It was a case that transfixed the pro-Israel community: the August 2005 arrest on espionage charges of two senior officials at AIPAC, the most influential pro-Israel group in Washington.
Before the government dropped the case in May 2009 — amid questions of whether the officials actually committed a crime by talking to Israeli officials about classified information one of them had received alleging an Iranian plot against Israelis stationed in Iraq — AIPAC fired the two men: foreign policy chief Steve Rosen and Iran analyst Keith Weissman.
Now the battle is on to clear their names.
Rosen has filed a defamation lawsuit demanding $20 million from AIPAC, and new court filings last week shed light on a key element of the case: Before firing the two senior staffers, AIPAC prepared a robust defense of them that alleged a conspiracy inside U.S. government agencies to target pro-Israel groups.
The government, in its August 2005 indictment, hinged the charges against Rosen and Weissman on a section of the 1917 Espionage Act, which had never before been successfully invoked, that criminalizes the receipt of classified information. (The law has surfaced again recently in questions of whether the U.S. government could successfully sue WikiLeaks.)
The filings by Rosen’s lawyers aim to undermine AIPAC’s claim that the decision in March 2005 to fire him and Weissman was based on the revelation that the two dealt in classified information. Rather, the documents allege, AIPAC approved in some circumstances of dealing in classified information.
Thus, Rosen alleges, AIPAC fired him and then for years refused to pay his legal fees because it was under pressure at the time from the government, a charge that AIPAC has always denied.
The new court filings — part of Rosen’s response to AIPAC lawyers seeking to get the case dismissed — show the extent to which some of AIPAC’s highest officials believed the U.S. government was targeting the group because of its pro-Israel stance and activities, not because of suspected criminality.
Here are some highlights of the filings:
• Rosen’s lawyers describe two cases in which AIPAC defended and praised Rosen and another employee for receiving and passing along “information concerning Libyan officials giving money to an American presidential candidate in 1984.” Rosen identified the candidate as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, but said that it was never alleged that Jackson knew about the accusation that his staffers had received $100,000 from the Libyans.
• The documents point to a draft of a speech that was to have been delivered by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, Rosen’s boss, just weeks after the FBI raided AIPAC’s offices on Aug. 27, 2004. In the speech, Kohr was to say that the government was targeting AIPAC for “who we are and what we do.” The speech was never delivered.
• An AIPAC briefing paper prepared around the same time — and also never distributed — intimates that the prosecutors were seen as singling out pro-Israel groups. However, it was not clear whether Kohr and AIPAC planned on making a public counteroffensive accusing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials of deliberately targeting pro-Israel groups.
• The filings attempt to show that Kohr and AIPAC legal counsel were aware in October 2004 that Weissman suspected that the information he had received about the Iranian plot was classified. (AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton has denied that AIPAC ever dealt in classified information.)
• The documents indicate that, in 1984, AIPAC defended an employee who had distributed to congressional offices a classified paper outlining U.S. strategies in trade negotiations in Israel. AIPAC said at the time that the staffer never solicited the paper and had returned it immediately upon learning that it was classified.