Lawmaker Is Said to Have Agreed to Aid Lobbyists
WASHINGTON — One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say.
The lawmaker, Representative Jane Harman of California, became the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee after the 2002 election and had ambitions to be its chairwoman when the party gained control of the House in 2006. One official who has seen transcripts of several wiretapped calls said she appeared to agree to intercede in exchange for help in persuading party leaders to give her the powerful post.
One of the very few members of Congress with broad access to the most sensitive intelligence information, including aspects of the Bush administration’s wiretapping that were disclosed in December 2005, Ms. Harman was inadvertently swept up by N.S.A. eavesdroppers who were listening in on conversations during an investigation, three current or former senior officials said. It is not clear exactly when the wiretaps occurred; they were first reported by Congressional Quarterly on its Web site.
The official with access to the transcripts said someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department. She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify.
In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor — the media mogul Haim Saban — would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post.
Ms. Harman denied Monday having ever spoken to anyone in the Justice Department about Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, the two former analysts for Aipac. Her office issued a statement saying, “Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former Aipac employees.”
The statement did not, however, address whether Ms. Harman had contacted anyone at the White House or had participated in phone calls in which she was asked to intervene in exchange for help in being named chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee.
David Szady, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former top counterintelligence official who ran the investigation of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, said in an interview Monday that he was confident Ms. Harman had never intervened. “In all my dealings with her, she was always professional and never tried to intervene or get in the way of any investigation,” Mr. Szady said.
The officials who were familiar with the transcripts, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involved intelligence matters, also said they knew of no evidence that Ms. Harman had intervened in the case.
One of the officials said he was familiar with the transcript of “at least one phone call” in which Ms. Harman discussed weighing in with the department on the investigation of the Aipac officials and her possible chairwomanship of the Intelligence Committee. (She did not get the post.) He identified the California donor as Mr. Saban, a vocal supporter of Israel who turned the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers into a global franchise.
The CQ article, citing unnamed present and former national security officials, said a preliminary review was halted by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales because he wanted Ms. Harman’s support in dissuading The New York Times from running an article disclosing a program of wiretapping without warrants conducted by the National Security Agency.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement Monday that Ms. Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004. Mr. Keller said she spoke to Mr. Taubman — apparently at the request of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A. director — and urged that The Times not publish the article.
“She did not speak to me,” Mr. Keller said, “and I don’t remember her being a significant factor in my decision.”
Shortly before the article was published more than a year later, in December 2005, Mr. Taubman met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish.
The former officials who spoke to The Times did not know about Mr. Gonzales’s reported role nor about Ms. Harman’s contacts with The Times. Aides to Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.
A spokesman for Mr. Saban did not return telephone calls. A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said the speaker had no comment.
The possibility that Ms. Harman might be under investigation surfaced in news reports in 2006. The CQ report provided new details, including quotations attributed to the transcripts of one of Ms. Harman’s conversations. Ms. Harman, CQ said, told the person who requested her aid that she would “waddle in” to the matter, “if you think it would make a difference.” Before ending the call, CQ reported, Ms. Harman said, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
It is unclear when this conversation was supposed to have taken place, but Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were fired from Aipac in March 2005 and indicted a few weeks later. They were charged with violating the World War I-era Espionage Act when they shared with colleagues, journalists and Israeli Embassy officials information about Iran and Iraq they had learned from talking to high-level United States policy makers.
The trial of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman seems on track to begin in June in Alexandria, Va.
Nonprofit Groups Seeking Exceptions to Lobby Rule
WASHINGTON — When it came time for President Obama to pick a human rights chief, many around him thought Tom Malinowski was the obvious choice.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
As the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, Mr. Malinowski has fought slaughter in Darfur, repression in Myanmar and torture in the United States. He served in the State Department and on the National Security Council under the last Democratic president. But he had one liability: he was a registered lobbyist.
The fact that Mr. Malinowski lobbied on behalf of genocide victims rather than military contractors, investment firms or pharmaceutical companies made no difference. Mr. Obama’s anti-lobbyist rules do not distinguish between those who advocate for moneyed interests and those who advocate for public interests, and so Mr. Malinowski was ruled out. But in the process, he has become the symbol of a deep discontent among many Democrats over Mr. Obama’s policy.
