Fieger’s Judge Gets Curious

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I never wanted Jeffrey Fieger to be my governor. But I’m looking forward to the way he fights his campaign finance charges, particularly now that the judge appears to think the investigation into him was politically motivated.

A federal judge in Detroit peppered a prosecutor with questions Tuesdayto find out whether the investigation that resulted in the Augustindictment of Southfield lawyer Geoffrey Fieger on campaign financecharges was politically motivated.

U.S. District Judge Paul Borman also wanted to know why it took 75 to80 federal agents to raid Fieger’s law office and confront 32 employeeson the doorsteps after dark in November 2005.

[snip]

Borman is mulling over a request by Fieger’s lawyers to let them gatherevidence and depose past and present Justice Department officials tofind out whether the Bush administration ordered the probe. If it did,Fieger’s lawyers want the charges dismissed.

Potential deposition targets could include former Attorney GeneralAlberto Gonzales and former White House political adviser Karl Rove.

This prosecution is one of several that appear to have targeted trial lawyers who were big money donors to Democrats, particularly John Edwards. And Fieger’s the kind of scrappy fighter who may well pull this off.

FISA Update

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Via Laura Rozen–there are several interesting things in this article. First, Bush has given over the family jewels–the legal opinions justifying their illegal domestic wiretapping program. He has given them to SJC, but not to HJC.

Across the Capitol, Senate Intelligence Chairman John D. RockefellerIV, D W.Va., said his staff Tuesday reviewed legal opinions and otherdocuments the panel had sought related to the NSA program. He said hisstaff was allowed to take notes, but he hadn’t been briefed on theircontents yet and intended to view them for himself.

[snip]

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr.,D-Mich., in a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding, complainedthat the documents were being provided to Senate Intelligence, but notto his panel or the House Intellligence Committee.

I’m betting that in approximately 4 days, the Republicans will accuse Democrats of leaking materials that were actually leaked by Richard Shelby.

Second, it appears that Republican posturing about a bill is now considered news.

And Then There Were Three?

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Via DK at TPM, all three big telecoms have told Congress to fuck off they can’t confirm or deny whether they’ve been breaking the law by cooperating with the Administration.

Three telecommunications companies have declined to tell Congresswhether they gave U.S. intelligence agencies access to Americans’ phoneand computer records without court orders, citing White Houseobjections and national security.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell "formally invokedthe state secrets privilege to prevent AT&T from either confirmingor denying" any details about intelligence programs, AT&T generalcounsel Wayne Watts wrote in a letter to the House Energy and CommerceCommittee.

Qwest and Verizon also declined to answer, saying the federalgovernment has prohibited them from providing information, discussingor referring to any classified intelligence activities.

Used to be–back in the halcyon Nacchio days and shortly thereafter–that only two telecoms would invoke State Secrets: AT&T and Verizon. But here we have Qwest doing so too.

Is that the reason why Qwest isn’t shrieking more loudly about the immunity deal its rivals might get for being more reckless with the law than Qwest?

Update: Here’s a new line. It’s not the program that is confidential. It’s the proof that the telecoms had AG authorization to undertake the programs that is confidential.

Did the NSA Ask for Data Mining Before or After 9/11?

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I did my big timeline yesterday to try to pin down how much of what we suspect to be the warrantless wiretap program started in early 2001, rather than post-9/11 as Bush has always claimed. As I pointed out in my timeline, it’s clear that Nacchio walked into the February 27 meeting expecting to talk about Groundbreaker. He remained willing to do Groundbreaker. But he was also asked to do something which he was unwilling to do.

My big question is: when did the access to the switches happen, when did the data mining of purportedly international data being, and when did the data mining of domestic data happen?

Let’s start with this comment from William Ockham, who knows a lot more about the telecom side of this than I.

First, I think Nacchio and Qwest objected to at least two differentovertures from NSA. In early 2001, I think the NSA asked them to dowhat AT&T did in San Francisco, set up a tap in to their fiberoptic backbone. In a sense, emptywheel is correct in saying that thisactivity was part of Groundbreaker. I think it would be more accurateto say that Groundbreaker was a cover for this activity. Qwest wouldhave objected on the grounds that FISA prohibited wire communicationinterception inside the USA, even if the communication was "foreign toforeign". Qwest was dumped from the Eagle Alliance (Groundbreakerconsortium) because it wouldn’t play ball.

