Ex-FBI Agent Says He Was Fired for Contacts With Israel Lobby AIPAC

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"A Jewish FBI agent says he was falsely accused of "an unspecified foreign preference'" for Israel. In suing over his termination, the John Doe plaintiff says he believes the accusation came because he faxed unclassified documents to "colleagues at AIPAC," the politically powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. He accuses the FBI and the Justice Department of allowing "ill-informed biases regarding the country of Israel and the loyalty of Jewish Americans to improperly and illegally color their personnel decisions."

The former FBI intelligence specialist says he was wrongfully tied to the 2004 scandal in which two AIPAC employees and Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin were indicted on espionage charges.

Franklin pleaded guilty to passing confidential information to AIPAC regarding US foreign policy on Iran and was sentenced to prison in 2006, but his sentence was reduced to house arrest. The case against the AIPAC employees was dismissed, according to contemporary media reports.

In his complaint, Doe says he worked for the State Department as an analyst "assigned to primarily cover issues relating to Palestinian terrorism and the Jewish extremist account within the Bureau of Intelligence and Research" before joining the FBI's Counterterrorism Division in 2004.

He says the FBI began investigating him in regard to AIPAC in October 2005, then revoked his security clearance and placed him on administrative leave without pay. He says he was never told of what charges, if any, were filed against him, only that he was "under investigation for espionage."

Doe says he was subjected to a 15-hour interrogation and two polygraph exams. The results were never revealed to him.

In June 2008, nearly three years after learning of the investigation, Doe says the FBI handed him his walking papers after refusing to let him appeal the revocation of his security clearance."

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[robinlynne]

1. then fire Jane Harman now!

[kenfrequed]

2. Hmm...

You can lose security clearance even if the evidence isn't strong enough for formal charges of espionage. You can certainly be denied access to sensitive information if you have strong and provable associations that create risk to national security. It sucks but thems the breaks.