Fed'l Judge Says CIA Fraud Shielded Agent from Suit, Mulls Possible Lawyer Sanctions
A federal judge is mulling possible sanctions for multiple Central Intelligence Agency lawyers and two other CIA employees including a former director after finding that the agency committed fraud while seeking to protect an agent from a lawsuit.
The former director, George Tenet, filed an affidavit in 2000 asking that that suit against a former Burma station chief, Arthur Brown, be dismissed, because Brown was a covert agent. However, the CIA continued to say Brown was covert even after his cover was lifted in 2002, reports the Associated Press, based on court documents in the Washington, D.C., case that were unsealed today.
The lawsuit was brought by Richard Horn, who contends that the CIA illegally wiretapped his home in Burma in 1993. He formerly worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The AP article doesn’t name the one CIA attorney it reports was referred by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth for disciplinary action. However, a subsequent Washington Post article indicates that this attorney and three other current or former CIA lawyers now on the hot seat in the litigation worked or work for the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Post article reports that attorneys Jeffrey Yeates, John Rizzo, Robert Eatinger and A. John Radsan were ordered yesterday to explain to the court why Lamberth should not sanction them concerning government’s conduct in the case. Additionally, the order imposes the same obligation on Tenet and Brown. (Brown contends that he told top CIA lawyers as early as 2002 that his cover had been lifted, according to the Post.)
Defense attorneys either declined to comment or could not be reached by the Post. A CIA spokesman tells the newspaper that the agency “takes seriously its obligations to U.S. courts.”
A second Associated Press article published around the same time reports that Lamberth also criticizes CIA Director Leon Panetta. “The court does not give the government a high degree of deference because of its prior misrepresentations regarding the state secrets privilege in this case,” the judge writes.
Updated at 6 p.m. to include and accord with information from subsequent Washington Post article and at 6:15 p.m. to include information from most recent Associated Press article.
