A short history of Washington leaks

Hmmm. See a pattern here?

The reporters' testimony, focusing on discussions with I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, appears to have provided Mr. Fitzgerald with a means to corroborate or challenge the accounts provided by the White House officials about the conversations. In the case of Mr. Libby, the journalists' accounts are likely to be central to any case brought by Mr. Fitzgerald, because they have failed to substantiate Mr. Libby's initial assertion that he learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters.

The approach differs from the one pursued by prosecutors in most previous leak investigations, including three prominent cases in recent years, in which inquiries have proceeded without cooperation from journalists involved.

One, a two-year investigation concluded in 2004, found that Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was almost certainly a source for news accounts that described classified Arabic-language messages intercepted by the National Security Agency just before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the messages was one that said, "Tomorrow is zero hour," but the Justice Department decided not to bring charges, instead turning the matter over to the Senate ethics committee.

A second case, against Charles G. Bakaly III, a spokesman for Kenneth W. Starr during his investigation of President Bill Clinton, ended in acquittal in 2000. Mr. Bakaly was accused of being a source for an article in The New York Times that discussed whether President Clinton could be indicted while in office. Mr. Bakaly was charged with lying to investigators in their leak inquiry. At his trial, Mr. Bakaly said he had provided some information to The Times, but said that it had been public and that his responses during that leak investigation had been truthful.

In only one of the three cases, a 2003 episode involving the Drug Enforcement Agency, was anyone convicted of a crime. In that case, Jonathan Randel, a D.E.A. analyst, was sentenced to a year in prison for providing what the agency called sensitive information to The Times of London.

So, let's review. A Republican senator's leak is disappeared, and one of Starr's minions goes unpunished. Okay, so Randel must have been a real danger to national security, right?

Attorney General John Ashcroft is making good on his word to aggressively prosecute leaks - or at least some leaks. Again, the target has been a low-level employee, a Morison for the new millenium. He is Jonathan Randal, an intelligence research specialist with a Ph.D. who had worked at the Atlanta office of the DEA.

Randal's alleged crime? Leaking negative information about one of the richest men in the U.K., Lord Michael Ashcroft (no relation).

Lord Ashcroft, who makes his home in Florida and the former British colony of Belize had been bankrolling the Conservative Party in Britain. His business empire is also based in Belize, an offshore tax haven. The London Times reported that leaked information from the Foreign Office indicated that high officials in Belize viewed Lord Ashcroft with "deep suspicion." Then, a few days later, it reported that his name appeared in a number of DEA files relating to investigations into drug trafficking and money laundering in Belize.

The bad press forced Lord Ashcroft's resignation as the Conservative party's treasurer. Soon, the U.S. State Department issued a statement that it had no conclusive proof connecting Ashcroft to money laundering, or anything else. But the London Times said that to the contrary, it had DEA documents showing that Ashcroft was index-numbered on the DEA files, a measure that, it said, is taken only when serious suspicions exist.

[...]

Randal was indicted by Bush's new U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, William Duffey Jr.. Duffey is a former Deputy Independent Counsel who worked for Ken Starr in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Starr, with Duffey's help, built a case against then-governor Jim Guy Tucker, sending him to jail on fraud and conspiracy charges.)

In February 2002, Duffey's office confronted Randal with a twenty-count indictment. The impact of the indictment was to criminalize Randal's leak. But to do so, prosecutors didn't bother to draw from an official secrets act - since they didn't have one. Instead, they twisted the existing law to issue an indictment to the same effect.

Funny, I don't remember the editors of the Weekly Standard editorializing dramatically about the criminalizing of politics when it came to that case.

And don't the Times's reporters have access to Google, or do they just drop bread crumbs to make us intrepid bloggites feel clever?