Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Shown shmoozing above with porcine mass murderer Ariel Sharon is Democratic representative Jane Harman. It's always been well understood that Jane is a drone aircraft, remote-controlled from a bunker in Jerusalem, but it gets better. CQ Politics has a fun item today:

Sources: Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC [Spies]

Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee....

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections....

Seemingly wary 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.”

....Harman is said to have been picked up on a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington....

[C]ontrary to reports [at the time] that the Harman investigation was dropped for “lack of evidence,” it was Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s top counsel and then attorney general, who intervened to stop the Harman probe.

Why? Because, according to three top former national security officials, Gonzales wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times and engulf the White House....

Justice Department attorneys in the intelligence and public corruption units who read the transcripts decided that Harman had committed a “completed crime,”.... And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court....

Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application.....

But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.

.... Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections.