Pelosi Now Recalls Being Briefed on Harman Wiretap; Harman Launches Media Blitz, Trips Up Badly (Round Up)

photo by Deb Cupples |   by Damozel | On Tuesday Speaker Pelosi didn't remember being briefed on any wiretap involving Rep. Jane Harman, but it's all come back to her now.  It seems there was this tradition of briefing "for the top Democrat and top Republican in the House to be alerted any time a member shows up on wiretaps or other surveillance devices." (WaPo)  And even though she did know, she wasn't "in a position" to pass on the information to Harman.

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged today that she had indeed been briefed about a wiretap that recorded conversations involving Representative Jane Harman...But Ms. Pelosi said today that although she was briefed, the Justice Department had not provided her with details and that Ms. Harman was not the subject/target of the surveillance."

Ms. Pelosi said today that she wasn’t in a position at the time of the briefing to let Ms. Harman know that she had been overheard in conversations during eavesdropping by the federal authorities....(New York Times)

Adam Horowitz:  "Nice that she remembered."  An aide said:

It was pointed out that that sounds like there is a precedent for this, meaning that other members have been wiretapped, the aide responded, "I think so."

Asked directly who else has been wiretapped, the aide said they didn't know.(Domenico Montanaro)

It seems Pelosi thought that the briefing might have been one of those amusing practical jokes for which the merry pranksters of the NSA are so well known. 

“It was not my position to raise it with Jane Harman,” Pelosi told reporters at the Christian Science Monitor lunch. “In fact, I didn’t even know if what they were talking about was real. All they said was that she was wiretapped.” (Roll Call)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Pelosi further babbled:

“That’s one of the issues that is important to note here is that when you are briefed on something, it isn’t your information to share with anybody else, whether they are briefing you on legal opinions or whether they are briefing you on actions they are taking, you have no ability to share that information with anyone else, so even if I wanted to share it with her I would not have had the liberty to share it,” Ms. Pelosi said....(NYT)

As for Harman's allegedly blighted hopes of chairing the House Intelligence Committee, Pelosi says of the woman The New York Times refers to as "her one-time friend":

“The only reason Jane is not the chairman is because she already served the two terms,” Ms. Pelosi said in a roundtable discussion with reporters at the Capitol. “It had nothing to do with her position on Iraq. It had nothing to do with donors, nothing to do with eaves-dropping, wiretapping,” she said. “It had nothing to do with anything. It had only to do with the fact that this extraordinarily talented member of Congress had served her two terms.”.(NYT)

I am so sure.  "Passing over Harman was always slightly odd," remarks Atrios.  It was.

Oh, by the way.  CQ Politics is reporting a later phone call, discussed here at TPM.   CQ Politics alleges:

In this second conversation, Harman's interlocutor informed Harman that "Pelosi went ballistic" when a major Democratic fundraiser told Pelosi that unless she made Harman the chair of the Intelligence committee, Pelosi would "get no more contributions from me." (TPM) 

Um, but on the other other hand,  BarbinMD at Kos says that Pelosi has claimed that no threat ever happened.

Harman has angrily denied the allegations against her.  "Ms. Harman has...demanded the release of a full transcript of the wire-tapped call. She has also said that she has been fielding calls from irate lawmakers concerned that they, too, were the subject of secret surveillance."  (NYT) 

Jeff Stein of CQ, who broke the story, seems unimpressed with her response:

For her part, Harman unleashed a media offensive Tuesday, appearing on CNN and MSNBC and other news outlets after The New York Times published a front-page story adding new details to the story and independently confirming most of CQ's initial report.

She appeared to run into trouble under tough questioning by National Public Radio's Robert Siegel, co-host of "All Things Considered." 

One observer called Harman's defensive, sometimes contradictory answers "a train wreck."

(CQ)

Yeah, it was, kind of.  She should have waited till she calmed down and could explain her side of things coherently.  As it is, she's made things worse by undermining her own credibility.  Via DDay, an interview that is going to yield comedy gold in the days to come:

Robert Siegel: First, do you remember the phone call in question? Who is the other party and is that a fair description of what was discussed?

Rep. Jane Harman: We don't know if there was a phone call. These are three unnamed sources, former and present national security officials, who are allegedly selectively leaking information about a phone call or phone calls that may or may not have taken place.

RS: But are you saying that you really don't have any recollection at all of a phone conversation like this?

JH: I'm saying that, No. 1, I don't know that there was a phone conversation. If there was and it was intercepted, let's read exactly what I said to whom. We don't know who that was either.

RS: But, indeed, if what happened was, initially, your phone wasn't tapped [and that] the person you were talking with was being tapped — and if that was an investigation of a foreign agent, is it realistic to think that anybody is going to release a completely unredacted transcript of that conversation?

JH: Well, let's find out. I mean, the person I was talking to was an American citizen. I know something about the law and wiretaps. There are two ways you do it. One is you get a FISA warrant, which has to start with a foreign suspected terrorist, a non-American foreigner. If this was FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that would have had to happen.

RS: But if you know that it was an American citizen —

JH: If it was Article III, FBI wiretap, that's different. But I don't know what this was. And I don't know why this was done. And I don't know who the sources are who are claiming that this happened are and I think —

RS: But you are saying that you know it was an American citizen. So that would suggest that you know that there was a —

JH: Well, I know that anyone I would have talked to about, you know, the AIPAC prosecution would have been an American citizen. I didn't talk to some foreigner about it.

RS: You never spoke to an Israeli? You never spoke to an Israeli about this.

JH: Well, I speak to Israelis from time to time. I just came back from a second trip to Israel in this calendar year. I've been to the Middle East region as a member of Congress 22 times and was in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Israel and Turkey just a week ago.

Dday:  "I'm writing this blind, because my head just exploded."

Zachary Roth at TPM agrees that she did herself no good at all with her precipitate responses.

At Mondoweiss, Adam Horowitz has an analysis of Harman's motives that is different from what he calls the "media shorthand" -- that she wanted the Chair.

This wasn't just a case of an ambitious Democrat who had an eye on a prospective chairmanship that might or might not have come open more than a year down the line....She was already the Ranking Member of Intel, and Pelosi was threatening to take that away at the start of the next Congress. No other Democratic Ranking Members on any other committees were facing that kind of threat in 2005; they were all assured of becoming the chairmen of their committees if the Dems won in '06.

This is because Intel is different than other committees, and had historically had a term limit (two terms) for ranking members and chairmen. The Republicans had waived those limits in 2003 for Porter Goss, but Pelosi was saying that -- even though the Repubs had changed the rules -- she would still pull Harman from the Ranking Member slot after two terms. As the Dem Leader, this was her prerogative.

This became public knowledge in the spring of 2005. Harman's campaign to keep her slot (by forcing Pelosi to change her mind) began then (if it hadn't already begun). By the way, I don't doubt that many others called Pelosi on Harman's behalf, and probably also made fundraising threats. Harman had, and has, plenty of establishment friends....That is how Washington works.  (Mondoweiss)

Dday focuses on Harman's past disinterest in the civil liberties of her fellow citizens.

[H]er instinct to lash out in anger...really comes off badly, considering that she lobbied to spike the NYT story revealing the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. It's darn near impossible to reconcile her past statements with this new image as a civil liberties extremist....

This goes double for Steny Hoyer, who's out there whining about wiretapping after pushing the FISA Amendments Act through the House.

Amen to that.  ..

Dan Fleshler at HuffPo asks:  "Who Gets the Prize for the Most Stupid Behavior in the Jane Harman Fracas?"

More at Memeorandum.

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