News organizations filed documents in federal court Monday opposing a government request to close portions of an upcoming trial of two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the Espionage Act.

Media organizations, including The Associated Press, are concerned the government wants to keep large portions of evidence in the case out of public view when former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman go to trial.

Defense attorneys have expressed a similar concern, filing a motion to ''Strike the Government's Request to Close the Trial.''

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III rejected a similar motion filed last month and said at the time that he thought defense lawyers were being overdramatic in portraying the government as seeking to ''close the trial.''

In rare cases, courts have allowed the government to use what is called ''the silent witness rule,'' in which a jury sees certain evidence against the defendants that is never made available publicly.

Rosen and Weissman are accused of violating a rarely prosecuted World War I-era law that bars the receipt and disclosure of national defense information.

the condi connection : here


- bill 4-11-2007 8:46 pm

Justin Raimondo discusses the failures of the American media, warmongers who misleadingly identify themselves as libertarians, the threat of war with Iran and the upcoming trial of AIPAC’s Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman for espionage.

chart
links
timeline

- bill 4-12-2007 12:45 am

lawrence franklin espionage scandal


- bill 4-12-2007 12:48 am

juan cole

12/23/06

5/5/05

12/12/04


- bill 4-12-2007 12:58 am

WSJ take vs antiwar


- bill 4-12-2007 2:15 am

i was jokingly going to play the anti-semite card but, yahweh be praised, the wsj saves me the trouble.
- dave 4-12-2007 2:27 am

OMFG. I also thought about making a remark, but how do you parody that WSJ headline?

- mark 4-12-2007 3:34 am

Stop me if I told this one before. David Ross, former director of the Whitney was in Fort Worth around 89 to judge an art show. He used the occasion of his talk to stump for the NEA, which was under attack.
A man in the audience--typical libertarian conservative Texan, a photographer I think--made the valid comment that it's hard to separate government patronage from government control.

Ross started yelling and pounding the podium and saying that if we allowed politicians to mess with the NEA free speech would be next and then, then, you'd have the death camps!
- tom moody 4-12-2007 3:54 am

bills charts notwithstanding, anybody actually have a firm grasp of this case? seems terribly convoluted.

also, i have trouble taking raimondo seriously because of that stupid picture of him with the cigarette. memo to justin, youre no bogart.
- dave 4-12-2007 4:49 am

He's nothing if not consistent--he's had that cig since at least 2001. He is an excellent writer but that's all I'm saying.
- tom moody 4-12-2007 5:14 am

i went to high school with KW's younger brother and actually met him (KW) a couple of times back then. the coverage is all over the place. freedom of speach, antisemitism, loby business as usual, etc. im still looking for the there there - the scooter libby part two JM mentions. JM said he doesnt expect anyone to touch the story. a search on kos pulls no hits at all. im just now trying to piece it all together. the trial starts in early june.
- bill 4-12-2007 5:20 am

the ny sun coverage.


- bill 4-12-2007 4:27 pm

the new yorker on rosen and aipac


- bill 4-12-2007 5:10 pm

the jeffrey goldberg new yorker article seems to be the most definitive take on this matter that ive found so far

In June of 2004, F.B.I. agents searched Franklin’s Pentagon office and hi home in West Virginia, and allegedly found eighty-three classified documents Some had to do with the Iran debate, but some pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq (A separate federal indictment, citing the documents, has been handed down i West Virginia.) According to a person with knowledge of Franklin’s case, th agents told Franklin that Rosen and Weissman were working against America’ interests. Franklin faced ruin—the documents found in his house could cost hi his job, the agents said. Franklin, who did not have a lawyer, agreed to coöperat in the investigation of Rosen and Weissman, although apparently he was not give in return a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was wired, and was asked t contact the two aipac employees. On July 21st, Franklin called Weissman and said that he had to speak to him immediately—that it was a matter of life and death. They arranged to meet outside the Nordstrom’s department store at Pentagon City.

A month before that meeting, The New Yorker had published an article by Seymour Hersh about the activities of Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin, who held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly told Weissman that he had new, classified information indicating that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh. American intelligence knew about the threat, Franklin said, but Israel might not. He also said that the Iranians had infiltrated southern Iraq, and were planning attacks on American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin hoped, could insure that senior Administration officials received this news. It is unclear whether what Franklin relayed was true or whether it had been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has refused to comment on the case.

Weissman hurried back to aipac’s headquarters and briefed Rosen and Howard Kohr, aipac’s executive director. According to aipac sources, Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give the information to Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East official on the National Security Council. Kohr didn’t get in touch with Abrams, but Rosen and Weissman made two calls. They called Gilon and told him about the threat to Israeli agents in Iraq, and then they called Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Post, and told him about the threat to Americans.
A month later, on the morning of August 27, 2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him. Rosen quickly called aipac’s lawyers. That night, CBS News reported that an unnamed Israeli “mole” had been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the mole had been passing documents to two officials of aipac, who were passing the documents on to Israeli officials.
Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman were made public. The F.B.I. informed Franklin that he was going to be charged with illegal possession of classified documents. Franklin was said by friends to be frightened, and surprised. He said that he could not afford to hire a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for a court-appointed attorney to represent him. The lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty to espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence of six to eight years.

[...]

Even some of aipac’s most vigorous critics do not see the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage case. James Bamford, who is the author of well-received books about the National Security Agency, and an often vocal critic of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as a cautionary tale about one lobbying group’s disproportionate influence: “What Pollard did was espionage. This is a much different and more unique animal—this is the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint.” He continued, “Larry Franklin is not going to knock on George Bush’s door, but he can get aipac, which is a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the American government to change its policy to a more aggressive policy.” Bamford, who believes that Weissman and Rosen may indeed be guilty of soliciting information and passing it to a foreign government, sees the case as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of limiting aipac’s long—and, in Bamford’s view, dangerous—reach.

Other aipac critics see the lobby’s behavior as business as usual in Washington. “The No. 1 game in Washington is making people talking to you feel like you’re an insider, that you’ve got information no one else has,” Sam Gejdenson, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, says. When Gejdenson opposed a proposal to increase Israel’s foreign-aid allocation at the expense of more economically needy countries, aipac, he said, responded by “sitting on its hands” during his reëlection campaigns, despite the fact that he is Jewish. “It’s like any other lobbying group,” he said. “Its job isn’t to come up with the best ideas for mankind, or the U.S. It’s narrowly focussed.”

Prosecutors suffered a setback yesterday in their case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the 1917 Espionage Act when a federal judge rejected the government's proposal for conducting much of the trial in secret.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said the government's proposal to keep huge swaths of evidence in the case out of public view was unprecedented and violated the both the defendants' and the public's right to an open trial.

[...]

Prosecutors told Ellis after he issued his ruling that they are reviewing their options, including a possible appeal that would delay the scheduled trial date of June 4. Another option is to craft unclassified substitutions of the classified evidence that would be given to the jury and would be made public.

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