The Harman Scandal Continued

by Damozel |  Mazier and mazier.  It's like a labyrinth, this story:  every time you think you've found its center, you find that you're heading down another twisty little alley way with no idea where the truth lies.  Let's start with why she was being wiretapped.  

According to The New York Times,  Harman ended up on tape because she was "inadvertently swept up by N.S.A. eavesdroppers who were listening in on conversations during an investigation, three current or former senior officials said. It is not clear exactly when the wiretaps occurred; they were first reported by Congressional Quarterly on its Web site."How does that happen?  How does someone who was "one of the very few members of Congress with broad access to the most sensitive intelligence information" get "inadvertently" swept up in government eavesdropping?  My first question -- which, according to Mondoweiss, the man who broke the story has now answered -- is how she got "inadvertently swept up" in the first place? 

Here's what Jeffrey Stein said when someone raised the question during a live discussion at his website.

Mark Regan from Fairbanks: If it's a gross invasion of privacy for the Government to wiretap Rep. Harman, isn't it an even grosser invasion of privacy for you to publicize the results, even if the results have news value.

Jeff Stein: She was not the object of the tap.  (Mondoweiss)

So, um, "Aha!"?   Maybe not.  If she got caught on tape promising favors to AIPAC, she doesn't really seem to have followed up on whatever she promised, if anything.

David Szady, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former top counterintelligence official who ran the investigation of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, said in an interview Monday that he was confident Ms. Harman had never intervened. “In all my dealings with her, she was always professional and never tried to intervene or get in the way of any investigation,” Mr. Szady said.

The officials who were familiar with the transcripts, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involved intelligence matters, also said they knew of no evidence that Ms. Harman had intervened in the case.(New York Times)

According to me, the statement released by her office yesterday got everything in the wrong order.  The last sentence is the one in which I am chiefly interested.  Harman said (in addition to denying Stein's allegations):

If there is anything about this story that should arouse concern, it is that the Bush Administration may have been engaged in electronic surveillance of members of the congressional Intelligence Committees.

It's definitely aroused my concern.   And now here's Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy making a case for the possibility that Harman was targeted because she was the lone representative who objected back in 2002 after being briefed by the Bush administration on CIA practices.  [Cf. Did Congressional Democrats Condone the CIA's Secret Interrogation Program? (Dec. 9. 2007)]

That's certainly the first thing Deb and I thought of when we were discussing the Harman conundrum.  Rozen writes:

A former intelligence official familiar with the matter told Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity Monday ....[that] longstanding protocol involving the separation of powers required that when intelligence exists that includes a member of Congress, that the heads of the body in which that member sits, in this case, the top Republican and Democratic in the House of Representatives, then House speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL) and minority leader Nancy Pelosi, (D-CA) be informed. Noting that Pelosi had been the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence committee when Goss was the chairman in 2002, the former official said that Pelosi later awarded Goss the Congressional Medal of Honor. Pelosi also more recently signed off on Goss being made co-chairman of a bipartisan panel overseeing Congressional ethics.

Rozen reminds us:

Congressional leaders including Representatives Pelosi and Harman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), had been briefed on CIA waterboarding back in 2002. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," Goss told the Washington Post. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

Who was the lone person the article identified as objecting to the program?

Jane Harman....

Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee's top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program," the Post reported. "Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy. ‘When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath -- one of secrecy,' she said. ‘I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything.'"

Ah yes, I remember it well.   I remember wondering at the time if there would be any comeback.  So yeah, I can't help wondering now.

According to Rozen, the same former intelligence official who brought up the protocol requiring Hastert's and Pelosi's to  speculated that the timing of these revelations about Harman may indeed serve a purpose.

[H]e wondered if the timing of this story was about changing the subject, from what Bush-era officials had authorized, to what the Congress was complicit in. "Is this about taking pressure off the revelations of waterboarding and the memos?" he speculated. "And the fact," he added, "that no real intelligence came out of this whole effort?" referring to the enhanced interrogation/torture regime revealed in the memos, which he said produced no actionable intelligence.

But Stein says not.

[Question]: Why are your sources coming forward now? There must be some reason why they have waited almost three years.

Jeff Stein: Thanks. I've seen a lot of speculation about that online. The fact is, there is no "timing" to any "leak." No sources "came forward," so to speak. I learned about this quite a while ago and was just recently able to turn my full attention to it. Total coincidence.  (via Mondoweiss)

Of course, even if it turns out that the whole scandal is in part being driven by her dissent back in 2007, it's still quite possible -- and indeed, quite credible given her own "support of AIPAC" -- that what Stein alleges happened, happened.  As I'm not a fan of  Blue Dog Jane Harman, and as I'm particularly not fine with her support for warrantless wiretapping, I don't have any trouble believing that the corruption went all the way through the whole chain of persons and events.

I especially -- in light of subsequent events -- don't find it terribly difficult to believe this, though I intend to keep an open mind. 

According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he "needed Jane" to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.  (Stein, via FDL)

Christy Hardin Smith points out:  "Jeff Stein...says he has three separate sources who corroborate his piece. Having spent the last few years digging through any number of stories by a myriad of reporters, I have to say that Jeff is very careful in what he writes.  And having three sources with overlapping information?  Sounds pretty careful to me. "

And now Greg Sargent at Plum Line says:

Whoa. Dem Rep Jane Harman did in fact urge The New York Times not to publish its big expose of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping, apparently before the 2004 election, potentially changing the election’s outcome and the course of history, according to a statement from the paper.

As I noted here yesterday, one key revelation in that big CQ Politics scoop is that Harman may have privately tried to kill the story in 2004. Yesterday Times executive editor Bill Keller said that Harman hadn’t spoken to him or influenced his decision.

But now Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis sends over a more detailed statement from Keller explaining what really happened:

Congresswoman Harman spoke to Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman in late October or early November, 2004, apparently at the request of General Hayden. She urged that The Times not publish the story. She did not speak to me, and I don’t remember her being a significant factor in my decision. In 2005, when we were getting ready to publish, Phil met with a group of congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish. The Times published the story a few days later.

So Harman did urge the paper’s Washington bureau chief not to publish. While the timing is slightly fuzzy, it seems fair to assume in light of the CQ story that it was in fact before the election.

Meanwhile, Ambinder remarks:

It is not clear whether Harman was ever the subject of a formal investigation, although Time Magazine reported in 2006 that officials from the department's public corruptions unit were looking into allegations that Harman promised to pressure the Justice Department to drop the charges in exchange for receiving help from AIPAC in her quest to chair the intelligence committee.  (Atlantic)

TPM, by the way, has an excellent timeline of events with which to forge a sort of a path through the maze.. 

Anyway, if we don't know (or "know") anything else, we know it's a hot mess.  For more blogger reaction, you should go to memeorandum.

RELATED

"Radioactive": Harman Caught on Wiretap Promising Intervention for AIPAC

Did Congressional Democrats Condone the CIA's Secret Interrogation Program? (Dec. 9. 2007)

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