BY Jeff Stein

Steve Rosen is flashing a new weapon in his defamation suit against his former employer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful lobbying group usually referred to as AIPAC.

Rosen, a central figure in the Israeli espionage scandal that shook official Washington a few years ago, made available to SpyTalk an e-mail that he said shows AIPAC, which feared a widening federal investigation into its ties to Israel, signaled it would “do right by” him down the road, even after they had fired him with public denunciations of his conduct.

AIPAC had fired Rosen, its longtime foreign affairs chief, and Keith Weissman, its Iran analyst, in March 2005, after they were implicated in the FBI‘s investigation of alleged Israeli espionage, saying their conduct did not "reflect AIPAC standards." The two were accused of passing along classified information not only to Israel but to news outlets including The Washington Post.

The Justice Department would eventually charge the two under espionage statutes, alleging they used “their contacts within the U.S. government and elsewhere to gather sensitive U.S. government information, including classified information relating to the national defense, for subsequent unlawful communication, delivery and transmission to persons not entitled to receive it.”

Reports were that the FBI was broadening its investigation into AIPAC-Israel ties, with more indictments to come. In their defense, Rosen and Weissman were preparing to subpoena top administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to make their case that the United States regularly used AIPAC to send back-channel communications to Israel. Last year, the charges were dropped.

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http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/05/rosen_c...