Over at her personal blog, War and Piece, FP’s Laura Rozen posits a blistering point by point argument that it was Jane Harman’s politics (personal and partisan) that led ex-CIA boss Porter Goss to attempt to get her in criminal cross-hairs.
Laura comes up with a stunner: Goss might have lacked the legal authority to order a warrant for a wiretap on Harman. That would go a long way toward explaining why the White House quashed the warrant; not to say that the Bush administration is untainted by allegations of illegal wiretapping, but no one’s ever alleged that it devolved into a rogue’s free-for-all of I’ll tap my enemies, you tap yours. If anything, it was tightly controlled.
And, the more I think about it, there’s another implicit stunner in all this:
The belief among the ex-spooks who’ve been leaking this case that the political consideration of Harman’s utility to the Bush administration as an eavesdropping advocate must have been paramount for Alberto Gonzales, then the attorney-general, speaks volumes. Especially if one believes the leakers are sincere (and we’ve no reason not to): what kind of culture was it that prevailed in an administration where it was considered laugh-your-but-off nutty to believe that Gonzales would have quashed a tap on a sitting congresswoman because, you know, it was illegal?
This is like the midrashim about Sodom and Gomorrah, where bad was good and good was bad; where neighborhood committees are set up to rape angels; where the law mandates that citizens shower the beggar with gold, but ban any trade with him; so he soon dies, parched and starving, but covered in gold.
Brrr.
Speaking of perverse, Laura lets loose on the denizens of the left who should know better:
You can resent Aipac, long for a different US pollicy towards the Middle East, not care for Harman, think what she might have said on that call may be unseemly and suspect, and still think this is a seriously nasty case which raises as many or more questions about the motives and actions of her accusers and targeters as of hers. So far, with some notable exceptions, the case’s partisans seem to be choosing sides based almost solely on whether they are rooting for Aipac and associates to get knocked down, or held up, no matter what the truth of the matter is. That is just a terribly prejudiced way to look at it. One the sources on this Harman call have utterly played to and encouraged.
Apologies to John Wayne in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (I watched it last night, for the first time since childhood), but Laura Rozen sure writes purdy when she’s mad.
