1.
Goodman:
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman. Over the past several years, Democracy Now! has closely
looked at the government’s crackdown on whistleblowers, from Army Private
Chelsea Manning to former National Security Agency contractor Ed Snowden to CIA
analyst John Kiriakou. Well, today we bring you the story of another
whistleblower, one whose case has received far less attention, the jailed
former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s currently serving a
13-month sentence at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Cumberland, Maryland, for
violating the Espionage Act by leaking classified documents on North Korea to
Fox News reporter James Rosen. Journalist Peter Maass of The Intercept
details the prosecution of Kim in a new article
that’s just out today headlined “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim
Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story.” In a few minutes we’ll
be joined by Peter Maass. But first, this is an excerpt from The Surrender, a new short film
that accompanies the report on The Intercept’s website. It’s directed by
Stephen Maing and produced by Peter Maass and Laura Poitras, director of Citizenfour,
the Oscar-nominated film about Ed Snowden. This clip begins with Stephen Kim.
2.
STEPHEN KIM: In June 2009, I had a new
life ahead of me. I had recently gotten married, and I was about to go work for
the secretary of state on foreign policy and national security. I had no
inkling that the dark clouds would suddenly be appearing.
3.
NARRATION: In the spring of 2009, State
Department analyst Stephen Kim was introduced to Fox reporter James Rosen. The
meeting was arranged by the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs.
4.
STEPHEN KIM: I remember meeting him right
outside the State Department. You know, it’s just like when you first meet. We
talked about many things—Pakistan, the Iranian Revolution, the nuclear fuel
cycle. He didn’t know about South Korea, let alone North Korea. So I had to
explain like the basics.
5.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: To: James Rosen. I am
new to this. Do you have any good suggestions on things you might be interested
in doing? [Stephen Kim]
6.
JAMES ROSEN EMAIL: To: Stephen Kim. I’d
love to see some internal State Department analyses about the state of [North
Korea’s] nuclear program. [James Rosen]
7.
JAMES ROSEN: As a reporter, I will always honor the confidentiality of my
dealings with all of my sources.
8.
BILL O’REILLY: Yeah, sure.
9.
JAMES ROSEN: That’s it.
10.
BILL O’REILLY: And if you don’t do that, you’re no longer a reporter. And
you’re one of the best.
11.
NARRATION: After several meetings, James
Rosen published an article about North Korea that referenced parts of a
classified government report.
12.
LIZ WAHL: Well, starting off this hour,
another name has been added to the list of people charged under the Espionage
Act.
13.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Stephen Kim was one of
the U.S. government’s top experts on North Korea. He’s now facing trial and 15
years in prison for allegedly leaking classified information to a Fox News
reporter, a charge Kim adamantly denies.
14.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Fox News reporter James
Rosen reporting back in 2009 that North Korea would respond to sanctions with
more nuclear tests.
15.
JON STEWART: That’s it? That’s the leak
they needed to quash? North Korea answers everything with more nuclear—what?
That’s—they a nuclear test-based economy!
16.
STEPHEN KIM: I did not consider the
conversation to be so memorable or so blazened in my mind that it was because
of that conversation that these things are happening.
17.
ERIC BOLLING: We’re now learning the
Obama Justice Department invoked the Espionage Act, one of the most serious
wartime laws in America, to justify its investigation.
18.
ABBE D. LOWELL: The Espionage Act is this
100-year-old statute. It was passed as a result of World War I to address
spying, but it is the principal tool the government uses to go after both real
spying and for somebody like Stephen Kim, who’s accused of having a
conversation with a member of the media.
19.
Goodman:
That’s the attorney Abbe Lowell.
20.
REPORTER: This administration in the last
four years has prosecuted twice as many leakers as every previous
administration combined. How does that reflect balance?
21.
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: The president
firmly believes in the need to defend the First Amendment and the need in—you
know, for reporters to be able to do their jobs.
22.
NARRATION: The Fox reporter James Rosen
was named in court documents as a co-conspirator in violation of the Espionage
Act. But he was not indicted.
23.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Court records obtained
by NBC News show that in their efforts to convict Stephen Kim, prosecutors
obtained phone and cellphone records of Fox News journalists.
24.
NORAH O’DONNELL: The FBI naming Fox News
chief Washington correspondent James Rosen a criminal co-conspirator in the leak.
25.
NARRATION: James Rosen declined to be
interviewed.
26.
ABBE D. LOWELL: One of the disconnects
about this case is that here he is somebody who’s been accused of a national
security offense, and I can assure you that Stephen always thought, in all of
his work, that his job was to help make the United States stronger.
27.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: Call me idealistic or
radical but I refuse to play this game that deeply undermines our national
security.
28.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: James, I was thinking
that perhaps it would be good for you to write a longer piece on why the
Intelligence Community got so many things wrong about North Korea. Just a
thought–... Stephen.
29.
