Miscellaneous Thoughts on Jane Harman

Let me start by saying that I've always thought that she was an anti-civil rights scumbag, so that colors my view of her, but this news is really big.

You can go to CQ politics for Jeff Klein's story, but the short version is that Jane Harman wanted to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and in the process of lobbying various folks to get that position, which ultimately went to Silvestre Reyes, she talked to some member of the Israel lobby who was under a court authorized wiretap because they were under suspicion of being an Israeli intelligence operative, and she said that she would "waddle into" the AIPAC prosecution, and that she wanted them to intercede with Nancy Pelosi on her behalf regarding the Intel committee post.

According to sources who saw the transcript, she finished the discussion with the phrase, "This conversation doesn't exist."

Certainly, the implication of "interceding with Pelosi," is that campaign donations were involved, though the article does not make a specific claim of campaign donations for Harman's action.

This gets more complex because Alberto Gonzalez quashed the investigation of Harman because he wanted her support of the Bush Administration's illegal wiretap program, she had always been supportive of the program, and the New York Times was finally getting ready to release the story, and they wanted a Vichy Dem to speak for them.

Let's be clear, there was no indication of a quid pro quo between Abu Gonzalez and Harman, but neither did there need to be one. She was always in the tank on this issue.

I would also note that while Klein suggests that Harman interceded to get the story spiked at the Times in 2004, the editors there have categorically denied this.

I'm not sure whether there was a crime or not. Law enforcement officials seem to think so, but law enforcement officials always think that, as the other Matt notes, "....how many politicians’ reputations could really stand up to serious surveillance? ..... we have a political system that’s substantially powered by a kind of systematic, quasi-legalized bribery."

He also has the bigger point, which is that politics is messy business, and if you were to wire tap any political figure, you would end up with stuff that is just plain sleazy, because that is how political "sausage" is made.

His best point, however is this:

Thinking about that further reinforces the point that selective, unaccountable surveillance is very dangerous. A president could do a great deal to gin up pretexts to wiretap members of congress and blackmail them even without the members doing anything unusually egregious.

Which really is the big point on why we should all object to the surveillance society.

Meanwhile a friend of John Aravosis thinks that this is all a tempest in a teapot, noting, accurately, that the AIPAC "spies" are not charged with espionage, i.e. acting as an agent for a foreign power, but rather acquiring sensitive government data under the (never used in this circumstance in the past 90 years) 1919 Espionage act:

The heart of the CQ story is incorrect...because Harman wasn't acting on behalf of Israel. Rosen and Weissman aren't being accused for spying on behalf of Israel. The CQ story is trying to depict Rosen and Weissman as convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. What Rosen and Weiss did is nothing like what Pollard was convicted of. Rosen and Weissman met with the State Department official on their behalf, not at the behest of Israel or AIPAC. To suggest so is wrong and that's what stinks about this story. The fact that Stein’s title of CQ’s “Spy Talk Columnist” shows the inherent bias of this story and shows that it is teetering on pure fantasy.

In any case, it's clear that if she had a normal security clearance, it would be yanked pending an investigation, and that she should never be chairman of the Intel committee, and it appears that Pelosi was aware of this episode, and it may have contributed to her passing over Harman for the position.