Office of U.S. Trustee vs. Harmon - Witness Leon Panetta

THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFFICE OF THE U.S. TRUSTEE

David C. Farmer, Successor Trustee
vs.
Bobby N. Harmon

(Formerly Mary Lou Woo vs. Harmon and James Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE/KSC

United States District Court, District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

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DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

LEON PANETTA

Former Chief of Staff for William J. Clinton; lobbyist; nominated by President-elect Barack Obama as the new Director of The CIA.

Address to be determined.

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July 10, 2009

Report: Bush surveillance
program was massive

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned.

They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.

The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

Bush started the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.

The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.

The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."

The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.

The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Ca., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs during an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."

In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.

Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.

The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.

House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

Yahoo News

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NEW DISCOVERY (02-10-09): More arguments for First Amendment Rights violations by the U.S. Justice Department and Judge David Ezra:

February 11, 2009

Obama under fire for adopting
Bush's stance on 'state secrets'

By Inter Press Service

William Fisher, Inter Press Service

NEW YORK: President Barack Obama has cast doubt on his promise to put an end to secret government by allowing his Justice Department to follow a path frequently taken by his predecessor.

Before a federal appeals court in San Francisco Monday, lawyers from the Obama Department of Justice invoked the same "state secrets privilege" used by the administration of ex-President George W. Bush to argue that a lawsuit brought on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohammad and four other alleged victims of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program should not go forward because revealing the evidence would harm national security.

If the appeals court agrees, it will mean that the alleged victims will not have their day in court. The court has not yet ruled on the case.

The defendant in the civil lawsuit is known as Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, which is alleged to have knowingly provided the CIA with the chartered aircraft used to "render" terror suspects to countries where they were tortured.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Ben Wizner, who argued Monday on behalf of Mohammad and the other appellants, told IPS: "To date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets' here."

"And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this issue," he added.

"This is a betrayal of the rule of law," the attorney said. "It is not the standard we expected from the Obama administration."

The ACLU was encouraged to believe that the Obama Justice Department would break from the practices of the Bush administration. Eric Holder, recently confirmed as the new attorney general, said at his confirmation hearing: "I will review significant pending cases in which DOJ [Department of Justice] has invoked the state secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in legally appropriate situations."

This appeared to be at odds with testimony by Obama's nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who told senators at his confirmation hearing that the practice of rendition would be continued, but that "extraordinary rendition" - sending terror suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured - would end.

In a statement, Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director, said: "Eric Holder's Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same."

He added: "Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again."

The Mohammad case stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2007 by the ACLU against Jeppesen on behalf of five victims of the United States government's "extraordinary rendition" program.

The suit charged that Jeppesen knowingly participated by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly "disappear" the five men to detention and interrogation.

According to the ACLU, shortly after the suit was filed, "The government intervened and inappropriately asserted the 'state secrets privilege,' claiming further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public."

The case was dismissed in February 2008, and the ACLU then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the San Francisco Bay area.

According to published reports, Jeppesen had actual knowledge of the consequences of its activities. A former Jeppesen employee informed Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine that, at an internal corporate meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated: "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."

The case has also caused a furor in Britain and a problem for the US State Department.

In a separate case brought on behalf of Mohammad, who is a legal British resident, Britain's High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion. The High Court said that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohammad.

The court said that it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the United States to reconsider sharing intelligence with the British.

But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy "governed by the rule of law" would seek to suppress evidence "relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be."

The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position.

The British foreign secretary, David Milliband, denied that there was any threat from the US. But, in a statement last week, the State Department said that the United States "thanks the UK government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information" and that "the United States investigates allegations and claims of torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment such as those raised by Binyam Mohammad."

After Mohammad was captured, then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohammad, and last October all charges against him were dropped.

The ACLU last week sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to clarify the Obama administration's position on the Mohammad case and to reject what it described as the Bush administration's policy of using false claims of national security to avoid judicial review of controversial programs.

The ACLU's Romero said: "The latest revelation is completely at odds with President Obama's executive orders that ban torture and end rendition, as well as his promise to restore the rule of law."

It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege. During the Bush administration, government lawyers invoked the "state secrets" privilege more often than any prior administration to stop cases from proceeding.

Among such cases was that of whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, who was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to US security.

Her case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. And in 2007, the Supreme Court refused to review the "state secrets" privilege in a lawsuit brought by ACLU client Khaled al-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to detention, interrogation and torture in a CIA "black site" prison in Afghanistan.

www.dailystar.com

See also: Uncle Sam’s Torture Chambers

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NEW DISCOVERY (01-05-09): Factual evidence of more undisclosed conflicts of interests:

January 5, 2009

Obama picks Leon Panetta to head CIA

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer Nedra Pickler

Featured Topics:

Barack Obama

Presidential Transition

WASHINGTON – Two Democratic officials say President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to run the CIA. Panetta was a surprise pick for the post, with no experience in the intelligence world. An Obama transition official and another Democrat disclosed his nomination on a condition of anonymity since it was not yet public.

