Monday, April 20, 2009

Jane, you ignorant slut

California congresswoman Jane Harmon really, really wanted to be the head of the intelligence committee. She was in line for the job, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi simply refused to give it to her. At the time, we were told that there was "bad blood" between the ladies. Some folk suspected that something else was going on. Now we know.

This is the article that now has everyone talking: The NSA recorded a conversation that Harmon had with an Israeli spook who wanted her to do whatever she could to get the Department of Justice to drop the AIPAC spy case. There was a quid pro quo, it seems -- the Israelis would do whatever they could to make Pelosi give Harman the intel committee job.

Which, you will recall, she did not get. Did Pelosi get wind of the arrangement? Is that the basis of the bad blood?

Harman denies that such an arrangement ever existed.

We've heard similar allegations before, but the NSA wiretap angle is very new. That claim ties in directly with this AlterNet story, derived from this NYT piece:
The same article reveals that in 2005 or 2006, the NSA attempted to wiretap an unidentified member of Congress, lending further credence to speculation earlier this year by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., that he might have been spied on.
Nope. Wasn't Jay.

Speculation: Could it be that the NYT -- rarely considered unfriendly to Israel -- is playing up the privacy aspect of this story to make sure that we would direct all tsk tsks at the NSA, and not at Jane Harman? Right now, everyone is talking about wiretaps and not about Israel.

At any rate, Bush's AG, Alberto Gonzales, deep-sixed any investigation of AIPAC and the congresswoman -- an investigation initiated by CIA head Porter Goss.

There was much speculation as to just why Porter Goss resigned in May of 2006. Yes, I indulged in much of that theorizing myself. Continuing in that vein, I must ask: Did Goss' sudden and surprising resignation have any link to the Harman/AIPAC dust-up?

It seems that Gonzales offered a quid pro quo of his own: He would make the investigation of Harman go away -- if she defended the warrantless wiretapping program, then under attack. And so she did!
According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times. Harman, he told [then-DCI Porter] Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
She defended the very program that unearthed blackmail evidence against her, a situation which contains more irony than you'll find at a post-moderist cocktail party. That said, I must point out that her defense of the program was, as they say, nuanced -- as this PBS interview makes clear. Of course, at the time she gave that interview, she probably had heard many angry words from her constituents.

I think this is one of those goatfucks that makes everyone smell like fresh dung.

6 comments:

glennmcgahee said...

Makes you wonder who else had conversations recorded. Obama perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Nice headline. FYI, and not to shamelessly blogwh*re or anything, but we have more than enough foil squirreled away from when the NSA scandal first broke. Even if only the links...

Anonymous said...

Jane Harmon is another Dem whom I used to have some small amount of respect for. Since I have no respect for most politicians she was high on my list of people to trust. Once she defended wiretapping I lost what little respect I had for her and she went back on the no respect list.

Now I find I must make a list that is below "no" respect. -3 respect perhaps?

I've read/heard of politicians selling themselves out cheaply before. A few bucks here and there to help them with their only real concern; re-election but this is a new low. To wh*re yourself out for this? She's not just a wh*re, she's a really cheap wh*re.

Bob Harrison said...

I love roosting chickens.

Sextus Propertius said...

"Nope. Wasn't Jay."

We don't actually know that - just because they wiretapped Harmon doesn't mean they didn't wiretap Rockefeller as well.

Anonymous said...

Nobody seems to care that a U.S. House Representative was wiretapped without a FISA approval. According to CQ:

And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.As much as I didn't want Harmon to become chairperson, and was content Reyes got it, I'm not happy that the NSA wiretapped her.

And I question why this information is coming out now. The NSA doesn't open it's books to reporters, unless it has an agenda. This sort of investigations belong to the FBI, not the NSA.