Aug. 2, 2002 | When the Justice Department indicted defense attorney Lynne Stewart in April on charges she helped client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, communicate with his followers, civil libertarians and attorneys of all political stripes saw it as one more example of Attorney General John Ashcroft's determination to erode attorney-client privilege.
Now documents obtained by the defense in the Stewart case show that the government was secretly taping meetings and phone calls between Stewart and Rahman and others for over two years. While the government obtained a court order authorizing some surveillance of their meetings in 1998, the scope of what was monitored seems to extend beyond what is commonly authorized. And at a hearing July 19, prosecutors refused to say whether they are currently taping Stewart's conversations with her own attorney, Michael Tigar.
The indictment of Stewart has alarmed defense attorneys. "We take this as a very serious threat to the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial," says Jim Harrington, an attorney with the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "Since the founding of this country, one of the fundamental rights our people have had is the right to a lawyer you can confide in. In this situation, you have the government interfering with that right." The association, he said, has already filed a friend-of-the-court brief objecting to the government's seizure of paper records and computer files from Stewart's office.