On June 4, the AIPAC trial will commence in Northern Virginia. Keith Weissman and Steven J. Rosen, two former employees of the pro-Israel lobbying organization, are charged with violations of the espionage statutes for allegedly passing along “national defense information” to journalists and to representatives of the government of Israel. But before the trial can begin, the court has had to consider a raft of motions, including an important one that was ruled on earlier this week.
Prosecutors had sought to keep much of the classified information at issue in the case from being released to the public. To that end, they had proposed elaborate procedures under which secret evidence would be presented to the jury but kept from broad distribution. T.S. Ellis III, the judge presiding over the case, has explained what this would have entailed.
Witnesses would not be permitted to
speak the names of certain specific countries, foreign persons, or other things, but would instead use a code, “Country A,” “Report X,” “Foreign Person Y,” “Foreign Person Z,” and the like. That code would be provided to counsel, the Court, and the jury. The system of codes would change, moreover, to reflect . . . different alleged overt acts disclosing . . . classified information presumably to prevent the public from inferring the meaning or discerning the meaning of the code that’s being used.
The defendants’ attorneys vociferously protested this approach, claiming it is a clear violation of their clients’ Sixth Amendment right to a public trial.
