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Just Out: Does investigation of the Pentagon's channel to an Iran Contra arms dealer continue?
When Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence presented the final installments of the committee’s long-awaited pre-war intelligence investigations to the press earlier this month in the Senate gallery, they demurred when reporters asked them if they intended to pursue possible charges against Bush administration officials whom the senators said had exaggerated the case for war based on the intelligence available to them. ...
But there are signs that further federal investigation of at least one aspect of the committee’s inquiry may continue.
... Mother Jones has learned that one subject of one of the recent Senate Intelligence committee reports has told associates that he has hired a defense attorney in connection to a federal investigation. [...]
One clue as to the origin of a possible federal investigation pursuing the US officials’ channel to Ghorbanifar is contained in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report (.PDF) on the Rome meetings. The report refers to a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation of the same matter (that report remains classified), as well as to a Defense Department Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) investigation of the Pentagon officials’ meetings with Ghorbanifar.
The CIFA investigation was halted only a month after it began by then Defense Department intelligence czar Stephen Cambone, the Senate report found. The CIFA report raised the possibility that “Ghorbanifar or his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest levels of the US government.”
The Senate Intelligence committee report concluded that the decision to end the counterintelligence investigation of the Ghorbanifar channel was “premature,” and criticized the Pentagon for not pursuing CIFA’s recommendations. Among the counterintelligence office's recommendations, that a comprehensive “analysis be conducted of the counterintelligence implications related to the ability of Mr. Ghorbanifar or his associates to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials.”
The Justice Department would not comment on whether it is pursuing a counterintelligence investigation related to the case. ...
Update: Very interesting timeline from Marcy Wheeler.