According to Jeff Stein at CQ Politics, Rep. Jane Harman was caught on an NSA wiretap offering to use her position as ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee to help reduce the charges against two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, for stealing classified information. Harman allegedly told a suspected Israeli agent she would intervene on their behalf, in exchange for AIPAC lobbying Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee.
“This conversation doesn’t exist," she reportedly told the agent over the phone, according to CQ Politics.
Of course it did exist, because Harman was being wiretapped. The story suggests that the wiretap was done properly, with court-approval. Which is ironic, because, according to the story, what happened next was that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales interfered to quash the FBI's investigation into Harman, because the Bush administration needed her to defend their warrantless wiretapping program, a story which The New York Times was about to break at the time. Harman had, according to CQ Politics, persuaded the paper to withhold the story once before, during the 2004 elections. (Harman, if you'll remember, was also allegedly among a group of Democrats who had been aware of the CIA's torture program before it had been publicly revealed.)
Harman never did get the position she wanted, and her stock failed to rise with the Obama administration. Harman, for her part, denies the allegations.
“These claims are an outrageous and recycled canard, and have no basis in fact,” Harman said in a prepared statement. “I never engaged in any such activity. Those who are peddling these false accusations should be ashamed of themselves.”If the story is true, it goes a long way toward explaining why someone who didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims ended up being head of the House Intelligence Committee. But here's another question --how often did the Bush administration offer to defer justice in order to wrangle the support of a member of Congress for one of its illegal programs?
