http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=FBI+waited+to+move+on+AIPAC&intcategoryid=5FBI waited more than a year
to make move against AIPAC
By Edwin Black
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 (JTA) — The FBI’s investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee did not go into high gear until more than a year after the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst allegedly passed foreign policy strategy information to two AIPAC officials.
The investigation only intensified in July 2004, when the FBI allegedly directed the same Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin, to conduct a sting operation against AIPAC officials, providing them with purportedly classified information to pass on to Israel, according to sources close to the investigation.
A month later, the FBI raided AIPAC offices, confiscating files from two senior staffers.
On Dec. 1, the FBI returned to the headquarters of the pro-Israel lobby, searching staffers’ offices. The FBI also issued subpoenas to four AIPAC staffers to appear before a grand jury at the end of this month.
Most accounts of the AIPAC investigation have focused on the Franklin lunch with Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, an Iran specialist, a meeting, it has been learned, that occurred on June 26, 2003, at the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington, Va.
The chronology is important, say several sources with direct access to the prosecution’s case, because it suggests that that meeting produced insufficient grounds for the FBI to pursue a case against AIPAC.
“We always wondered why there had been no contact by the FBI from June 2003 to August 2004,” when AIPAC’s headquarters were raided, said a source familiar with the government’s investigation. “That’s more than a year.”
“It never made sense, if this violation” that is alleged to have taken place at the Tivoli lunch “was so serious,” the source said.
Instead, the probe of AIPAC appears to have intensified only after the FBI monitored a call between Franklin and reporters at CBS News in May 2004, in which he allegedly disclosed information about aggressive Iranian policy in Iraq.
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