Make no mistake about it. This is about torture. Nothing else. Does anyone REALLY believe Republicans care whether Jane Harman was wiretapped or not, and what was said on those wiretaps? NOW Dennis Hastert has something to say about it? Who does Jeff Stein think he is kidding?

Incensed that Bush officials had ignored their obligation to alert him, Hastert demanded an explanation from then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Hastert said in an April 25 email.

But Hastert, a former Illinois Republican, was rebuffed, he said. Hastert directed his staff to inform his Democratic counterpart, then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., about the Harman wiretap. “In the fall of 2006 a member of my staff was approached by a whistleblower and told that a member of Congress was captured on audiotape while talking to someone who was a target of a legally authorized wiretap related to an espionage investigation,” Hastert said in the e-mail response to questions from Congressional Quarterly. . . . “The whistleblower came forward because an important protocol was being ignored whereby the congressional leadership is notified of such intercepts,” Hastert said. “Specifically, I was told that the whistleblower indicated that the CIA director was being blocked from briefing the leadership.”

The whistleblower had charged that Negroponte, a career diplomat before he became the first to head the ODNI in 2005, was responsible for blocking Goss from informing House leaders, former Hastert chief of staff Scott Palmer said. “Normally the briefing would have come from the CIA, but the CIA was now controlled by the DNI,” Palmer said. “So the whistleblower’s concern that the DNI was blocking the briefing seemed credible. But we never did know who precisely who was stopping it.”

The whistleblower? Ooookaaay. And now Negroponte was the one blockng the briefing. Stein changes his story every day. But who was this "whistleblower?"

The identity of the whistleblower, “who seemed to be very familiar with the thinking at CIA headquarters,” according to Palmer, was withheld because of a promise of confidentiality.

Sounds like Porter Goss to me. Now here's the part that gets interesting:

The information was so sensitive, Palmer said, he and another aide composed and typed Hastert’s letter to Gonzales themselves, rather than dictating it to a secretary. The two aides then summoned William Moschella, then the Justice Department’s chief of congressional liaison, to pick up the letter in person, “to signify how important we viewed the matter,” Palmer said.

It is one thing to claim that "protocol" requires that Congressional leaders be informed that a Congressperson was caught on a wiretap. It is quite another to disclose the information. This is clearly against the law and against the entire idea that Goss I mean, the "whistleblower," has some altruisitc motive. Stein must thnk we are a bunch of chumps.

It's becoming quite clear what is happening here - in addition to smearing Pelosi and Harman, Porter Goss and his acolytes are settling scores. Negroponte and Hayden took over when Goss was unceremoniously dumped as CIA Director.

Here's the more likely story:

Hastert’s staff learned they would not be getting a briefing. “Basically, they told us, ‘There’s really nothing here that would warrant notifying the leadership, we’re not going to come and brief you,’” Palmer said. At that point, Hastert’s aides grew concerned that the whistleblower “was becoming agitated” and that the existence of the wiretap might surface, which would have the twin effect of exposing a highly classified operation and unfairly “smearing” Harman as a foreign agent herself. “We did not have any reason to believe that Harman was a security risk,” Palmer said. “We knew her to be a highly respected member of Congress.”

(Emphasis supplied.) We'll see what the next tall tale Jeff Stein is fed to try and give this nonsensical story legs. After all, can't have people talking about torture.

Speaking for me only