-Caveat Lector- This story is one of the many I post daily to http://leviathan.weblogs.com >From http://www.theage.com.au/news/2000/12/11/FFX6NB8LJGC.html Australia link to FBI accusations By JOHN MacGREGOR Monday 11 December 2000 The Chief Counsel of Washington's powerful House Committee on Government Reform will visit Australia early next year to investigate evidence that US Attorney-General Janet Reno is involved in official malfeasance against a former rival who is now seeking political refuge in this country. The committee has received evidence suggesting that Ms Reno used the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a political vendetta against Joseph Gersten, a former rival who now lives in Sydney. The evidence comes in documents subpoenaed by the committee from the US Justice Department and the State Attorney's Office in Florida, and leaked to the committee from Australian Government departments. Prime Minister John Howard was recently briefed on the matter by advisors. Mr Gersten, who now practises law in Sydney, was a rival of Ms Reno's in Florida Democratic politics in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a Florida senator; she was a state attorney. Mr Gersten is now seeking refugee status in Australia on the basis of "a well-founded fear of political persecution" in the US. Chief Counsel James C. Wilson stated that he wants to "talk to Gersten, and also to Australian law enforcement authorities" about the FBI passing "raw and unsubstantiated" information on Mr Gersten to the Australian Federal Police. The House Committee on Government Reform recently gave Mr Gersten's legal team a copy of a report on Mr Gersten, written by Sydney company Nautilus Investigations and Security Pty Ltd for the US embassy in Canberra. The embassy said that Nautilus had "volunteered" the report, which casts serious aspersions on Mr Gersten and which Mr Gersten says are false. In a covering note, Nautilus investigator Langdon Rogers pitches for business to the embassy, and offers to "return" Mr Gersten - apparently to the US. On December 29, 1997, Nautilus's derogatory report was sent under US Embassy letterhead to Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Palmer in an apparent attempt to discredit Mr Gersten. On Tuesday in Washington, Mr Wilson will interview Susan Curtis, the FBI agent who was apparently responsible for sending the letter on Mr Gersten to the AFP, while she was a legal attache at the US embassy in Canberra. Questionable information on Mr Gersten was divulged to the NSW Law Society and the Immigration Department by the AFP in the mid-1990s. There has since been an attempt to withdraw Mr Gersten's certificate to practise law; and his application to live in Australia as a "skilled migrant" has been refused. In 1992, Ms Reno was a Florida state attorney, and a high-profile Democrat with links to Hillary Clinton's family. At the time, Mr Gersten was chairman of the heavyweight Dade County Finance Committee. That chairmanship enabled him to uncover massive corruption at the Port of Miami - which was then a centre of fundraising for the first Clinton-Gore campaign. Shortly after this, in 1992, Ms Reno laid drug and prostitution-related charges against Mr Gersten. The evidence for these charges, already dubious, has been largely demolished by subpoenaed FBI documents which the House Committee has just released to Mr Gersten's legal team. Meanwhile, Ms Reno's rival for state attorney in 1988, Republican Jack Thompson, has told The Age that Ms Reno attempted to have him disbarred from the Florida bar in 1990, after he publicly criticised her - as she later did with Mr Gersten in 1992. Should George W. Bush win the US presidency, this would enable a Republican attorney general to act on the House Committee's work of the past eight years, much of which relates to Ms Reno's alleged abuses of power. Sources close to the committee believe this may include the prosecution of matters relating to the treatment of Mr Gersten. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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