Jesselyn Radack, left, speaks with Raymond McGovern, Coleen Rowley and Thomas Drake in Moscow last year after a meeting with Edward Snowden. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Federal officials are closing in on a person they suspect gave The Intercept classified documents about a terrorist-tracking database, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News reported Monday.
The leaked documents show a large number of the million or so people in the database aren’t actually affiliated with terrorist groups, The Intercept reported in August.
Citing unnamed “law enforcement and intelligence sources,” Isikoff reported FBI agents recently raided the home of the suspected source, believed to be a federal contractor, and prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation.
But Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who represents Edward Snowden - a close associate of The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald - says Isikoff’s sources should face a leak probe themselves.
[FLASHBACK: Greenwald Suggests There's a Second NSA Leaker]
“By all means the government should investigate these leaks to Isikoff,” Radack tells U.S. News. “[Isikoff’s] article is an object lesson on the Obama administration's double-standard on leaks. It criminally pursues those who expose its incompetence, ineptitude or illegalities, but leaks like a sieve when it serves their own interests.”
Isikoff wrote his sources told him the leak investigation has ”generated concerns among some within the U.S. intelligence community that top Justice Department officials — stung by criticism that they have been overzealous in pursuing leak cases — may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media.”
Radack, a former Justice Department ethics adviser now working as national security and human rights director at the Government Accountability Project, says these sources are “clearly trying to intimidate this and other whistleblowers by leaking their investigations anonymously to the press.” And in doing so, she says, they are breaking the rules.
“The Justice Department has ethics rules about unfair pretrial publicity and in this article the government seeks to impugn someone who has not even been charged,” she says.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
Though the criminal investigation is newly confirmed, many people suspected the existence of a fresh whistleblower - someone other than Snowden - immediately after The Intercept’s August report. One of the documents the publication reproduced displayed data compiled in August 2013 - months after Snowden lost access to secret documents.
Jeremy Scahill, a co-author of The Intercept’s report, described the source as an “extremely principled and brave whistleblower” in a Thursday interview with Democracy Now! Filmmaker Laura Poitras’ newly released documentary “Citizenfour” includes a scene with Greenwald discussing the new whistleblower with Snowden, who is in exile in Russia.
The Obama administration, using the Espionage Act of 1917, has famously prosecuted more people suspected of leaking sensitive government information to the news media than all previous administrations combined. Isikoff reports that the Justice Department, however, has not filed charges against suspects in new leak probes since Sept. 2013, after receiving bad press for labeling a reporter a suspected criminal conspirator and seizing Associated Press phone records.
In the September 2013 case, a former FBI agent facing child pornography charges pleaded guilty to tipping off the AP about a scuttled bomb plot, the exposure of which contradicted Obama administration claims there was no credible terror plot on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death. CIA Director John Brennan, homeland security adviser at the time, made an arguably more damaging disclosure, telling TV pundits - one of whom repeated the detail - that a Western agent had infiltrated al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate. Brennan and the TV pundit, former Bush-era national security adviser Richard Clarke, did not face charges.
Steven Nelson is a reporter at U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at snelson@usnews.com.
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