After 9/11, the NSA came back and asked for "metadata" about theircustomers and Qwest refused based on the 1996 Telecommunications Act.This may have been the trigger for Nacchio’s prosecution (if oneassumes it was a selective prosecution).

Both of these illegal activities were precursors to the so-calledTSP. The fiber optic taps provided the means for interceptingcommunications world-wide and the customer activity data mining wasprovided the means for identifying the supposedly suspicions needles inthe haystack.

Now look at this statement Nacchio’s lawyer, Hebert Stern, issued after last year’s USA Today story; the statement exactly supports WO’s speculation.

In light of pending litigation, I have been reluctant toissue any public statements. However, because of apparent confusionconcerning Joe Nacchio and his role in refusing to make privatetelephone records of Qwest customers available to the NSA immediatelyfollowing the Patriot Act, and in order to negate misguided attempts torelate Mr. Nacchio’s conduct to present litigation, the following arethe facts.

In the Fall of 2001, at a time when there was noinvestigation of Qwest or Mr. Nacchio by the Department of Justice orthe Securities and Exchange Commission, and while Mr. Nacchio wasChairman and CEO of Qwest and was serving pursuant to the President’sappointment as the Chairman of the National Security TelecommunicationsAdvisory Committee, Qwest was approached to permit the Governmentaccess to the private telephone records of Qwest customers.

Mr.Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process hadbeen secured in support of that request. When he learned that no suchauthority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on thepart of the authorities to use any legal process, including the SpecialCourt which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchioconcluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of theTelecommunications Act.

Accordingly, Mr. Nacchio issuedinstructions to refuse to comply with these requests. These requestscontinued throughout Mr. Nacchio’s tenure and until his departure inJune of 2002. [my emphasis]

In other words, the Administration made a request in fall 2001 for "access to the private phone records of Qwest customers." If Stern means "fall" at all literally, then this request came after 9/11–and it could well match the October 2001 time frame described for the start date of the warrantless wiretap program. Stern’s reference to the Telecommunications Act makes it clear that this data relates to domestic customers. Now, Stern is responding directly to the USA Today article that exposed the domestic aspect of this program, and which made the following specific comment about Qwest.

Some Context on Hayden’s Witchhunt of Helgerson

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As the NYT broke the other day, General Michael Hayden is conducting an investigation of the CIA’s Inspector General, John Helgerson. Their first report on the story intimated the reason why Hayden was conducting such an unusual investigation.

A report by Mr. Helgerson’s office completed in the spring of 2004warned that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared toconstitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by theinternational Convention Against Torture.

Some of the inspectorgeneral’s work on detention issues was conducted by Mary O. McCarthy,who was fired from the agency last year after being accused of leakingclassified information. Officials said Mr. Helgerson’s office wasnearing completion on a number of inquiries into C.I.A. detention,interrogation, and “renditions” — the practice of seizing suspects anddelivering them to the authorities in other nations.

Last year’s coverage of McCarthy’s firing strongly suggest her firing was related to her opposition to the CIA’s torture policies.

Atttorney-Client “Crossed Lines”

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What a surprise! An attorney representing a Gitmo detainee and someone in Afghanistan has found "crossed lines" in his telephone connection (h/t scout prime).

A law firm that represents clients atGuantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan is warning its Vermont clientsthat it believes the federal government has been monitoring its phonesand computer system.

[snip]

A Verizon Vermont technician who investigatedproblems with Gensburg’s phone last month found crossed lines, butdidn’t explain what caused the problem, Sleigh said. A forensicexamination of Gensburg’s computer found an application that disabledall security software and would have given someone access to allinformation on the computer, Sleigh said.

“We’ve been told byour expert that nothing on their machines are confidential,” Sleighsaid. “We are continuing to see who, what, when and how this infectionwas installed on my client’s computer.”

Sleigh said it could be a routine infection introduced into the machine by e-mail.

“Giventhe phone situation, a number of another anomalies we’ve observed overtime… we think we have legitimate cause for concern,” Sleigh said.

Okay. I was joking. I’m not surprised, not in the least. But you think maybe those Senators thinking of giving the telecoms immunity for doing stuff like this might consider what they’re doing to the principle of Read more →

The Dread Dinners!

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Hey. Remember when Duke Cunningham was a hero? Well, once you’re useless to the up-and-comers, that hero reputation dies a quick death (h/t chrisc).

Wade said the now-imprisoned congressman was so critical to securingmillions of dollars in federal contracts that defense contractors werewilling to act like they were his friends.

