Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters' sources in jail, and Trump could be even worse
This is Part III of a three-part series by Freedom of the Press Foundation on the Espionage Act of 1917 on its 100th anniversary. Part I can be read here and Part II can be read here.
“My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others,” Dennis Blair told The New York Times in July 2013. “We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.”
Blair, who served as Director of National Intelligence for the Obama administration in 2009 and 2010, was defending the Obama administration’s strategy of aggressively prosecuting journalists’ sources under the Espionage Act of 1917.
For much of the law’s existence, while it was used perniciously against anti-war demonstrators, it was not applied to journalists or their sources. It was not until 1971 that a person was indicted under the Espionage Act for providing classified information to a journalist. Between 1917 and 2009, only one person was convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking to a news organization.
But the Obama administration was determined to change that. Under pressure from Congress and intelligence agencies, Attorney General Eric Holder directed the Department of Justice to aggressively prosecute government employees who discussed classified information with reporters. In 2012, after news organizations reported on U.S. drone strikes and attempts to disable Iranian nuclear reactors, Holder assigned two U.S. attorneys to track down the journalists’ sources.
President Barack Obama strongly supported Holder’s war against journalists’ sources, despite once promising to protect whistleblowers when in office and running for president on the national security scandals of the Bush administration — misdeeds that became public only because of leaks.
“Since I’ve been in office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks and speculation,” Obama said in June 2012. “Now we have mechanisms in place where, if we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences. In some case, it’s criminal. These are criminal acts when they release information like this. And we will conduct thorough investigations, as we have in the past.”
Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in putting a number of people in jail for daring to help national security journalists report on classified government programs.
During the Obama administration, the Department of Justice brought charges under the Espionage Act against eight people accused of leaking to the media — Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden.
Two other high ranking Obama officials, General David Petraeus and General James Cartwright, were also prosecuted as part of leak investigations. They both ultimately pled to lesser charges and were never indicted under the Espionage Act. Cartwright was also later pardoned. Including their cases, the total number of leak case prosecutions under the Obama administration was 10.
Thomas Drake was a senior NSA executive who started his job on September 11, 2001. In the post-terror attack climate, he had repeatedly complained — both internally at the agency and to Congress and the Department of Defense — about waste and lack of privacy protections at the spy agency. In 2005, he allegedly started talking to Siobhan Gorman, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and provided her with unclassified documents for a story detailing how the NSA wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a spying program that infringed on Americans’ privacy.
The Department of Justice initially investigated him as a suspected source for the Times’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning article on warrantless wiretapping; it did not find any evidence that he was, but it did discover his alleged communication with Gorman. A grand jury formally indicted Drake under the Espionage Act in 2010. Drake was never accused of providing classified information to anyone, since he only shared unclassified information with Gorman. Instead, he was accused of taking a few classified documents home.
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https://freedom.press/news/obama-us...s-sources-jail-and-trump-could-be-even-worse/