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

by D amozel |  Josh Marshall at TPM said it:  "This story is so radioactive it's hard to know which of fifty different directions to go with it."  Details are here. The part that's new is the allegation that Harman was caught on tape discussing favors to be had and returned during a wiretap, along with an implication that the Bush administration might have used this as leverage to get her to come in on its side on the warrantless wiretapping controversy.  Reading the CQ Politics report on this, as Marshall points out in a subsequent piece, one could certainly infer that Harman was going to side with the administration on warrantless wiretapping anyway, and that Gonzalez intervened "because the administration needed her out there spinning the warrantless wiretap story on their behalf."

Man, I don't even know where to start:  with the alleged [she denies it] line-crossing by Harman; with the surveillance by the Bush administration of members of Congress; or with the continuing saga of the previous administration's well-documented disposition to treat "justice" as exceedingly subordinate to political advantage.   For me, I think it's the last one of these -- and indeed Greenwald calls this "the crux."

 Anyway, I'll set aside the crux for a moment to set out the gist:

[T]he gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a "suspected Israeli agent" in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee -- a position she ended up not getting....

The story suggests that the tapes show Harman crossed the line. And the gears were in motion to open a full blown investigation. But then Alberto Gonzales intervened and shutdown the whole thing. (TPM)

The allegations that Harman did a deal with AIPAC to help them with the espionage cases against two highly placed officials are, of course, old news, along with the fact that the FBI dropped the case due to "lack of evidence."  See CQ Politics.  

Harman has angrily denied the allegations.  But, as CQ Pol suggests, these accounts -- if true, or rather, if sufficiently credible to be believed by her fellow Dems -- "go a long way toward explaining not only why Harman was denied the gavel of the House Intelligence Committee, but failed to land a top job at the CIA or Homeland Security Department in the Obama administration."

One thing is clear:  Harman's advocacy of warrantless wiretapping. Greenwald provides a short history:

Indeed, as I've noted many times, Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as "the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee" to repeatedly praise the NSA program as "essential to U.S. national security" and "both necessary and legal."  She even went on Meet the Press to defend the program along with GOP Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and she even strongly suggested that the whistleblowers who exposed the lawbreaking and perhaps even the New York Times (but not Bush officials) should be criminally investigated, saying she "deplored the leak," that "it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of the newspapers," and that the whistleblowers were "despicable."  And Eric Lichtblau himself described how Harman, in 2004, attempted very aggressively to convince him not to write about the NSA program.

But there is most definitely an interesting wrinkle here, another aspect which is pointed out at Emptywheel.

First, as it happens the AIPAC trial is in a very active stage right now, with both sides submitting schedules in preparation for a May 6 and 7 CIPA hearing that may end up giving the AIPAC defendants access to classified material with which to defend themselves; if the government faces setbacks in that CIPA hearing, I think it likely that the government gives up the case. If I were a law enforcement guy whose case was crumbling, I might gin up some press attention to convince people of the value of the case. 

So I find it interesting that the three sources for this story want to talk about Harman, but not the AIPAC guy on the other end of the call.

Hmmmm, yes....

On the other hand....Scott at LGM says, and it is getting progressively (no pun intended) to argue, that this simply confirms that Harman is "reactionary and corrupt":

Harman would seem to have combined being wrong about pretty much every important issue for years with the kind of corruption Hastings was accused of. I will have to agree with John that it's a real shame that Harman's retention as Intelligence chair was derailed by anti-Semitic hippies....

In response, Matt Weiner commented:

[T]he way I read the article, Gonzo intervened to save Harman's scalp because he knew Harman would carry his water on the warrantless wiretaps. Not that he blackmailed her into doing so, he knew that she'd already done so and would do so again without being asked. 
  
What kind of useless Democrat do you have to be for Alberto Gonzales to protect you?

If that's what he did, I think we all know the answer to that one. 

Sullivan asks:

Is it more of a scandal that the Bushies were wire-tapping Harman and then were in a position to blackmail her if she didn't provide public support for ... their warrantless wire-tapping? Or is it just another day at the office for AIPAC?

Memeorandum has more.

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