More on Jane Harman
Glenn Greenwald has a column on the AIPAC-Jane Harman story. From that column:
Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as “the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee” to repeatedly praise the NSA program as “essential to U.S. national security” and “both necessary and legal.” She even went on Meet the Press to defend the program along with GOP Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and she even strongly suggested that the whistleblowers who exposed the lawbreaking and perhaps even the New York Times (but not Bush officials) should be criminally investigated, saying she “deplored the leak,” that “it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of the newspapers,” and that the whistleblowers were “despicable.” And Eric Lichtblau himself described how Harman, in 2004, attempted very aggressively to convince him not to write about the NSA program.
And apparently there was no need to apply pressure on Harman to support warrantless wiretapping. Greenwald notes later:
Atrios reads the CQ story as containing “the suggestion that in exchange for dropping the investigation, Harman became a cheerleader for Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.” I’m not sure that’s what the CQ story suggests. It was always clear that Harman would be a defender of the illegal NSA spying program; she was, as she herself acknowledged, repeatedly briefed on the program since 2003 and was such a vigorous proponent of it that she tried to bully Eric Lichtblau out of writing about it in 2004 — a full year before it became public. She didn’t need to be bribed or cajoled to support it. Instead, Gonzales’ motive in quashing the investigation seems to be that he did not want her credibility impaired — because, as a Democrat and a gushing defender of the NSA program, she would be of great value once the scandal broke.