"We would dread having dinner with (Cunningham) and having to listen tohim repeat the same jokes," Wade told jurors in the same courtroomwhere Cunningham pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2006 to more thaneight years in prison for taking bribes.

I wonder if Wade is going to tell the jurors that Cunningham’s hot tub was filled with Potomac water, or that Cunningham used it, during parties, naked?

Of course, that only tangentially pertains to Wade’s task at hand, to incriminate Brent Wilkes sufficiently so his own sentence is lessened.

But I do hope Wade’s testimony might serve as a lesson to those other Congressmen Representative Flake hopes will be indicted for their earmarking ways. I think it’s this kind of humiliation, as much as anything else, that might serve as a deterrent for these people.

What Nacchio Tells Us about the NSA

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The documents made available by the RMN yesterday provide more details about what the NSA and other government agencies have been doing with fiber optic networks–but it’s still not exactly clear what those documents show. As a preliminary, I’m going to try to put the contents of this CIPA filing into a coherent chronology, to clarify some of the issues. The filing is what Nacchio submitted when the judge said his previous CIPA filing was not detailed enough, and it has a timeline going back to the late 1990s.

From reading the filing, I think (though I think others will disagree) that what Nacchio describes as Groundbreaker is at least the physical tap into switches that we know AT&T to have accomplished. That’s important, because Nacchio walked out of his meeting on February 27, 2001 willing to doGroundbreaker (at least the hardware side of it), but unwilling to do something else NSA requested at thatmeeting. Which means the telecom involvement goes beyond simply tappinginto the switches, and the switch-related aspect is not the troubling side of it.

The rest of this chronology just describes how Qwest has built several fiber optics networks for our intelligence agencies–potentially global in scale–that they claim are "impervious to attack." While it’s not clear whether these networks are connected up with public networks or not (GovNet, the proposed network for the government that got scotched with 9/11, was supposed to be private), it does raise the question of how much of these global networks are for communicating (that is, secure communication within an intelligence agency) and how much are for eavesdropping.

And boy, if I were the rest of the world, I’d be less than thrilled to know Qwest had build a redundant fiber optics network for US intelligence agencies throughout my country.

Here’s the timeline:

Rove’s Free Lobbying Gig

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As you’ve probably already sussed out, the transcript from the Jill Simpson interview with HJC is must-read scandal porn. In it, Simpson clearly states that Rove got involved in the Siegelman prosecution and talked to Public Integrity at DOJ in doing so.

But there’s another bit I’d like to look at closely, which the majority counsel uses to establish that Rob Riley had an extensive relationship with Simpson and that Riley has gotten Rove to intervene with legal favors in the past. Here’s the document they’re discussing in this passage.

Q Okay. And the general substance of this appears to be an effort to get a Senator to send a letter. I’ll read the first two sentences of the e-mail. "I’ve been talking with Robby from Hutchinson’s office. He has offered to try to get the Senator to send this letter." And the letter has to do with getting payment on a FEMA matter.

A That is correct.

Q Can you read the handwritten note that’s at the top?

A "I e-mailed this to" — and that’s the client’s name — "then Karl and Stewart today."

Q Hold on. Oh, I e-mailed — sorry. You are reading it. Sorry.

A I say the blank is the client’s name that I can’t disclose. But it says, I e-mailed this to the client’s name, Karl and Stewart today.

Q And then it says Rob?

A Yes, that’s the note he sent me.

Q You didn’t read the beginning which is "To Jill."

A Yes.

We Might Yet Crack MZM

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I’ve long suspected that MZM is the latter-day incarnation of COINTELPRO, though it had the added advantage that it also made a profit for George Bush’s cronies. Via the Daily Muck, it looks like we might make some progress on MZM.

A formerofficial at the Albemarle County-based National Ground IntelligenceCenter pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to a conflict ofinterest charge.

Robert Fromm,a 60-year-old Earlysville resident, was charged in a corruptioninvestigation centered on now-defunct defense contracting firm MZM Inc.

[snip]

The conflictof interest charge arises from allegations that he worked on MZM’sbehalf to influence U.S. Army and Department of Defense officialsregarding the program he previously managed at NGIC.

Fromm’sdefense attorneys previously said their client did not intentionallybreak the law. As part of his plea agreement, Fromm will also cooperatewith a larger federal investigation.

Fromm’s sentencing is January 2008, which suggests he has 3 months to prove he’s a nice guy. Perhaps we’ll learn a little more about MZM in the meantime?