Reply #39: There's a lot here between the lines:

[leveymg]

1) Shelby, after he switched parties, was collecting classified intercepts within NSA which he used successfully to block the nomination of Tony Lake, Clinton's first choice to replace CIA Director John Deutch, who was widely disliked by the CIA old guard and drummed out as CIA Director after only a year and a half in the job. Someone later revealed to CBS that Deutch had kept classified materials on his home laptop, and someone using his AOL account and the same computer had surfed porn sites. Who would know his surfing habits? -- both AOL and the NSA. See, http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/02/03/cia/index.html

Shelby clearly believed that elements within NSA were monitoring Clinton's CIA Directors. Any such intercepts of high government officials are supposed to be rigorously compartmentalized and immediately "minimized", which means destroyed. But, apparently that wasn't happening during the Clinton Administration.

Shelby wasn't the only one collecting intelligence against the Clinton Administration. Other parties had interest in the telphone conversations of Bill Clinton. Monika Lewinski testified to the Starr inquest that in March 1997 Clinton told her that a "foreign embassy" in Washington was tapping the line from her Watergate apartment.

Lewinski's handler, Linda Tripp, was also secretly taping her conversations with Monika. Tripp was the protege of Lucianne Goldberg, a long-time GOP political operative. Goldberg got her start as part of the stable of attractive women run by the notorious dirty-trickster, Maurice Chontier, a mobbed-up LA private detective, who had been Richard Nixon's bagman going back to the 1948 election. Illegal wiretaps and "honey traps" are an inherent part of political spying:

AP 9/25/98 "The House Judiciary Committee agreed Friday to release audio tapes that Linda Tripp made of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, as Republicans and Democrats vied for political position in advance of next month's vote on a formal impeachment inquiry. In a daylong session behind closed doors, the panel also agreed over objections of some Democrats to make public thousands of pages of still-secret documents that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr gathered as part of his eight-month sex- and-cover-up probe relating to President Clinton's affair with Ms. Lewinsky. The panel deliberated as Clinton, struggling to quell talk of impeachment, accused Republicans of placing ``partisanship over progress, politics over people.'' The White House complained again about the ``lack of fairness and bipartisanship'' in the committee's proceedings. ``The decision to publicly release ... secret grand jury material ... violates the American people's sense of decency and fair play,''."

2) Shelby then turned on Tenet. The Senator had willing sources for dirt on Clinton officials within several intelligence agencies.

3) Shelby wasn't the only GOP Committee head who had an interest in the private electronic communications of Democrats. In 2004, Orin Hatch unexpectedly announced that he would resign as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This happened in the wake of a little-publicized scandal involving two of his aides who had tapped into the restricted e-mail system used by Democratic members and staff of the Commitee. Hatch's aides then funneled the take from this wiretap -- which included documents laying out Democratic strategies to Bush's block judicial appointments -- to unnamed Republican political operatives. One would not be surprised if Karl Rove was on the routing list for those memos.

Hatch's staff then leaked details of the resulting Senate investigation to Robert Novak. This forced Hatch's resignation as Chairman of the Committee. See, Daily Kos: ANNALS OF GOP SPYING: The Senate e-mail Hack & Leak. There is a persistent MO to these GOP dirty-tricks. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/9/112130/2397

Of course, these incidents of GOP wiretapping are just traces of a much larger illegal domestic intelligence-gathering operation run by contractors, such as MZM, with deep ties to the GOP that's been operating under cover of the so-called War On Terrorism. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/23/8418/64300