Some data points:
- It appears that people are arguing that Gonzalez backed off the investigation of Harman almost a year after the the New York Times had published its story on the wiretaps.
- The leak of this information to Time Magazine in 2006 came 3 days after Harman released a report under the auspices of her being the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) on the Randall “Duke” Cunningham affair, and both Goss and his “Gosslings” frequented Cunningham’s booze and prostitute laden soirees:
Indeed, my read of a more recent CQ piece about then DNI John Negroponte also telling Goss not to brief the House leadership about Harman caught on the wiretap is that Negroponte was also trying to shut down what he thought was a rogue effort to pursue investigation of Harman. One now wonders if the reported Negroponte-Goss tensions that ultimately ended in Goss being forced to resign were also fueled by his concerns about Goss’s and the Gosslings’ actions on the Harman matter, and not just the Foggo matter. As we now know, by the way, the Foggo matter is not at all unrelated to the Cunningham case and the HPSCI report that Harman released. Remember: Foggo got the number 3 job at CIA because Goss’s staff recommended him to Goss. Indeed, many members of Goss’s staff had played poker with Foggo and the Cunningham case defense contractors for years (remember the Watergate poker parties?). And my understanding is that when Goss was chairman of HPSCI, Foggo had served his staff as a kind of mole against Tenet and other suspected-unloyal-to-Bush types inside the CIA. So Team Goss and the Gosslings had reasons to squirm when Harman released that report. I need to check when the Foggo indictment actually came down, but I don’t believe he was indicted yet at the time Harman released that report in October 2006. So that case against Foggo and the wider Cunningham investigation still moving may have unnerved people in Goss-land for multiple reasons when Harman released that report.
….
October 2006 is one month before the midterms when the Democrats would retake the House. And with the Democrats expected to win, who would get the chairmanship of HPSCI would have been a live issue for those who cared about these things, including about what kind of oversight even of past actions at CIA might have occurred. Oversight – and in particular Democratic-led oversight – that might have included looking into actions taken during Goss’s tenure as CIA director from 2004-2006. That tenure included, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the CIA’s destruction of videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects — which Harman may have been briefed about. The episode is serious – it’s now the subject of investigation by a special prosecutor. Goss’s tenure also included the whole Foggo corruption matter which was still playing out in 2006, indeed, which played a big role in Goss being forced to suddenly step down as CIA director in May 2006.
So it’s beginning to sound like someone was going after the person most likely to investigate both the torture tape destruction and the connections between Goss staffers and disgraced Congressman Cunningham.
Most of this appears to be moot, because prosecutors are dropping the case against the AIPAC lobbyists, which is a good thing, because the precedent intended by this case was to criminalize the receipt of any classified material by an American citizen without any espionage being involved, and could be very easily extended to journalism.