A former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer was indicted as part of a federal investigation into an improper leak of classified information to reporters, the Justice Department announced Thursday evening.
CNN was first to report on Thursday that the Justice Department was probing the former Intelligence Committee staffer, James Wolfe, a 57-year-old retired aide, who formerly protected sensitive information shared with lawmakers on the committee.
Wolfe was arrested following his indictment by a federal grand jury in Washington on three counts of making false statement to the FBI about his contacts with reporters. He allegedly provided federal investigators with false denials about his contacts with three reporters and falsely claimed he did not share sensitive Intelligence Committee information with two of them, according to the indictment. Wolfe is set to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Friday.
As part of the probe, prosecutors also seized several years’ worth of New York Times’ reporter Ali Watkins’ email and phone data. Watkins had allegedly been in a three-year relationship with Wolfe and was informed of the records seizure in a letter from the national security division of the U.S. attorney’s office in February. The Times reported that it didn’t learn about the seizure until Thursday. This is the first known case of a journalists’ records being seized by the government under President Trump.
Wolfe reportedly used encrypted messaging applications to communicate with four reporters, prosecutors alleged. The FBI began looking into Watkins’ sources after she reported on Russian spies’ efforts to work with former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in April 2017, according to The Times. Wolfe was also in communication with another unnamed reporter about a story related to Page’s subpoena to testify before the committee. He served as an unnamed source for another reporter and was in contact with a fourth journalist through his Senate email address for at least three years, according to the indictment.
Read the indictment below:
Punish the monkey, let the organ grinder go…
Not defending his actions or lying to the FBI, but it sounds like Wolfe saw a lot over a 30 year career and then saw things with Trump campaign guy Carter Page that were beyond what he’d seen before or thought was at all proper in the U.S. Of course, the personal relationship with #2 and his efforts to impress her may have entered into his actions, too. But, what he leaked to the reporters are things the public should know about - unless sources and methods were revealed or national security otherwise put at risk.
The problem here is the legitimacy of the process. Any secret this administration wants to keep is going to tend to be something the public ought to know. Selectively enforcing laws in an authoritarian way isn’t defensible. Maybe Trump can pardon the guy, though, if Snooki or Octomom makes a case for it.
In a free country, information about citizens is protected by law. Information about the government is open to the public.
In a police state, information about the government is secret and he citizen’s lives are open books.
Such total information inversion is necessary to facilitate the crimes of government and to prevent those crimes from becoming public knowledge
As summed up by Al Gore
"By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. Because so long as the government’s actions are secret, they cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people must be transparent to the people. "
So long as that asshole in the Oval Office is in charge, there will be many martyrs. I applaud his bravery.