“It’s an outrage,” said Stephen Rickard, executive director of the Open Society Policy Center, an advocacy organization. “Tom is one of the most effective and dedicated human rights activists in Washington, and you could get 20 people to say that. It’s extremely unfortunate that Tom and people like Tom can’t be brought in to use their talents.”
The dispute over the policy underscores the tension between the grand gestures of the campaign trail and the undesired consequences once in office. As a candidate, Mr. Obama presented himself as a reformer who would purge Washington of the insidious influence of special interests. As president, he has found some of his own supporters among those purged.
Although Mr. Obama has issued a few waivers to allow activists to work in his administration, the broad sweep of his rules points to the lasting damage of the scandal surrounding the powerful lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. The assumption underlying the Obama policy, critics say, is that all lobbying is suspect, even legitimate advocacy at the heart of a democratic process.
“It wasn’t a problem of too much democracy,” said Larry Ottinger, president of the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest. “It was a problem of money corrupting politics.”
David J. Kramer, who was President George W. Bush’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, the job Mr. Malinowski did not get, said, “It does not make sense to me to bar someone who lobbied not for personal or corporate gain but for the greater good, particularly when loopholes have been made for people in industry.”
A coalition of nonprofit groups has started a campaign to exempt lobbyists for charitable and social welfare organizations that have tax-free status, meeting with presidential aides and sending them a package of ideas for rewriting the policy. Some senior officials privately agree with the effort, concluding that they are hurting the administration by effectively barring people who lobbied on behalf of human rights, environmental and consumer causes espoused by Mr. Obama.
But White House officials said there had been no internal debate on the matter and flatly dismissed the proposals, adding that they would not consider any changes because it would start the administration down a slippery slope of declaring some lobbyists acceptable and others unacceptable.
“You can’t have a value judgment,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said Mr. Obama understood the tradeoff. Public trust in government is so fragile, he said, that it was important to stick to the campaign promise.
“It’s painful,” Mr. Axelrod said. “There are a lot of good people out there who are philosophically simpatico with us and are very skilled and would be very valuable to us.”
But, he said, “you can’t have carve-outs for lobbyists you like and exclude those that you don’t. It would be very hard for people to understand that distinction. This is one of those cases where we’ve had to sacrifice the help of a lot of very valuable people.”
Mr. Obama signed his lobbying order on his first full day in office, banning anyone who was a registered lobbyist from working for any executive agency they had lobbied in the past two years or in any other agency on an issue they had lobbied on in that time. As a practical matter, the order meant that most registered lobbyists could not take jobs in their areas of expertise. The policy was praised as “groundbreaking” in a letter from groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.
The White House has granted three waivers, the first to William J. Lynn, a Raytheon lobbyist who became deputy defense secretary. The other two went to Cecilia Muñoz of the National Council of La Raza, who is now White House director of intergovernmental affairs, and Jocelyn Frye of the National Partnership for Women and Families, who is now Michelle Obama’s policy director.
The Lynn waiver provoked criticism because a lobbyist for a military contractor seemed exactly what the policy was aimed at, but Mr. Obama argued that Mr. Lynn was uniquely qualified. Since then, the administration has eschewed waivers. Among those left out of jobs are people like Mr. Malinowski. He declined to comment.
The coalition of groups protesting the policy said Mr. Obama’s stance was actually hurting transparency by discouraging people from registering as lobbyists. Some nonprofits registered many staff members even if they did little lobbying, but now, the groups said in an April 9 letter to Mr. Obama, the attitude has changed from “when in doubt, report” to “don’t report unless clearly required.”
The issue has pitted longtime friends against each other. Norm Eisen, the White House special counsel for ethics, is in charge of enforcing the policy. On a White House blog, he called the restrictions “some of the toughest ethics rules ever imposed” to stop those who go through “the revolving door between government service and the private sector in order to achieve personal gain at the expense of the public interest.”
Before joining the White House, Mr. Eisen co-founded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — a group that is now part of the coalition protesting his policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment