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Two senior AIPAC officials to be indicted by Justice Dept. under U.S. Espionage Act


Nathan Guttman | Washington | May 30

Haaretz - The U.S. Justice Department is expected to file indictments against two former senior American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers - Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman - and, according to sources familiar with the affair, the charges will be subsumed under the Espionage Act.

A Virginia grand jury is now examining the evidence in the case, which involved receipt of classified defense information from Larry Franklin, a Pentagon official, and its transfer to the representative of a foreign country, Naor Gilon, of the Israeli embassy in Washington. Sources involved in the case confirmed that the Espionage Act is on the agenda.

Ed.: more recent news and extensive background on the AIPAC spy story on our compilation thread on it here; more from the above story after the jump.

...According to the sources, the grand jury will submit indictments in the coming weeks against Rosen, the former head of foreign policy for the lobbying organization, and against Weissman, who was responsible for the Iranian brief in AIPAC. The grand jury is expected to hand down its indictment against Franklin this week. He is suspected of handing over the classified information. That indictment is expected to be similar to the criminal complaint already filed by the FBI.

The classified material is said to involve information about Iranian intentions to harm American soldiers in Iraq, and it was supposedly given to the two former AIPAC staffers during lunch in Virginia on June 26, 2003.

But suspicions against Rosen and Weissman focus on a meeting a year later, on July 12, 2004.... Franklin called Weissman and asked for a meeting to discuss an important subject. At the meeting, in a mall near the Pentagon, the Franklin told Weissman that Iranian agents were trying to capture Israeli civilians working in the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. Around the same time there had been conflicting reports in Washington about an Israeli presence in Kurdish Iraq. Journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker had written that Israelis were operating there, but Israel -and the Americans -denied it.

At the meeting, Franklin told Weissman that the information was classified. This is significant in terms of the investigation, since it prevents the AIPAC men from claiming in their defense that they did not know they were dealing with state secrets.

...The fact that Rosen and Weissman, as American citizens, handed information to an official representative of a foreign power while knowing it was classified is incriminating under the 1917 Espionage Act, which defines as a crime receipt of classified information for the purpose of helping any foreign entity.


HongPong May 30, 2005 - 1:05am
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Feith and Franklin

Feith and Franklin

Xymphora | May 28

Uruknet.info - An article ( http://www.nysun.com/article/14523 ) in the New York Sun (of all places) contains additional information on the Franklin-AIPAC scandal, including details of Franklin's June 2003 meeting. We have usually been hearing about his July 2004 meeting, and this shift from a pure propaganda rag is no doubt part of the AIPAC defense. Nevertheless, the article contains a few useful pieces of information (Cacheris is Franklin's lawyer, who claims to be working for free, but of course if he was being paid you would immediately wonder who had an interest in paying him; my emphasis in bold):

"Following Mr. Cacheris's agreement to defend Mr. Franklin, the bureau offered a deal whereby Mr. Franklin would plead guilty to the lesser charge of mishandling classified material, or section 793 of the U.S. Code. The lesser charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Mr. Cacheris said he refused the deal and that he intends to take the case to trial. Despite turning down the offer and ceasing to cooperate with the FBI, Mr. Franklin was charged with only mishandling, not espionage, on Tuesday."

and:

"Mr. Cacheris told the Sun yesterday that he believed the FBI did not originally intend to investigate Mr. Franklin. 'We believe there was a pre-existing investigation that Larry Franklin is not involved in,' he said yesterday."

and (the best part; my emphasis in bold):

" . . . Mr. Franklin first approached Messrs. Rosen and Weissman in February or March 2003 for a meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Va., with the intention of passing on threat information regarding Iran's plans for American soldiers in Iraq.

According to one source familiar with the case, Mr. Franklin was told by an aide to an undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith, that the two Aipac lobbyists could get the threat information to the National Security Council. Mr. Rosen, in particular, has a reputation for high-level contacts with policy-makers in the executive branch. According to sources familiar with the case, the three men at this 2003 meeting discussed passing the threat information to National Security Council official Elliott Abrams."

So the story is now that Douglas Feith decided that the best way to get information to his colleague and fellow ultra-Zionist Elliott Abrams ( http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/abrams/abrams.php ) was to have it delivered through Franklin to AIPAC and then to Abrams? Very strange. Note that the story that Franklin was trying to pass on information concerning threats to Israeli agents in Kurdistan is now that he was trying to pass on information concerning threats from Iranians to Americans in Iraq. The idea that Franklin was trying to protect Americans from Iranians simultaneously makes Franklin more sympathetic and focuses the blame on Iran (which is of course on the current Zionist hit list), but has the disadvantage of making no sense. Why didn't Feith just pick up the phone and call Abrams? Mr. Rosen's "high-level contacts" may have been excellent, but they weren't better than Feith's. While this part of the new cover story makes no sense, AIPAC's continuing efforts to spin this scandal have now led directly to two big admissions:

  • Israel was indeed using intelligence agents to manipulate events in Kurdistan; and
  • Douglas Feith was behind the Franklin-AIPAC scandal (although probably not exactly in the way described in this article).

Is this why Feith had to leave the Bush Administration? Can we expect to see charges leveled against Feith? Was Franklin only charged with mishandling classified material because a more serious charge would also involve having to charge the guy who put him up to it, Feith?

:: Article nr. 12156 sent on 30-may-2005 04:18 ECT

:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=12156

:: The incoming address of this article is :

   xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/05/feith-and-franklin.html

ww May 30, 2005 - 9:19am
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