WORLD BREAKING NEWS. Cont'd.
Ex-US Senate Aide Charged with Giving Iraq Secrets
NEW
YORK (Reuters) - A former congressional aide was arrested on Thursday on
charges she gave secret information to Iraqi intelligence agents and was paid
$10,000 for her services, federal prosecutors said. Susan Lindauer, 41, was
arrested in her hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, on charges in an indictment
filed in federal court in Manhattan. She appeared in Baltimore federal court
on Thursday. Lindauer will be held at a community facility on $500,000 bond
until her scheduled arraignment in New York on Monday. Several years before
the activities outlined in the indictments, Lindauer worked in 1996 as a press
secretary to former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, an unsuccessful
candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, according to
congressional records. She also worked as a press aide to Rep. Peter DeFazio
in 1993 and then-Rep. Ron Wyden in 1994, both Oregon Democrats. Wyden is now a
senator. The White House said Lindauer is a "distant relative" of Chief of
Staff Andrew Card. The charges against Lindauer are included in a case against
two sons of a former Iraqi diplomat. The indictment against them, filed last
year, charges Wisam Noman al-Anbuke and his brother, Raed Roman al-Anbuke,
with passing information to Iraqi intelligence agents about Iraqi dissidents
living in the United States. The heart of the case against Lindauer focuses on
activity that took place between October 1999 and March 2002, a year before
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was ousted by a U.S.-led invasion. She is also
accused of having meetings last year with an undercover FBI agent she believed
was a member of the Libyan intelligence service who was seeking to support
resistance groups in postwar Iraq. The charges state she kept in touch with
the undercover agent via e-mail until last month.
CONSPIRACY CHARGE
Lindauer is charged with conspiracy, acting as an unregistered foreign-government agent and taking money from a government that supports terrorism. If convicted of all counts, she could face 25 years in prison. The two other defendants previously pleaded not guilty to the charges. Court documents spell their surname as al-Anbuke, but a defense lawyer said the men go by al-Anbuge. The brothers are the sons of Rokan al-Anbuke, who was deputy permanent representative to Iraq's U.N. mission until Aug. 1, 2000, when he returned to Iraq. His sons remained in New York.
