PRESS RELEASE
Obama's `Ethics Czar' Was Spy
Against Anti-Apartheid Groups,
NAACP, Congress
Aug. 11, 2010 (EIRNS)—Barack Obama's "Ethics Czar" Norman Eisen spent his formative pre-Harvard-Law-School years working for the Los Angeles office of an organization that ran a massive domestic spy operation throughout the United States, illegally spying on minority groups like the NAACP, gay organizations, and progressive members of Congress and other elected officials.
From 1985 to about 1988, Eisen worked for the Los Angeles office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the office—along with the ADL's San Francisco office—that was raided by California police in April 1993, and later sued for spying on American citizens. The same California ADL whose operatives even sold information on American organizations and citizens to the apartheid government of South Africa.
And Eisen has the chutzpah to describe his stint with the well-funded and powerful Los Angeles ADL, where he was Deputy Director, as spending three years between college and law school as a "community organizer," just like his Harvard Law School buddy, Barack Obama. That's chutzpah.
Since the 2008 Obama campaign until June 23, 2010, when he was awarded with a nomination to become ambassador to the Czech Republic, Eisen was Obama's "Ethics Czar". In 2008, from his job at the Washington, D.C. law firm, Zuckerman Spaeder, Eisen donated $40,000 to the Democratic National Committee, to the Obama campaign and to the Biden campaign. All legal.
But having co-founded CREW—Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—with funding from the nefarious off-shore billionaire George Soros, Eisen became Obama's specialist on ethics, collecting every campaign promise that Obama had made on the campaign trail about not hiring lobbyists, and keeping lobbyists out of his government (unless he gave them a waiver!).
Eisen turned those Obama statements into a draft of an Executive Order on Ethics, which Obama signed on Jan. 21, 2009. Shortly afterward, Obama named him Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform.
But behind the persona of a "clean government" nerd is the racist and violent history of the Los Angeles domestic spying operations of the Anti-Defamation League—the very same office where Eisen served as Deputy Director for three years—and tries to pass it off as being a"community organizer."
ADL's Dirty Laundry
The ADL spying case centered around the activities of an ADL informant/covert operative, Roy Bullock, who worked for them from 1960, where he signed up with the ADL in Southern California until his activities were exposed in 1993.
According to journalist Robert I. Friedman of the Village Voice, writing in May 1993, Bullock "found his true calling when he became a paid spy for the Anti-Defamation League in 1960....
"Over a 30-year period, he compiled computer files for the ADL on 9876 individuals and more than 950 groups of all political stripes, including the NAACP, the Rainbow Coalition, ACLU, the American Indian Movement, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Pacifica, ACT UP, Palestinian and Arab groups, Sandinista solidarity groups, Americans for Peace Now, and anti-apartheid organizations. Bullock, who even spied on the then recently slain South African nationalist Chris Hani when he visited the Bay Area in April 1991, sold many of his ADL files on anti-apartheid activists to South African intelligence. Meanwhile, between 1985 and 1993, the ADL paid him nearly $170,000, using a prominent Beverly Hills attorney as a conduit in order to conceal its financial relationship with Bullock....
"Between 1987 and 1991, Bullock sold information to South African intelligence, receiving steady raises, which he split evenly with Gerard. 'Bullock said it was his impression, though Gerard never explicitly told him so, (and Bullock never asked) that Gerard may have been telling the CIA about his and Bullock's contacts with the South Africans,' says the FBI report [that was obtained and publicly released in the police raid."[1]
In 1993, Executive Intelligence Review reported on what came out after California law enforcement authorities raided San Francisco and Los Angeles offices of the ADL regarding ADL's domestic spying operation known as "Operation Eavesdrop":
"April 8, 1993: San Francisco Police again raided the offices of the ADL in San Francisco and Los Angeles, this time serving the search warrants and seizing ten cartons of ADL records, including interoffice communiques and financial records. That same day, San Francisco Police release the search warrant affidavit, with over 700 pages of attachments, including SFPD and FBI interviews with [ADL paid informants] Roy Bullock and David Gurvitz, printouts from Bullock's computer, copies of classified FBI materials found in the ADL files, and a list of 950 organizations that were being spied upon by the ADL. The lists were obtained from computer disks seized in the original raids on the Bullock and Gerard homes.
"Of the 950 organizations spied upon by the ADL, many were civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Rainbow Coalition, or trade unions like the United Auto Workers and United Farm Workers and environmental groups like Greenpeace. The Arab-American community was heavily targeted for not only spying, but infiltration by ADL agents provocateurs who regularly stole membership data, obtained license plates numbers and deployed members of white supremacist groups into the Arab-American ranks for purposes of later "exposing" the links.
"In a throwback to ADL spying in the 1940s, the declassified police investigative material also reveals that ADL has spied on members of Congress, including former Rep. Pete McCloskey, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Alan Cranston and Rep. Ron Dellums.
"A half-dozen organizations, campaign committees and publications associated with Lyndon LaRouche were also targeted for ADL spying."
And there is a direct connection to Eisen's Los Angeles office, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which reported, "According to the police affidavit, Bullock received direction from San Francisco ADL Executive Director Richard Hirschaut as well as from ADL's research director in New York, Irwin Suall. But he was paid with cashier's checks drawn by Los Angeles attorney Bruce Hochman, a former head of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council. ADL funneled the money for these checks to David Lehrer, ADL executive director in Los Angeles, who maintained a secret bank account for the sole purpose of paying Bullock and other informants. A checkbook for the account in the false name of "L. Patterson" was kept in a locked safe at ADL's Los Angeles headquarters." [2]
A class action suit was eventually brought on behalf of dozens of California residents by former Congressman Pete McCloskey. Rather than go to trial, the ADL settled the case out of court.
[1] Robert I. Friedman, The Village Voice, May 11, 1993, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 19, "How The Anti-Defamation League Turned the Notion of Human Rights on Its Head, Spying on Progressives and Funneling Information to Law Enforcement."
[2] Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1993, p. 17.