Panetta was director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime congressman from California.

He served on the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel that released a report at the end of 2006 with dozens of recommendations for the reversing course in the Iraq war.

Panetta currently directs with his wife Sylvia the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, based at California State University, Monterey Bay a university he helped establish on the site of the former U.S. Army base, Fort Ord.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090105/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_director

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November 19, 1999

Estate lobbied
White House

Ex-Gov. John Waihee urged
officials to kill legislation that would
penalize charities' trustees
for excessive pay

By Rick Daysog, Star-Bulletin

Ousted trustees of the Bishop Estate paid former Gov. John Waihee to lobby top White House officials in an effort to protect their hefty paychecks, according to internal trust documents obtained by the Star-Bulletin.

Waihee met with President Bill Clinton's then-deputy chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, at the White House in late 1995 to discuss the so-called intermediate sanctions law, which penalizes trustees of charitable trusts who receive excessive pay.

Waihee, a longtime Clinton supporter, also contacted then-Treasury Department Deputy Lawrence Summers on the trustees' behalf while his law partner, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, approached Clinton's then-chief of staff, Leon Panetta.

The trustees' congressional lobbying had been controversial for several years. But until now their efforts to influence the intermediate sanctions legislation at the White House level, along with Waihee's role in the campaign, have been largely unknown.

And while the trustees' lobbying eventually fizzled, critics said it demonstrates the lengths to which the ousted trustees went to protect their compensation, and lays bare the 115-year-old charitable trust's political connections in the nation's capitol.

"It's almost unbelievable that they would spend this much money and go through these efforts to serve their personal interests at the expense of the interests of the trust's beneficiaries," said Randall Roth, University of Hawaii law professor and co-author of the 1997 "Broken Trust" article which prompted Gov. Ben Cayetano to order a state investigation of the estate.

"It seems like 'arrogant' isn't a strong enough word for them."

The estate previously disclosed that it paid Waihee's firm -- Washington, D.C.-based Verner Liipfert Bernhard McPherson and Hand -- more than $900,000 between 1995 and 1998 to lobby Congress on the intermediate sanctions measure.

The ousted trustees defended the effort as being conducted for the benefit of the trust. The former trustees said they supported the general idea of the intermediate sanctions law but opposed specific provisions that were onerous to the estate and the trust-run Kamehameha Schools.

"It's the old story of a good idea that got messed up in the details," said Glenn Sato, attorney for ousted Bishop Estate trustee Richard "Dickie" Wong. Wong previously headed the estate's lobbying efforts.

The estate's court-appointed master and interim trustees disagree. Colbert Matsumoto, the estate's master for the 1994-1996 period, concluded that the lobbying was largely self-serving, and asked the state Probate Court to surcharge trustees for the costs.

The interim board has cited the ousted trustees' lobbying as one of several alleged breaches of trust in its suit to permanently remove Wong and Henry Peters from the multibillion-dollar estate.

The temporary trustees have charged that Peters and Wong jeopardized the estate's tax-exempt status by taking excessive pay and by neglecting the trust's core educational mission.

The interim trustees are retired Adm. Robert Kihune, American Savings Bank executive Constance Lau, former Iolani School headmaster David Coon, retired Honolulu police Chief Francis Kealoa and local attorney Ronald Libkuman.

Probate Judge Kevin Chang removed Wong and Peters on an interim basis May 7 after the Internal Revenue Service threatened to revoke the estate's nonprofit status.

According to internal documents obtained by the Star-Bulletin, the former trustees' lobbying was more extensive than previously disclosed.

The documents also show that ousted trustees sought to eliminate the intermediate sanctions law, contradicting their public statements that they supported the legislation.

'Everyone but the pope'

A Sept. 22, 1995, memo from Waihee and Verner Liipfert staffer Denis Dwyer indicated that the estate initially sought to "kill" the bill but was unable to do so due to a barrage of negative stories about nonprofits in the national media. That year, longtime United Way President William Aramonywas convicted of defrauding the charity. Waihee and Dwyer later developed a backup position to "minimize the adverse impacts" on the estate.

The trustees successfully lobbied for the elimination of the so-called exit tax, which gave the IRS the power to charge hefty fines to charities that convert to a for-profit corporation.

The trustees also pushed unsuccessfully for a provision that would have set their compensation according to state law. Under that rule the trustees' salaries would have been protected from the overview of the IRS or other federal agencies.

According to the estate's documents, Verner Liipfert's lobbying team consisted of 15 lawyers and consultants, including Waihee and former state official Norma Wong.

The campaign included dozens of telephone calls, letters and meetings with Sens. Robert Dole, William Roth and David Pryor and House Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer.

The Verner Liipfert team also enlisted the assistance of Goldman Sachs Group to lobby former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato. Bishop Estate is a large shareholder in the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm.

"It appears that the former trustees lobbied everyone but the pope himself on this issue," said Deputy Attorney General Hugh Jones.

