NSA did not order wiretap on Rep. Jane Harman

[ColbertWatcher]

From the Los Angeles Times
Official: NSA did not order wiretap on Rep. Jane Harman
Intelligence Director Dennis Blair did not say what agency requested the reported phone intercept. The congresswoman from Venice has asked the Justice Department to release a transcript of the call.
Associated Press
April 28, 2009

The National Security Agency did not place a wiretap that reportedly intercepted phone conversations made by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the top U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

Dennis C. Blair, the national intelligence director, declined to say which agency requested the reported wiretap and oversaw the information gleaned from Harman's conversations. Blair was speaking at the dedication of a new intelligence research facility.

The only other agency that has authority to place wiretaps on calls inside the United States is the Justice Department.

(more at the link)

--Los Angeles Times

[malaise]

1. Let me see

Rove, Gonzo and Bush!!!

[bleever]

2. Wasn't it a FISA warrant due to contacts with a suspected foreign agent?

That's my recollection.

[TorchTheWitch]

4. Yes, and it was approved

But they never got a chance to actually do it because that's when Gonzo intervened to kill the investigation into Harman (and thus killing the wiretap on her).

I don't know why this is news or why it's confusing to anyone. The original article by Stein said the wiretap wasn't on her but on the suspect she spoke with. If you talk to someone on the phone whose calls are being tapped, then you're going to have your half of the conversation listened to.

[ColbertWatcher]

6. The question isn't who was being recorded, but who was doing the recording.

If the NSA didn't do it, that leaves the DoJ.

[TorchTheWitch]

9. it was a court-approved NSA wiretap on the Israeli

Whoever wrote the article in your OP seems to think that there was an NSA wiretap on HARMAN. Obviously, the NSA is denying there was one on Harman because it wasn't on HER, it was on the suspected Israeli agent she spoke to. They got approval for a FISA wiretap on Harman but Gonzo stepped in and killed the investigation of her thereby stopping Harman from being wiretapped. There never was ANY wiretap from ANY agency on HARMAN that collected the incriminating things she allegedly said. This article is trying to make it appear that someone was spying on Harman herself and not owning up to it. All of this is explained very clearly in Jeff Stein's article and further explained in the online Q&A he did about it. For some reason, whoever wrote the article in your OP is STILL confused and thought that Harman herself was being wiretapped when that's not the case. The incriminating things she apparently said was in a conversation with a suspected Israeli agent who was the one being wiretapped by a court-approved NSA wiretap. When you have a phone conversation with someone being wiretapped, BOTH sides of the conversation are listened to, and THAT's how she was discovered to have said the incriminating things that she allegedly said.

[ColbertWatcher]

11. Okay. Thank you. n/t

[Canuckistanian]

3. Of course not

They ordered the wiretap on the Israeli agent. Harman was talking to the agent at the time.

This is a pointless argument.

The bigger question is, why was Harman talking to Israeli agents?

[spanone]

5. the plot thickens....

[snot]

7. K&R'd

[usregimechange]

8. It was likely the CIA office in the Cheney White House

[HamdenRice]

10. OK, it's a little confusing, but here is how NSA "passes off" wiretaps to FBI

In general, in the past, the NSA has conducted "signal intelligence" ("sigint" or electronic evesdropping) on foreign targets, not on Americans. For that reason, the NSA generally did not need a warrant.

The NSA, however, is not really an investigative agency so much as the handmaiden of other agencies that need the sigint. Most of the time, that's our intelligence agency that focuses on gathering intelligence overseas, namely, the CIA. At other times, it's the DoD which needs to listen in on foreign military targets. (Although with our lavish defense/intell budgets, the military has its own sigint capability in the even more secret Defense Intelligence Agency.)

As international communications became more intertwined, the NSA was bound to pick up Americans' conversations -- especially calls between foreigners and Americans. Bush accelerated this even before 9/11 by routing all communications through NSA tapable nodes, like the infamous one in California.

Theoretically, when the NSA wiretaps a foreigner having conversations with an American, it can evesdrop on, and record that conversation, but it must delete all of the words spoken by the American -- until it gets a warrant. An NSA "intercept" transcript of a foreigner having a conversation with an American looks like this:

Foreigner: So, how's your mom?
American: <deleted>
F: OK down to business. Is everything in place for the bomb next week?
A: <deleted>

At this point, the NSA (or the organization, like the CIA, that the NSA is spying for) has to get a FISA warrant. The FISA Court gets to hear the secret evidence and grant the NSA a warrant to wiretap the American or transcribe the American half of the conversation.

But an additional confusion was that the CIA was not supposed to conduct law enforcement activities in the US, so at this point, the CIA had to pass off the investigation of the American to the FBI.

But the FBI had its own wire tapping capabilities independent of the NSA for domestic wiretapping pursuant to court warrant.

Another layer of confusion is that when a foreign intelligence organization is suspected of spying in the US, that's was historically a domestic federal law enforcement issue. That is investigated by the FBI which is part of the DOJ. The FBI was heavily involved in the "spy catching" cases during the cold war against the Soviets. (But if the foreign spy was believed to have penetrated the CIA, then it was also under the jurisdiction of CIA domestic counter-intelligence-- the nutty people under James Jesus Angelton and his successors.)

This was the nature of the conversations that Harman was having -- it was a domestic spycatching case. Remember it began as an investigation of AIPAC in Washington, as primarily a domestic spy-catching case. From most news reports, Harman was not having conversations with Mossad agents in Israel; she was having conversations with AIPAC officers who seem to have been working for the Mossad in Washington.

That leads me to believe that these were FBI wiretaps. But we don't know whether the FBI used its longstanding domestic wiretapping capabilities, or asked the NSA to wiretap, which the NSA was capable of thanks to the Bush administration expanding the NSA's domestic wiretapping capability.