Topic: Keith Weissman

The Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal (also known as the AIPAC espionage scandal) refers to Lawrence Franklin's scandal of passing classified documents regarding United States policy towards Iran to Israel through American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, pled guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison which was later reduced to ten months house arrest. Two former AIPAC employees were also indicted, but the case was dismissed.

While prosecutors said several 2009 court rulings would have made it almost impossible to obtain a guilty verdict and forced disclosure of large amounts of classified information, defense lawyers and some legal experts said the government was wrong in the first place for trying to criminalize the kind of information horse-trading that long has occurred in Washington. Critics of the case charged that the government was trying to criminalize the routine give and take in Washington. Steve J. Rosen, AIPAC's then-policy director, said he met with senior government officials all the time.

On August 27, 2004, CBS News broke a story about an FBI investigation into a possible spy in the U.S. Department of Defense working for Israel. The story reported that the FBI had uncovered a spy working as a policy analyst under Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. He was later identified as Lawrence Franklin, who had previously served as an attaché at the U.S. embassy in Israel and was one of two mid-level Pentagon officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for Iran policy in the office's Northern Gulf directorate.