We've been wondering about something on this whole Jane-Harman/AIPAC story. (For the background, go here.)
When the Justice Department heard Harman on the wiretap, and as a result started to investigate her (a probe later reportedly shut down by Alberto Gonzales), what was the underlying crime she was suspected of, and how strong does the case against her appear to have been?
Guess who's footing the bill for those fancy lawyers the Stevens Six have hired? We are.
The Justice Department confirmed to TPMmuckraker that the prosecutors -- who are being investigated for criminal contempt in connection to misconduct in the Ted Stevens case -- requested representation under a DOJ provision that applies to employees who run into legal trouble while doing their jobs, and that the request was authorized.
Another day, another advance by CQ's Jeff Stein on his Harman-AIPAC story...
Late last night, Stein reported that, after Alberto Gonzales quashed the FBI probe into Rep. Harman for political reasons, intelligence officials, angry about Gonzo's move, told Nancy Pelosi about the wiretap that had picked up Harman talking to a suspected Israeli agent -- defying the AG's order that Pelosi not be informed.
As we noted, Philip Zelikow, a former top lawyer to Condi Rice at the State Department, yesterday wrote that the White House tried to destroy all copies of a memo he authored, which took issue with the legal opinions laid out in the infamous OLC torture memos.
Today, Zelikow appeared on MSNBC to flesh out that story. Among other things, he reveals that the Bushies said his memo was "inconvenient to have around." (Would it have been too much for Andrea Mitchell to have followed up by asking him who, exactly, said that?)
Watch:
Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman is stepping up his campaign to persuade Attorney General Eric Holder to take another look at his case.
Seventy-five former state attorneys general, including ten Republicans, have sent a letter to Holder saying that Siegelman's defense lawyers have raised "gravely troublesome facts" about whether he got a fair trial, reports the New York Times. The letter cites Holder's recent decision to ask that the charges against Ted Stevens be dropped, thanks to prosecutors' failure to turn over evidence to the defense, as required. It argues that there is evidence of similar misconduct in Siegelman's case, and that the charges should similarly be dropped if that's borne out in an investigation.
The Stevens Six have lawyered up. And what lawyers they are.
Legal Times reports that Nicholas Marsh, one of the public integrity prosecutors, has hired Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, of Patton Boggs.
Some recent developments in the fast-moving Harman-AIPAC story to update you on...
- Nancy Pelosi told reporters that she was briefed "a few years ago" by the NSA that they had wiretapped Harman, but wasn't told what was found, and never alerted Harman.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who sits on the House Judiciary committee (and also happens to be TPM's congressman) went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to repeat his call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, who, while a member of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week.
Nadler also said he supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush administration officials, including Bybee, committed crimes.
Watch:
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Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.
Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is the latest to call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, in response to the release of those torture memos last week.
Bybee wrote one of the memos in 2002, when he served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel.
Here's Feingold's statement:
The just released OLC memos, including the 2002 memo authored by Jay Bybee, are a disgrace. The idea that one of the architects of this perversion of the law is now sitting on the federal bench is very troubling. The memos offer some of the most explicit evidence yet that Mr. Bybee and others authorized torture and they suggest that grounds for impeachment can be made. Clearly, the Justice Department has the responsibility to investigate this matter further. As a Senator, I would be a juror in any impeachment trial so I don't want to reach a conclusion until all the evidence is before me.
Think Progress, the blog of the Center for American Progress, is circulating an online petition calling on Congress to impeach Jay Bybee, who, while at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week. Bybee is currently a federal judge.
CAP is led by John Podesta, a close White House ally who helped run Barack Obama's transition.
Think Progress joins Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Times, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in calling for Bybee's impeachment.
Late Update: Sen. Pat Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary committee, has called on Bybee to step down from the bench, though he doesn't seem to have mentioned anything about impeachment.
As David noted over at TPM, there was some potentially big news in a blog post that was written this morning over at Foreign Policy by Philip Zelikow, a top State Department lawyer under Condoleezza Rice.
