Rice Must Testify at Ex-Israel Lobbyists' Spy Trial
Bloomberg | November 2, 2007
By Cary O'Reilly
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Ex-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and about a dozen other current and former Bush administration officials must testify at the trial of two former lobbyists accused of spying for Israel, a judge said.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia, today rejected a government effort to bar testimony by the officials, who also include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who both worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, were charged in August 2005 with conspiring to commit espionage by receiving national defense information from a Pentagon employee and passing it to a journalist and to the Israeli embassy. Their trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 14.
Rosen and Weissman seek the government officials' testimony about other officials' meetings with AIPAC in an effort to prove they didn't intend to leak classified information, according to court documents.
``Defendants may introduce evidence of conversations between government officials and AIPAC employees that occurred outside defendant's presence if they show that defendants were told about the conversations,'' Ellis said, rejecting government arguments that such testimony would be inadmissible hearsay.
Lawrence Franklin
AIPAC fired Rosen, a policy director for the lobbying group, and senior Iran analyst Weissman in April 2005 during a federal investigation into whether they received classified information from Lawrence Franklin, a former Iran analyst for the Defense Department. Franklin pleaded guilty that year to leaking secret documents and was sentenced to about 12 1/2 years in prison.
According to the indictment of Rosen and Weissman, Franklin met with them in Washington-area restaurants between 2002 and 2004 to discuss policy and exchange information, including documents about potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
``We are not going to comment on an ongoing legal matter,'' State Department spokesman Tom Case said.
Messages left for AIPAC spokesman Josh Block at the group's Washington office weren't returned. Erica Paulson, a McDermott Will & Emery attorney representing Rosen and Weissman, didn't immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
The case is U.S. v. Franklin, 05cr225, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
