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Justice Department Gave Communist Spy Plea Bargain May 22, 2000 The federal government struck a plea bargain that resulted in no prison time for a nuclear scientist who confessed to passing secrets to Red China, rather than await an analysis that ultimately concluded he "directly enhanced" Peking's weapons program, documents disclose. The documents, gathered by Senate investigators, detail weeks of miscommunication among prosecutors, defense officials and the FBI that led up to the December 1997 plea bargain for Peter H. Lee, a former U.S. nuclear-labs scientist. The miscommunication left the Justice Department official with final authority for the case unaware that his prosecutor would seek minimal prison time for Lee. As it turned out, the judge gave Lee no prison time. "Had this been our opening position in plea negotiations, I doubt that I would have approved it, particularly the short period of incarceration," Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney admitted to a Senate judiciary subcommittee. Federal law enforcement officials claim they wanted to avoid a trial to protect sensitive counterintelligence information that would have divulged some of the methods and sources they used. Instead, officials sought to press Lee into a plea bargain, secure his cooperation, and put him in prison for a short time, officials said. They hoped he would help on other Red China espionage matters. The plan backfired, however, when Lee was found to be lying. Prosecutors decided not to wait for an analysis of how much Lee damaged national security. They proceeded with the plea bargain weeks after his confession. Michael Liebman, the lead prosecutor, claimed he thought it was "impractical" to wait for a damage assessment because he thought it would take a year to complete. But within two months, the Energy Department had completed an analysis of Lee's disclosures. Lee's classified information was of significant material assistance to Red China in their nuclear-weapons development program, the department concluded in February 1998. "This analysis indicates that Dr. Lee's activities have directly enhanced the PRC [People's Republic of China] nuclear-weapons program to the detriment of U.S. national security," the memo said. Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), who led the Senate's review, sharply criticized the rush to the plea bargain. "That was just atrocious," he said. "I think it was indifference to the severity of the issue and a traditional interest in chalking up a conviction, which is meaningless when there is no substantial jail time as warranted by the infraction." Specter's draft report concludes that prosecutors should have brought more severe espionage charges against Lee or at least tried to break the plea bargain when he did not fully cooperate. Lee worked at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear labs and was a federal contractor. In October 1997, he admitted to the FBI that he shared classified information with communist Chinese nuclear scientists in 1985 and 1997--some of it involving a secret $100 million joint U.S.-British project on radar detection of nuclear submarines. Since the plea bargain, which required Lee's cooperation, the scientist failed an FBI lie-detector test and left U.S. officials convinced he had not disclosed the full extent of his activities for Red China, the draft Senate report states.
© 2000 TruthNews. All Rights Reserved. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
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