Looking to lash a leaker

August 6, 2007

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the White House would try to punish a whistleblower with criminal charges, but this is nevertheless startling.

The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) — the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets.

The agents seized Tamm’s desktop computer, two of his children’s laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media.

The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

Now, I don’t know anything about Tamm, who was apparently working at the OIPR in 2004 when senior Justice officials first strongly objected to the White House’s surveillance program. Maybe he played a role in exposing illegal surveillance, maybe not. I have no idea.

I do know, however, that this investigation is pretty ridiculous.

First, whoever leaked word of the warrantless domestic surveillance exposed an administration program that was against the law. Shining the light on illegalities shouldn’t be punished; it should be rewarded. As Anonymous Liberal explained, “[T]his is a classic whistleblower scenario. Investigating people who expose illegal government conduct is a terrible way to expend prosecutorial resources.”

Second, and just as importantly, there’s some irony in Bush’s Justice Department seeking to criminalize leaks — we are, after all, talking about a White House that leaks like a sieve, especially when it comes to national security.

Just last week, the Bush gang was dishing to the NYT new details (that hadn’t even been disclosed to Congress) about the administration’s surveillance activities. Because the leak was intended to help defend Alberto Gonzales from perjury charges, the White House didn’t complain.

Indeed, we’re taking about a White House that authorized top staffers to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq’s weapons capability in June and July 2003. For that matter, the same officials aren’t terribly good at keeping the identity of undercover CIA agents under wraps, and the Vice President doesn’t seem entirely clear on what he can and cannot declassify.

Moreover, it appears that the White House “authorized” leaks of classified information to reporter Bob Woodward, possibly undermining national security.

But those were all national-security leaks that the administration liked, so there were no investigations, no raids on officials’ homes, and no whining about how the leaks are undermining our safety.

Typical.

Yes, it’ll be just a short while now before this rogue WH begins to terrorize its own citizens in the name of fighting terror. -Kevo

  • Ho hum, just another beautiful day in Bergen-Belsen. The only way to make this any more of a Gestapo flashback would be if the raid was conducted at, say, 1:00 AM. Really it’s completely on-message – let us do what we want, keep your mouth shut, and you can go on living pretty much as before. Dissidence will not be tolerated.

    Never mind that the program to which he refers was against the law, the law is flexible and will tolerate any amount of bending, provided that it’s for the protection of the American people. You don’t really know how to look after yourselves, only we know, even though we’ve been wrong about, well….pretty much everything so far. We need to listen in when you talk to somebody else, because you might be just talking about Etta’s recipe for lemon pound cake, or who knocked Sherry up; but then again, you might be talking about roadside bombs or buying a shipment of doorbells to use as detonators. You’ll just have to trust us that we won’t wiretap everybody in the opposition party, so that we can know first about emerging scandals we can use as blackmail – or simply to inhibit their communicating with each other because they suspect they’re being wiretapped. Terrorists will never think to use a network outside the United States, or find other means of communications such as satellite phones, everybody knows they don’t have any money anyway. Besides, if we weren’t sure they had accomplices here in the United States, talking to terrorists every day and setting up attacks to kill the sons and daughters of their neighbours, we wouldn’t do this. Trust us. Trust us.

    The best we can hope for us that the cancer eating America doesn’t spread.

  • And does it bother anybody else that the search warrant itself was “classified.” In my book, classified is another word for secret. Who authorized the search warrant? On what grounds and with what evidence?

    And Mark, with this admin, I think I’m in a ’60s timewarp: “Trust no one!”

  • But those were all national-security leaks that the administration liked, so there were no investigations,…

    The organs of the State — including the Ministry of Justice and its prosecutorial apparatus — exist to serve the Party, not the other way round. All cadres with a correct understanding of the nature of the Revolution know that.

  • Those who cooperate with the authorities and observe the curfew have nothing to fear. Those who choose to disobey the state will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Sleep well, comrades.

  • Is there nothing more we can do other than continue to demand impeachment from our elected representatives? The DoJ is turning our FBI into the gestapo. Who ever leaked the information exposing the illegal activities of this WH surveillance program is a true patriot and, as you say, should be rewarded…we just have to get rid of Bush 1st.

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