U.S. Plans to drop charges against alleged Israeli spies

Sunday May 03, 2009 10:13 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News

The U.S. Government announced Friday that it plans to drop all charges against two long-term lobbyists of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), after a U.S. Congress member was implicated in the case. The move came just two days before the opening of the AIPAC Annual Convention in Washington, DC, at a time when polls of the US population show increasing discontent with the level of US government aid given unconditionally to the state of Israel.

Congress member, Jane Harman, of California was revealed last week to have had phone conversations in 2005 promising to help the two lobbyists by asking then-President Bush to drop the charges, in exchange for getting AIPAC's help to get Harman into a particular political position she desired.

The case against the two lobbyists, which has been largely ignored in the U.S. media, began receiving some publicity over the last week after Harman's involvement was exposed. Ironically, the Congress member was caught on wiretap making the deal to intervene on behalf of the accused spies, after she had helped sponsor the bill that made such 'warrantless wiretapping' possible. Many civil liberties advocates argued at the time that these types of wiretaps violated the US Constitution. After her exposure last week, Harman has changed her position and is now arguing against the use of wiretaps in this way.

Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman are the two lobbyists who were charged with working as spies for Israel while posing as lobbyists in the U.S. Congress. The charges involved the passing of classified information to the Israeli government and to journalists – the two were the first civilians charged under the law since it was passed in 1917.

A third defendant in the case, Lawrence Franklin, a U.S. government official, pleaded guilty to passing classified government information to the two lobbyists, and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.

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Feds drop charges against pro-Israel lobbyists

 By Barakat, Associated Press Writer –

Fri May 1, 2009, 3:33 pm ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. –

Prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss all charges against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of disclosing U.S. defense secrets, ending a four-year legal battle that promised to put former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration insiders on the witness stand.

Critics of the prosecution of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee accused the government of trying to criminalize the sort of back-channel discussions between government officials, lobbyists and reporters that are commonplace in the nation's capital.

To prove the point, Rosen and Weissman's lawyers won the right to subpoena a parade of Bush administration officials and have them testify at trial under oath. Those slated to testify included Rice, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and several others.

Rosen's defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, said each of those administration officials had conversations with Rosen and Weissman and disclosed almost exactly the same type of information that led to the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman.

Prosecutors had sought unsuccessfully to quash those subpoenas, arguing that Rice and the others had nothing relevant to add to the case.

In a statement Friday, Acting U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said the government moved to dismiss the charges after concluding that pretrial rulings would make it too difficult for the government to prove its case.

Boente also said he was worried that classified information would be disclosed at trial.

Defense lawyers, in a joint statement, praised the Obama administration for reconsidering the case.

"This administration truly shows that theirs is a Department of Justice, where the justice of any case can be re-evaluated and the government can admit that a case should not be pursued," the defense team said.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III had made several rulings — upheld by appellate courts earlier this year — that prosecutors worried would make it almost impossible to obtain a guilty verdict. Among them was a requirement that the government would have to prove that Rosen and Weissman knew they were harming the United States by trading sensitive national defense information with U.S. government officials, reporters and an Israeli diplomat.

The defense had also been prepared to show the information obtained by Rosen and Weissman, while technically classified, was not truly secret and its disclosure was irrelevant to national security.

The federal government's former arbiter of classification, J. William Leonard, was slated to testify for the defense that the government overuses classification and applies the label to information that by any practical measure does not need to be secret. The government had sought to bar Leonard's testimony.

The trial had been scheduled to start June 2. Charges were first brought in 2005.

Rosen and Weissman had not been charged with actual espionage, although the charges did fall under provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act, a rarely used World War I-era law that had never before been applied to lobbyists or any other private citizens.

Weissman's lawyer, Baruch Weiss, called the dismissal a victory for the First Amendment. Had Rosen and Weissman been convicted, he said it would have set a precedent for prosecuting reporters any time they obtained information from government officials that was later deemed too sensitive to be disclosed.

Weiss said the four-year prosecution "has been a tremendous hardship for both Rosen and Weissman," who have been unable to work.

A former Defense Department official, Lawrence A. Franklin, previously pleaded guilty to providing Rosen and Weissman classified defense information and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Franklin said he was frustrated with U.S. policy toward Iran, and leaked info to Rosen and Weissman with the hopes that they might use their contacts in the administration to get the policy changed.

AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton said the organization was pleased the Justice Department dismissed the charges. AIPAC fired Rosen and Weissman in April 2005, when they were under investigation. Dorton declined to comment on whether AIPAC still thinks Rosen and Weissman acted improperly.

The AIPAC case popped back into the headlines last month after reports that Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., was overheard on wiretaps agreeing to seek lenient treatment for Rosen and Weissman.

Harman adamantly denied she had contacted anyone seeking favorable treatment for Rosen and Weissman, and demanded that transcripts of the wiretaps be released.

The indictment against Rosen and Weissman charged that they obtained and then disclosed to reporters and to an Israeli official classified information on U.S. policy toward Iran, as well as information on the al-Qaida terror network and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers dormitory in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel.

The case revolved solely around alleged oral disclosures — the two were never alleged to have traded in classified documents — which was an additional complicating factor in the prosecution.

It will be up to Ellis to formally dismiss the charges, but it would be highly unlikely that he would refuse the government's request for dismissal.