lesser post, chairing an intelligence panel of the House Homeland Security Committee.
No evidence has emerged that Harman did, in fact, discuss the AIPAC case with Justice Department officials, although The Washington Post reported in April that she called the White House on the defendants' behalf.
In the opinion of some attorneys in the Justice Department's Public Integrity and Intelligence Oversight sections, Harman had committed a "completed crime" merely by agreeing to use the power of her office in exchange for something...
In any event, the AIPAC charges were not reduced by Bush officials. They were dropped last month by President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, because the judge in the case had set an impossibly high bar for the government to get a conviction.
But back in late 2005, following the discovery of Harman's conversation on the court-ordered wiretap, then-CIA Director Porter Goss was supposed to notify the leaders of the House, Pelosi and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, that Harman had been picked up on a national security electronic intercept, and that FBI agents would seek to question her.
But Goss... was blocked from notifying Pelosi and Hastert by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, who told the CIA director they needed Harman's support for the administration's warrantless NSA wiretap program, which was about to surface in the New York Times.
Any revelation that she was under investigation for ties to Israeli intelligence would effectively neutralize her as a useful Democratic supporter of the Bush wiretaps, they argued.
Ultimately, Harman was never questioned by the FBI about her remarks on the wiretapped conversation, much less investigated.
But when excerpts from the wiretap transcript surfaced here in April, Harman attempted to deflect attention from her alleged remarks by claiming, falsely, that she had been the victim of the Bush administration's illegal NSA wiretapping program -- which, in any event, she had supported, both privately, when it began after the 9/11 attacks, and publicly, in 2005, when it was revealed.
Harman had been heard on a wiretap that had been approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
Nevertheless, her tack was to make herself out to be a victim of Bush's extralegal wiretap program, suggesting along the way that NSA was targeting members of Congress.
Aided by veteran Democratic public relations advisor Lanny Davis, whom she hired to deal with the burgeoning flap, Harman took to the airwaves to accuse the Bush administration of an "outrageous abuse of power.... Full story
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