Rice, Hadley subpoenaed in AIPAC trial

Rosen and Weissman, former AIPAC officials, are to go on trial next month.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
weissman aipac 248 88 us (photo credit: US Government [file])
weissman aipac 248 88 us
(photo credit: US Government [file])
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley are among the witnesses defense lawyers want to subpoena in the case of two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists accused of receiving classified information. Attorneys for Stephen J. Rosen and Keith Weissman filed the notices of subpoena with the US District Court in Alexandria. Rosen and Weissman, former officials with AIPAC, are scheduled to go on trial next month. There is no indication whether the judge in the case has considered the subpoena requests.
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The names of Rice, Hadley and a number of other people the defense wants to call appeared on the online docket for the case Friday afternoon but by Sunday had been removed and replaced with the word "Witness." The docket indicated that the notices of subpoena had been made "in camera," or in private before a judge, and under seal. Telephone calls to Rosen lawyer Abbe Lowell, Weissman lawyer John Nassikas, and to a spokesman for the federal court, Edward Adams, were not immediately returned on Sunday. Along with Rice and Hadley, others named in the notices of subpoena filed last Wednesday included Elliot Abrams, deputy national security adviser; Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state; David Satterfield, deputy chief of the US mission to Iraq; William Burns, US ambassador to Russia; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; and Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA officer and current Mideast expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Also listed was Lawrence Franklin, a top Pentagon analyst who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Jan. 20 for giving classified information to Rosen, Weissman and an Israeli diplomat. Franklin had pleaded guilty to three felony counts in exchange for prosecutors dropping three other counts. Attorneys for Rosen and Weissman have argued that the former AIPAC officials were engaged only in routine lobbying work. However, Franklin acknowledged that he met periodically with Rosen and Weissman between 2002 and 2004 and discussed potential attacks on US troops in Iraq and other classified information. During Franklin's sentencing, Judge T.S. Ellis III said Franklin believed the National Security Council was insufficiently concerned with the threat posed by an unspecified Middle Eastern nation and that leaking information might spur more serious action. Evidence in the Franklin case suggests the unspecified nation was Iran. Weissman was AIPAC's top Iran expert before he and Rosen were fired in April 2005.