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.