1/10/2024 0 Comments Obama espionage act journalists![]() So potentially, someone could argue that these cases are not really his prosecutions. The indictments took place under Obama but "the wheels started turning before him," Pozen said. The Obama administration inherited two of the cases from President George W. If you pull out the Kim and Stirling cases, by the same standard, you’d likely drop one of the pre-Obama cases too and that would still leave the Obama administration using the Espionage Act five times compared to three times before he took office. government accountable."Īs for the claim, though, it does not matter much. "If for no other reason that the focus would be on the administration’s aggressive use of the Espionage Act to clamp down on whistleblowing and journalism that holds the U.S. "It would be better to say ‘leakers, many of whom are seen as whistleblowers,’ instead of just ‘whistleblowers’," Tapper said. We raised this issue of who is and isn’t a whistleblower with Tapper and he said in the fast pace of a live interview, he might have wanted to use slightly different words to make his point. In a statement given to ProPublica, the Justice Department said it does not target whistleblowers who follow the rules, but "we cannot sanction or condone federal employees who knowingly and willfully disclose classified information to the media or others not entitled to receive such information." No matter how broadly interpreted, Kim and Stirling don’t seem to fit that definition. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell School of Law defines a whistleblower as "an employee who alleges wrongdoing by his or her employer of the sort that violates public law or tends to injure a considerable number of people." There is little suggestion that whatever they might have revealed had to do with any government abuse or that the leakers wanted to raise broad policy concerns. Later that year, Jeffrey Sterling, a Central Intelligence Agency officer, was indicted for sharing information with a journalist James Risen about America’s work to counter Iran’s nuclear program. To take a couple of examples, in 2010, State Department contractor Stephen Kim was indicted for providing information about North Korea to Fox News. Very few of those prosecuted in recent years for unauthorized disclosures even sought to be considered that way." The Justice Department does not quibble about number of prosecutions but in a statement to PunditFact, the department said: "It is definitely not the case that anyone who leaks classified information is a whistleblower. "There’s not really any doubt," Pozen said."The spirit of the assertion is correct." Law professor David Pozen at Columbia University, has researched the culture of unauthorized disclosures in the nation’s capital and said generally, there has been an uptick in these prosecutions on Obama’s watch. So of those 11, seven have taken place while Barack Obama has been president. If we push back to 1945, there is one more case. Including Ellsberg, the government has used the Espionage Act 10 times to prosecute government workers who shared classified information with journalists. Most tallies, like the one by the investigative service ProPublica, begin with Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Vietnam War era documents known as the Pentagon Papers. But a scrupulous vetting of the record uncovers important ambiguities in the entire business of talking about leaks in Washington. On one level, a simple tally would address Tapper’s claim and - spoiler alert - the raw numbers back him up. more than all previous administrations combined." ![]() In a vigorous exchange on CNN’s The Lead, host Jake Tapper asserted to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post that "the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists. This has raised red flags among defenders of the media. In at least two instances, the government’s investigations have delved into the practices of reporters and news organizations and put reporters in legal jeopardy. The federal criminal charges filed against National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden make it seven times that the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act against government workers who shared information with the press.
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