Lawyers for Accused AIPAC Spies: They Were ‘helping the US create better foreign policy’

Lawyers for the former pro-Israel lobbyists praised Obama’s administration for dropping all charges, saying they are ‘extremely grateful’ to the White House.

By Jeremy Scahill

Following the Obama Justice Department’s decision to drop all charges against two former AIPAC lobbyists accused of passing sensitive US intelligence to Israel, lawyers for the two men are full of praise for the Obama administration and are portraying their clients as American patriots doing their civic duty.

The comments were published today by The Los Angeles Times:

The high-profile legal team for the two men, who later left AIPAC, have accused the government of trying to “criminalize” the kind of horse-trading in information that has long occurred in Washington.

[…]

Defense lawyers for [Steven] Rosen and [Keith] Weissman — Abbe D. Lowell for Rosen and John Nassikas for Weissman — credited the government for dismissing the charges, saying that the investigation has been misguided since the FBI first searched AIPAC’s offices in 2004.

“It was wrong for the government to single out AIPAC and our clients and allege wrongdoing when all they ever did was their job of helping the United States create better foreign policy … and it was especially wrong not to see the many flaws in the case so that these two men and their families had to live under this unfair cloud for so long,” Lowell and Nassikas said in a statement.

“We are extremely grateful that this new administration, in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Virginia, has taken seriously their obligation to evaluate cases on the merits and not to allow an unjust prosecution to continue solely due to momentum.”

The Times also notes that “it is the second major prosecution dropped by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. since taking over in January. Last month the government dropped its prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens even though he had already been convicted, citing widespread misconduct by prosecutors in the case.”

Related: Obama Justice Department Drops Spy Charges Against AIPAC Lobbyists: The defense had planned to call senior Bush officials to testify. Justice Department feared ‘damage to the national security,’ saying, ‘it is in the public interest to dismiss’