Spies Like Us

During this season of treason, Scooter and the Boy Genius might want to cut their losses and see if they can get the Larry Franklin special.

A Defense Department analyst charged with passing government secrets to two employees of an influential pro-Israel lobbying group plans to plead guilty at a hearing next week, court officials announced yesterday.

Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, will enter his plea in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Wednesday, the court said. Sources familiar with the case said Franklin is expected to plead guilty to conspiracy and possibly to other counts. He also is planning to resume his cooperation with prosecutors, they said.

...

Federal prosecutors declined to comment yesterday. Franklin's attorney, Plato Cacheris, said Franklin will appear in court Wednesday but declined to elaborate. "There will be some disposition,'' said Cacheris, who added that "the papers are not signed yet.''

The investigation has touched political and diplomatic hot buttons since it was publicly disclosed last year. Prosecutors say Franklin and the two former AIPAC employees, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, conspired to obtain and illegally pass on classified information to foreign officials and reporters over a five-year period.

Although no foreign government has been publicly named, U.S. government sources have identified Israel as the country at the center of the probe. The case has complicated relations between the United States and Israel, which are close allies, and angered many supporters of AIPAC, which is considered one of Washington's most influential lobbying organizations.

An Iran specialist, Franklin briefly cooperated with investigators in the summer of 2004 but has since stopped, his attorney has said. Franklin was first charged in May with disclosing classified information related to potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. A subsequent indictment last month expanded the allegations to say that Franklin revealed national defense information to Rosen and Weissman.

Surely all the wingnuts who reveled in the Sandy Burglar fable (which involved neither disclosure nor destruction of classified information) should be blogging their tiny brains out over a story involving disclosure of classified information that put American soldiers in Iraq at greater risk.

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Oh, Mister Ed calls Franklin a "dupe" who (presumably) was duped by real spies, and who only got a lawyer once he "discovered that he could get charged with associated crimes." Ed generously allows that he hopes Franklin won't get "completely off the hook," but should do "some real time," "regardless of the nationality of the agents involved." You're a real hard ass, Eed.

Meanwhile, The Corner is too deeply buried in Bill Bennett's well-upholstered backside to notice.

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