Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat with longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on a National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap telling “a suspected Israeli agent” that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, according to a report released Sunday night in Congressional Quarterly (CQ).

In exchange for Harman’s help, CQ sources say, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Cautious of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying: “This conversation doesn’t exist...”

Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment to CQ.

The case is a spin-off of a probe that has already led to charges under the Espionage Act against the two AIPAC lobbyists, whose case is still pending and scheduled to go to court in June, and to a 12-and-a-half-year prison sentence for former Defense Intelligence Agency official Lawrence A. Franklin.Franklin pleaded guilty a year ago to three felony counts involving improper disclosure and handling of classified information about the Middle East and terrorism to the two lobbyists, who in turn are accused of passing it on to a journalist and Israel. The two lobbyists, who have denied any wrongdoing but were dismissed by AIPAC in April 2005, were indicted on felony counts of conspiring with government officials to receive classified information they were not authorized to have access to and providing national defense information to people not entitled to receive it.

“It’s the deepest kind of corruption, which was years in the making,” said a recently retired longtime national security official who was closely involved in the AIPAC investigation.

Arab News spoke with Max Weihe, Harman’s press secretary, who said she had nothing to say about her alleged complicity in the widening Israeli spy scandal.

Weihe added an additional “no comment” when asked if the Department of Defense had revoked Harman’s top secret security clearance since she is now suspected of working with a foreign government against the best interests of the United States. Harman was also among a group of Democrats who were aware of the CIA’s torture program before it had been publicly revealed.

The Harman scandal broke in October 2006, when Time magazine reported that the Department of Justice and FBI were investigating any links between Harman and AIPAC.

But the crux of CQ reporter Jeff Stein’s scoop “is that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales intervened to kill the criminal investigation into Harman — even though DoJ (Department of Justice) lawyers had concluded that she committed crimes — because top Bush officials wanted Harman’s credibility to be preserved so that she could publicly defend the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program.”

The CQ goes on to say that Gonzales “needed Jane” to help defend the administration’s warrant-less wiretapping program, which was about to break in The New York Times and “engulf the White House.”

Harman, Stein said, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, and she could be counted on again to help defend the program. He was right.

On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman became possibly the most crucial defender of the Bush warrant-less eavesdropping program, using her status as the ranking Democratic on the House Intelligence Committee to repeatedly praise the NSA program as essential to US national security and both necessary and legal, writes Stein.

And thanks to grateful Bush administration officials, the investigation of Harman was effectively dead.

Harman’s critics yesterday said: “What sweet justice it would be if Harman’s guilt were established by government eavesdropping.”

But despite the allegations, Harman is currently scheduled to speak at the opening session of next month’s AIPAC gala in Washington. She’s scheduled to “explore the myriad foreign policy challenges facing the United States, Israel and the world.”