A Verner Liipfert spokeswoman had no immediate response. Waihee was out of town and could not be reached for comment.

Legislation's sole opponent

At times the Bishop Estate's hard-sell approach appeared to backfire. After Waihee placed a telephone call to former Treasury Deputy Secretary Summers, staff attorney Kathy Livingston abruptly told the lobbyists that the department would not support the estate's position on the intermediate sanctions bill, according to a February 1996 memo by Dwyer.

Summers' boss at the Treasury Department was former Goldman Sachs manager Robert Rubin, whose stock in Goldman Sachs was insured by Bishop Estate. Summers succeeded Rubin as head of the Treasury Department in July.

The estate failed to halt the legislation because it was the only charity that opposed the measure. Stung by the United Way controversy, the mainland philanthropic community banded together and urged passage of the intermediate sanctions legislation because such a law would help restore public confidence.

The bill was signed by Clinton in July 1996.

Paul Streckfus, a former IRS attorney and editor of EO Tax Journal, a monthly newsletter covering the nonprofit sector, said the estate's lobbying on the intermediate sanctions law adds fuel to the IRS' recent threat to revoke the estate's tax-exempt status.

Although former trustees have received outside legal opinions approving their lobbying, the IRS could conclude the lobbying constitutes an instance of private benefit, and could yank the estate's nonprofit status.

"If you are making $800,000 a year, you're probably going to do anything you can to ward off the people who are trying to take it away from you," Streckfus said.

"But the issue here is whether they were spending estate money for a proper purpose."

Bishop Estate Archive

http://archives.starbulletin.com/1999/11/19/news/story1.html

The Catbird Seat Archives - December 6, 2006

# # #

A Chronology: Key Moments In
The Clinton-Lewinsky Saga

1995

June 1995: Monica Lewinsky, 21, comes to the White House as an unpaid intern in the office of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.

November 1995: Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton begin a sexual relationship, according to audiotapes secretly recorded later by Linda Tripp.

December 1995: Lewinsky moves into a paid position in the Office of Legislative Affairs, handling letters from members of Congress. She frequently ferries mail to the Oval Office....

1997

August 1997: Tripp encountered Kathleen Willey coming out of Oval Office "disheveled. Her face red and her lipstick was off." Willey later alleged that Clinton groped her. Clinton's lawyer, Bill Bennett said in the article that Linda Tripp is not to be believed....

October 1997: Lewinsky interviews with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson for a low level public affairs position.

December 1997: Lewinsky leaves the Pentagon.

Dec. 8: Betty Currie, Clinton's personal secretary, asks presidential pal Vernon Jordan to help Lewinsky find a job in New York....

January 1998

Jan. 7, 1998: Lewinsky files an affidavit in the Jones case in which she denies ever having a sexual relationship with President Clinton.

Jan. 9: Tripp delivers the tapes to her lawyer, Jim Moody.

Jan. 12: Linda Tripp contacts the office of Whitewater Independent Counsel Ken Starr to talk about Lewinsky and the tapes she made of their conversations. The tapes allegedly have Lewinsky detailing an affair with Clinton and indicate that Clinton and Clinton friend Vernon Jordan told Lewinsky to lie about the alleged affair under oath.

Jan. 13, 1998: Tripp, wired by FBI agents working with Starr, meets with Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel bar in Pentagon City, Va., and records their conversation....

Jan. 16, 1998: Starr contacts Attorney General Janet Reno to get permission to expand his probe. Reno agrees and submits the request to a panel of three federal judges. The judges agree to allow Starr to formally investigate the possibility of subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Jones case. Tripp and Lewinsky meet again at the Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents and U.S. attorneys intercede and take Lewinsky to a hotel room, where they question her and offer her immunity. Lewinsky contacts her mother, Marcia Lewis, who travels down from New York City by train. Lewis contacts her ex-husband, who calls attorney William Ginsburg, a family friend. Ginsburg advises her not to accept the immunity deal until he learns more....

Jan. 19, 1998: Lewinsky's name surfaces in an Internet gossip column, the Drudge Report, which mentions rumors that Newsweek had decided to delay publishing a piece on Lewinsky and the alleged affair.

Jan. 21, 1998: Several news organizations report the alleged sexual relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton. Clinton denies the allegations as the scandal erupts....

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/resources/lewinsky/timeline/

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Leon Panetta is expected to testify regarding his business, professional, political and personal relationships with Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate, Goldman Sachs, Henry Peters, Matsuo Takabuki, Rodney Park, Wally Chin, Vernon Jordan, George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Dan Inouye, Daniel Akaka, The Nature Conservancy, Haunani Apoliona, Faye Kurren, Judge Barry Kurren, Monica Lewinsky, Crum & Forster, Zenith Insurance Company, Marsh & McLennan, AIG, Chubb Group, Citigroup, The American Red Cross, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Waihee, Ben Cayetano, AIPAC, Linda Lingle, Erskin Bowles, George Mitchell, Kenneth Starr, Joshua Gotbaum, and other entities to be named upon discovery.