washington | Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC foreign policy chief charged with receiving classified information, is suing his former employer for defamation.
Rosen filed a civil action March 2 in the District of Columbia Superior Court seeking $21 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its officers at the time of his dismissal in 2005 and an outside spokesman hired to deal specifically with the case.
Should it come to trial, the civil case promises revelations of how AIPAC works its relations with the executive branch and allegedly capitulated to government pressure to fire Rosen and Keith Weissman, its then-Iran analyst.
Weissman, Rosen’s co-defendant in the criminal case in federal court in Alexandria, Va., is not a plaintiff in the civil suit.
The core of the civil case is the repeated claims by Patrick Dorton, the outside spokesman for AIPAC named in the suit, that Rosen and Weissman were fired because they “did not comport with standards that AIPAC expects of all its employees.”
In seeking to prove that he was the victim of “false and defamatory statements” made on AIPAC’s behalf, the complaint describes Rosen as tumbling from the heights of a cozy relationship with the highest echelons of government to being shown the door at AIPAC.
Sources said that Weissman and the criminal defense team are not troubled by the lawsuit, but think that making the case that Rosen had been defamed would have been much easier after an acquittal or after the case had been dropped by the government.
Increasing calls on the Obama administration to drop the case included an editorial last week in the Washington Post.
Rosen and Weissman allegedly received classified information having to do with Iran and its backing for terrorism. The case came to light following an FBI raid on AIPAC’s offices in August 2004.
After the raid, AIPAC stood by the two employees, but seven months later, in March 2005, Rosen and Weissman were fired. They were indicted in August 2005.
In sworn affidavits, lawyers for Rosen and Weissman quoted lawyers for AIPAC as saying that the decision to fire the two came under government pressure. The case is now being seen to have been an instrument of Bush administration efforts to expand secrecy laws.
The criminal trial, which has been delayed multiple times, is now set for June 2.