But, no one really wanted to take me seriously then, so I guess I must have been wrong.  Right?

Note, also, that the Program Whose Name Is Redacted was discussed, um, a month after Bushco took office.  Which kinda gives the lie to the whole "Started it in response to 9/11" BS the Admin's been spouting all along.

From the documents linked at the Rocky Mountain News, it seems obvious the agency in question was the NSA.  (It was suggested in the Nacchio CIPA filings that it be referred to as an agency in the Department of Defense, which is where the NSA lies on the organization chart.)

Back to February 27, 2001:
Who attended the meeting?
Who called it?
Where was it held - building, room, etc.?
What time?
What was the program which the Government did not want discussed in the Nacchio prosecution?
Who became aware of Nacchio's refusal to have QWest go along with the NSA, how, and when?
To whom did those persons communicate regarding Nacchio?

My surmise is the chains are very short in this one - Nacchio said no(, we won't let you cut into our network with a splitter to capture our customers' information, nor will we just give it to you).  (Skimming those documents over at Rocky Mtn. News - at another meeting, it appears Richard Clarke wanted to know whether QWest could build a separate network and Nacchio told him "I've done that twice already" - maybe part of the contracts QWest didn't get were for the separate network which carries the split-off information back (from the big cable rooms which are in issue in the S.F. EFF v. AT&T suit) to the off-site analysis place wherever that is.)

A senior officer in the NSA - surely one with stars on their collar - was the recipient of the "no".  He turned around and the "no" made it to the OVP in one or two steps.

And, a call went from the OVP to a loyal subordinate at DoJ about Nacchio being dirty.  Maybe it went after the NSA decided to not give QWest the "legit", though secret, contracts Nacchio was relying on when he made his higher projections.  And, the AG (IIRC - wasn't Ashcroft still a nominee in 2/01 because of his race issues?) probably never knew about that call.  Just like he never really knew what the so-called Terrist surveillance Program was about, until Comey and Goldsmith started digging into it.

And, like in the Ala. Gov. Seligman case, there were likely some backroom shenanigans to steer Nacchio's case to a very unfriendly judge.  Seligman, it came out, was personally hated by the judge in his case (who blamed Seligman for an audit he'd undergone prior to going on the bench).

Are you accusing the US Government of 1) filling cooked books with the SEC a year before Bush took office and 2) selling $100 Million in private CEO stocks for one month straight before they were made public and 3) forcing the company to release a quarterly earnings report that correctly listed the $2 Billion Shortage and 4) forcing all  investors in Qwest to dump the stock?

And that Bush orchestrated all of this within 36 days of taking office from January 20th 2001 to February 27th 2001? And putting together a terrorist wire tapping program nine months before September 11th?  Might as well through WorldCom and Enron on the pile too - for masking three of the other largest bankruptcy and insider trading filings.

And who in there right mind would award a $100 Million dollar contact in July 2001 to a company that is trading at 4% its value in June 2001?

There's trading on material non-public information.
There's misstatements on earnings projections or accounting reports.
There's defrauding investors by outright lying about past performance or any of the myriad things that get regulated in a public company.
And then there's all other sorts of frauds.  (A wise man once said "the variety of frauds is limited only by the scope of the human imagination" or words to that effect.)

The problem here is:
(A) it appears he made income projections based upon the existence of secret contracts for secret work (and not even his CFO was cleared to know about these contracts or the work);
(B)  income projections upon work-you-expect-to-get-but-haven't-signed-the-contracts-for are a normal part of business
(1)  If you, as an officer of a public company,  don't include the prospective business (here, secret contracts for secret work) in the projections and your company's numbers come in huge (you make more than expected), you get hit (Criminally and/or civilly) for misstating the prospects of the company - shooting too low.  You're likely also breaching your fiduciary duty to the company and the shareholders, in addition to withholding information.
(2) If your company (a) has done this kind of work in the past and (b) included the profits from it in the projetions back then, then you'd better do the same, now.
(C) the government decided to not give those contracts to QWest, so the income from them never came in, making the projections inaccurate
(D) he was precluded from showing at trial that (1) he actually did have a good-faith basis for the projections he was making (based upon the expected income from secret contracts for secret work) and (2) the reasons the government declined to give the contracts (i.e., he wouldn't go along with the criminality, so they retaliated)
and
(E) All the telecoms took a brutal beating in 2001 from the collapse of the internet/telecom/dotcom bubble of the late 90s (how soon people forget), and QWest and Nacchio were the only ones singled out.  People who'd held AT&T stock since buying it one share at a time in the 40s and 50s (which had transmogrified into Baby Bells, and later things like Lucent, Agere, etc.) or even the 70s and 80s, lost 90% (or sometimes even more) of their investments, too.  

The theory they used for his insider trading charges was a novel one that hadn't been used before. It wasn't based on him having hard information but upon internal projections made months earlier.

In other words, the defense says they cooked up a way to charge him to punish him for his NSA participation refusal. And that he didn't find out about Qwest not getting the contracts until months after he sold his stock. Which in turn supports their defense that he had reason to be rosy about Qwest's future at the time he sold his stock despite the projections because he thought Qwest was getting the government contracts.

The other Qwest officers who testified there were no such contracts listed as initiatives wouldn't have known about the possible contracts because they didn't have security clearances and contracts still in the discussion phase weren't listed as initiatives.

Profits on one-time fiber optics sales were overstated as recurring profit from 1999 to 2002 by $2 to $3 Billion dollars.  

The government contracts discussed was only for $100 Million - that is less than 5% of the discrepancy.  

So unless payback includes filing overstated corporate reports from 1999 to 2002 by 98% greater than the secret contract no one in the company, a single investor or the SEC noticing... then performing 48 stock trades on behalf of the CEO without telling investors for over $58 Million dollars after the CEO received the first negatives earnings report went public - then yes - it was an amazingly performed long-term retaliation.    

AT&T only dropped by 30% from it's highest to its lowest - not 97% like Qwest.  The two losses are not equivalent.