Zelikow wrote that, in 2005, he had written a memo on the legality of harsh interrogation techniques that expressed an "alternative view" to the OLC memos. He continued:
My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.
We didn't have the chance to get to this earlier but CQ's Jeff Stein went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to talk about his now-famous report on Jane Harman and AIPAC*.
Among other things, Stein said that there are "several people who have known this for some time."
And interestingly, he adds that, according to his sources,the investigation into Harman that Time first reported on back in 2006 "never got started" because it was quashed by then-AG Alberto Gonzales.
The whole segment is worth watching...
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* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version that wrongly said Stein had appeared on Hardball.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) just appeared on MSNBC to give a guns blazing denial of the allegations in CQ's explosive report from yesterday.
The congresswoman, speaking to Andrea Mitchell, reiterated her claim that she didn't intervene with anyone -- not the Justice Department, or the White House -- in the AIPAC case. And she renewed her call for DOJ to disclose all the material associated with the investigation into her that, according to CQ's report, Alberto Gonzales helped stymie.
President Obama is leaving the door open for prosecutions of Bush DOJ officials who provided the legal rationale to support torture policies.
In comments to reporters this morning, Obama said he didn't support prosecuting CIA officers who were carrying out the policy. But:
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) has just released a letter she sent to Attorney General Eric Holder. Harman calls on Holder to give her all materials related to the government wiretapping of her, and to the investigation into her, so that she can release them publicly.
Harman also, crucially, takes her denial further than yesterday, saying she never contacted either DOJ or the White House or anyone else to seek favorable treatment for anyone.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night, to talk about the fallout from the release last week of the Bush administration's torture memos. And his appearance added to the growing sense that pressure is mounting to hold the memos' authors accountable.
Whitehouse, who sits on the Senate Judiciary committee, did temporarily pour a little bit of cold water on the spate of calls to impeach Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who is now a federal judge. He said that it's "certainly possible" that Bybee should be impeached, but that first, we should wait for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to release its long-held report into the authorship of the memos.
The New York Times adds some details to yesterday's blockbuster CQ report about Rep. Jane Harman and AIPAC.
Here are the key nuggets from the Times story:
* The report confirms that the call on which Harman agreed to take action in the AIPAC case in return for helping her get the House intel chair job was indeed picked up by the NSA, as Stein reported, rather than the FBI or other agencies, as some reports yesterday had suggested.
CQ's blockbuster story, about a wiretap that picked up Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) discussing the AIPAC spying case with a "suspected Israeli agent", picks up on a sequence of complex events from several years ago, and involves several moving pieces.
So we thought it would be worthwhile to put together a timeline of events laying out the major reported developments in this sprawling story.
Without further ado:
Rep. Jane Harman's office has released a statement in response to CQ's report that the congresswoman was heard on an NSA wiretap telling an "Israeli agent" that she would press the Justice Department to ease up on the AIPAC spy case in return for political help.
The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a 'scoop' out of widely known and unremarkable facts - that Congresswoman Jane Harman is and has long been a supporter of AIPAC, and that some members of AIPAC regarded her as well-qualified to chair the House Intelligence Committee following the 2006 elections. Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former AIPAC employees and the Department has never informed her that she was or is the subject of or involved in an investigation. 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.
For all the (justified) clamor over the Bush administration's torture memos that were released yesterday, there's been surprisingly little attention paid to the two authors of those documents.
As officials in the department's Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury authored the four memos. The first was written in 2002 by Bybee, and the latter three in 2005 by Bradbury. So: who are Bybee and Bradbury?
A British professor whose research on sleep was cited in one of the just-released Bush administration torture memos has expressed outrage that his work was used to justify extreme sleep deprivation, including keeping subjects awake for up to 11 days.
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, James Horne, a leading authority in the field of sleep research, said he was "surprised and saddened" to see Bush officials "misrepresent" his research to argue that such sleep deprivation does not cause serious harm to its subjects.
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