“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 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.

Since I’ve been in office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks and speculation.

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.

As the case proceeded, the prosecution argued that it did not matter why Drake took the documents home or whether his actions actually harmed national security.

“The only intent required under the statute is that the defendant retained the documents willfully, i.e., in violation of a known legal duty. … whatever intent or belief that the defendant had for the potential use of those documents is irrelevant,” the prosecution wrote in a motion asking the court to prevent Drake from telling the jury that he was a whistleblower.

Drake tried to argue that he did know the documents were classified — one of the documents was actually stamped “UNCLASSIFIED” but the prosecution argued that Drake should known that it was supposed to be classified — and that they should not have been classified. But the prosecution argued that was all irrelevant under the Espionage Act.

Drake was essentially barred from making any public interest defense at his trial—a fate that has befell every source charged under the Espionage Act before or since.

But just before the case was set to go to trial in June 2011, the prosecution’s case fell apart. The New Yorker and “60 Minutes” highlighted the travesty of the case against Drake, and the subsequent public attention to the case led the Justice Department to drop all charges in exchange for Drake pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. But the case remained a template which the Justice Department would use against several other alleged sources.

Just a month after Drake was originally indicted, Shamai Leibowitz, a linguist working for the FBI, was accused of leaking information to blogger Richard Silverstein. He was charged under the Espionage Act, took a plea deal in December 2009 and was sentenced to 20 months in prison. Leibowitz said that he had provided Silverstein with evidence that the FBI “was committing illegal acts,” and Silverstein later told the Times that Leibowitz had given him transcripts of secretly wiretapped conversations at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

The only intent required under the statute is that the defendant retained the documents willfully, i.e., in violation of a known legal duty. … whatever intent or belief that the defendant had for the potential use of those documents is irrelevant.

Then, Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, was accused of giving classified files to WikiLeaks in 2010 in one of the biggest and most cited leaks in US history. These included the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, which showed a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on Reuters journalists and civilians in Iraq, the Afghan War logs, the Iraq War logs, the State Department diplomatic cables and the Guantanamo Bay files.

Manning was arrested in Iraq and charged with a number of offenses, including violation of the Espionage Act and “aiding the enemy,” a military regulation that carried the death penalty.

In July 2013, a military judge acquitted Manning of the “aiding the enemy” charge but convicted her on a number of other charges, including multiple charges under the Espionage Act. She was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years in prison — by far the longest sentence ever given to a whistleblower or leaker. Shortly before leaving office, President Obama commuted her sentence to seven years (including time served), and she was released from prison in May 2017.

The cases kept coming. Stephen Kim, a State Department contractor, was accused of leaking information about North Korea’s nuclear program to Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2009. After fighting the case for years, Kim took a plea deal in 2014 and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent, was accused of leaking information about the CIA’s spectacularly botched attempts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times reporter James Risen in 2005. It was only in 2011, as the Obama administration ramped up its war on leakers, that Sterling was indicted under the Espionage Act. In 2015, Sterling was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was accused of giving a freelance reporter the name of an undercover CIA agent in 2009. Kiriakou, who had previously spoken out about the CIA’s torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, said that he thought the agent had already retired and was no longer undercover. Even though the information was never published, Kiriakou was forced to take a plea deal. The Espionage Act charges were dropped, but he pled guilty to violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act and was sentenced to 30 months in prison in January 2013.

Donald Sachtleben, a former FBI agent, was accused of confirming information about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen to Associated Press reporters in 2012 after the Department of Justice secretly seized two months’ worth of AP reporters’ work phone, cell phone and home phone records. News outlets and journalism groups condemned this invasion of journalists’ privacy, and Attorney General Holder later agreed to adopt new internal Justice Department regulations limiting when the Department of Justice could seize reporters’ communications. Sachtleben pleaded guilty in 2013 to violating the Espionage Act.

https://freedom.press/news/obama-used-espionage-act-put-record-number-reporters-sources-jail-and-trump-could-be-even-worse/

Hmmm. No commentus.

A

OP there was a journalist named Priscilla Villarreal who was arrested in Laredo USA for posting the name of a state trooper on her Facebook page when the police department was yet to disclose this information.

Press freedom does not translate to reckless acts of journalism which border on national security.

A security report was released by a journalist prior to the VP reading it and people do not see the far reaching implications of this and simply want press freedom.

Those Nigerians are mad!

Butterflyleo:
OP there was a journalist named Priscilla Villarreal who was arrested in Laredo USA for posting the name of a state trooper on her Facebook page when the police department was yet to disclose this information.

Press freedom does not translate to reckless acts of journalism which border on national security.

A security report was released by a journalist prior to the VP reading it and people do not see the far reaching implications of this and simply want press freedom.

Those Nigerians are mad!

Premium times made the mistake of posting actual documents, it is just plain reckless and could have made the police begin to suspect they have a snitch in their midst and triggered a need to know who it is. Disclosing Government confidential information and an ongoing investigation was just wrong, they could have easily wrote their usual source said this and that.

It wil affect The jobless aggressive lazy idiotic pigs of Biafra terrorist.
Because they like spreading lies according to source.

These Yoruba Muslims will not compare this useless government with that of the US when ot comes to developmental matters, if it's time to defend their Fulani master's wickedness, they remember the US.

Yorubas Muslims defending a Fulani for imprisoning a Yoruba Christian journalist.

buhariguy:
It wil affect The jobless aggressive lazy idiotic pigs of Biafra terrorist.
Because they like spreading lies according to source.

It affected a Yoruba Christian journalist and you Yoruba Muslims are celebrating it with glee.

buhariguy:
It wil affect The jobless aggressive lazy idiotic pigs of Biafra terrorist.
Because they like spreading lies according to source.

Is tinubu a criminal? Is he a thief? Jesuslovesyou, answer!

diebuhari1:

It affected a Yoruba Christian journalist and you Yoruba Muslims are celebrating it with glee.

Yoruba christains are regarded as IPOB yoots by BMC..shame on zombies

[s]

diebuhari1:
These Yoruba Muslims will not compare this useless government with that of the US when ot comes to developmental matters, if it's time to defend their Fulani master's wickedness, they remember the US.

Yorubas Muslims defending a Fulani for imprisoning a Yoruba Christian journalist.

[/s]

Please here is reserved for decent progressive human beings, if you cannot reason as expected just SHUT UP.

Misleading Title; I hope this isn't a sponsored post to justify the arrest of the Premium Times reporter who was arrested by Nigeria police for his refusal to disclose his source of published story.

As uncorrelated as this article is to this article, there is nowhere where it is stated that any journalist was arrested for leaks but rather their sources were arrested. The disclosure law only applies to the workers in the relevant departments, not to journalist.

Since the illegal arrest and prosecution of the premium times reporter has garnered international attention, this could be a lame attempt at justifying its illegality.

the title is misleading, but why compare Nigeria with the US for the wrong reasons. like I said before these buhari or APC supporters would defend even idi amin or Adolf Hitler. sahara reporters leaked so many classified info before 2015, not one person was harassed or jailed.