Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed? Representative Harman and the NSA Wiretaps

[Better Believe It]

April 23, 2009

Harman and the NSA Wiretaps
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?
By DAVE LINDORFF

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that (even though we know J Edgar Hoover did keep a dirt file on members of Congress to help him support his budget allocation each year) I always considered the idea of White House blackmail a bit far out. But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly, the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times, which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and illegal) NSA spying program. (Harman never did get the chair of the Intel Committee, though she did make a run at it. It is possible that the reason she didn’t get the position was that, as Pelosi now admits, she was informed early on by the NSA of the tap it had done on Harman.)

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff04232009.html

[BridgeTheGap]

1. I wouldn't put anything past these rat bastards. n.t

[Fireweed247]

2. It is the only explanation as to why the Congress approved of everything Bushco did

Either that or they were planted as "Democrats" by the Republican/Fascist party in the first place.