Report: ADL, BBI reps were at Rosen event

By · March 30, 2007

Representatives of ADL and B’nai B’rith reportedly are refusing to cooperate with the defense in the classified information case against two former AIPAC staffers. Jess Hordes, Washington director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International, were present with Steve Rosen, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s former foreign policy chief, at a 2003 briefing with Anthony Zinni, the former top U.S. envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Forward reported this week. Neither man commented to the Forward. Rosen’s defense wants to call Zinni, Mariaschin and Hordes to testify that the meeting was routine and did not involve the divulgence of classified information, as the prosecution contends. The ADL and B’nai B’rith fear being drawn into a case that already has complicated AIPAC’s mission in Washington. Zinni has told JTA that the meeting was inconsequential. “I met Mr. Rosen once at a dinner while I was the envoy,” the retired Marines general and former head of U.S. Central Command wrote in an e-mail to JTA a year ago, when his name first emerged as a possible witness. “It was a casual event and we discussed the process I was then involved in. The dinner was with four others.” The fourth person at the dinner is not known.