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Congresswoman Harman Caught Conspiring with Israeli Spies
(MARK MAZZETTI and NEIL A. LEWIS, The New York Times, April 23, 2009)
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency concluded in late 2005 that a conversation picked up on a government wiretap was serious enough to require notifying Congressional leaders that Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, could become enmeshed in an investigation into Israeli influence in Washington, former government officials said Thursday. . . . One reason Mr. Gonzales intervened, the former officials said, was to protect Ms. Harman because they saw her as a valuable administration ally in urging The New York Times not to publish an article about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants. . . . The accounts provided new details about tension between senior C.I.A. officials and the attorney general over what to make of the wiretapped conversations involving Ms. Harman, which the former government officials said first occurred in spring 2005. . . . In the wiretapped conversation, Ms. Harman was overheard agreeing to a request made by an Israeli intelligence operative that she try to obtain leniency for two pro-Israel lobbyists in exchange for help in securing the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, former officials said. . . . Former officials said that Mr. Goss had first seen the transcripts of Ms. Harman’s phone conversations in late 2005, when the government was renewing its requests to a special court to wiretap the calls of the Israeli operative, whom they would not identify. Ms. Harman was not the target of the eavesdropping but her conversations were picked up because she spoke with the Israeli agent. . . . Ms. Pelosi has not said who briefed her on the matter but said she was not permitted to share the information with Ms. Harman. Ms. Pelosi chose not to select Ms. Harman to be chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, but she has said her reasons for that decision had nothing to do with the wiretapped call. . . . Ms. Harman had weighed in beginning in 2004 in urging The Times not to publish an article about the secret surveillance program.

posted by Lorenzo 8:00 AM