JAMES ROSEN EMAIL: Dear Stephen, The only
way to do this is to EXPOSE the policy, or what the North is up to, and the
only way to do that authoritatively is with EVIDENCE. Yours faithfully, James.
30.
ABBE D. LOWELL: When a reporter is
dealing with somebody who could be exposed for what the reporter is doing, it
comes with a degree of responsibility. But this was information out there in
the world in nonclassified sources that you could google and learn without it
being classified.
31.
NARRATION: In February 2014, after
fighting charges for four years and depleting his life savings, Stephen Kim
accepts a plea deal.
32.
STEPHEN KIM: Probably the toughest
decision that I’ve had to make in my life was to plead guilty. It went against
every fiber of my being to give up the fight.
33.
YURI LUSTENBERGER-KIM: As the family
spokesperson, I would like to make a short statement. The government’s
prosecution, which started in 2010, has taken a horrific toll on my brother and
our entire family. His life has been in limbo for the past four years. There
will be difficult months and years ahead, but we look forward to Stephen
returning to our embrace soon.
34.
NARRATION: On April 2, 2014, Stephen Kim
is sentenced to 13 months in prison. He must report to prison when notified by
the government.
35.
STEPHEN KIM: The culture in Washington is
pretty cutthroat, pretty ruthless. And maybe it’s because of my academic
background, I thought that my intelligence assessments would pierce through the
politics. I guess I’m naïve. I was about to go to the policy planning staff,
working under Hillary Clinton. Basically, the style and thrust of my analysis
has always been, the way we analyze a country like North Korea, that everybody
says is unknowable, needs a reassessment. And to me, that all came down to how
the United States understands how another nation thinks. And we can’t view that
through our lens. There’s a term for it. It’s called mirror imaging. “Well, I would do it this way, so therefore they must do it
that way.” I think that’s—that’s not very helpful. And if abused, that
can be actually quite dangerous.
36.
Goodman:
Jailed State Department whistleblower Stephen Kim in an excerpt of the film The
Surrender, which was produced by The Intercept. You can go to their
website to see the full video; it accompanies a major new report
by Peter Maass of The Intercept. His report is called “Destroyed by the
Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His
Story.” You’ll hear that story when we come back with Peter Maass. Stay with
us. [break] As we continue looking at the case of jailed State
Department whistleblower Stephen Kim, we’re joined by Peter Maass, a senior
writer at The Intercept. His new article
just out today is titled “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to
a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story.” Peter Maass, welcome back to Democracy
Now! You’ve been on this story for a while now. You actually accompanied
Stephen Kim on his journey to jail, where he sits right now. But let’s go back,
and you tell us the whole story. What happened to Stephen Kim? Who was he? How
did he end up at the State Department?
37.
Maass:
Well, Stephen Kim was a expert on North Korea. He worked at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, which is where the nuclear weapons in the American
arsenal are designed and where they’re analyzed. So he was privy, when he was
there, to some of the kind of deepest, most sensitive secrets of all. And then
he became an official at the State Department working as an expert on weapons
of mass destruction, in particularly North Korea. And in 2009, he was
introduced to James Rosen of Fox News by John Herzberg, who is an official,
actually, a press official, at the State Department. And they were introduced
in order to talk. And they talked about all kinds of things—Pakistan, North
Korea, etc.
38.
Goodman:
Now, this is extremely important. Kim didn’t reach out to
Rosen. It was the State Department press person who got Kim in touch with
Rosen, is that right?
39.
Maass:
Exactly. And this is one of the—it’s not an irony. It’s
one of the kind of tragedies of this case, is that Stephen Kim ended up being
prosecuted by the FBI and the Department of Justice for talking to a reporter
whom Kim had been introduced to by another arm of the government—that is, the
State Department’s press office. So—
40.
Goodman:
And talk about where that first meeting took place. What did Herzberg set up?
41.
Maass:
What Herzberg set up was this kind of, you know, very ordinary, by Washington
standards, meeting, first meeting between a journalist and a State Department
official. It took place outside of the State Department. Again, this is
arranged by a State Department official. Because Herzberg, as, you know, a kind
of savvy press official does, knew that it wouldn’t be so good for this first
meeting to take place in Kim’s office—it was in a very sensitive area,
everybody would have to put away their classified documents, etc.—not so good
to have them meet in the cafeteria—whatever other journalists and other people
would see, etc.—so Herzberg arranged for them to go outside of the State
Department and meet in a park right outside of the State Department.
42.
Goodman:
Meet in a park?
43.
Maass:
Meet in a park right outside the State Department, which is what they did. And
they—
44.
Goodman:
And Herzberg was with them?
45.
Maass:
And Herzberg was with them, and Herzberg introduced them. “Stephen Kim, this is
James Rosen. James Rosen, this is Stephen Kim. I think you guys have a lot to
talk about.” First meeting, 10 minutes, they just exchanged pleasantries, etc.
Another—and again, “irony” isn’t quite the right word
with this, but later on, when Stephen Kim had this one conversation with James Rosen
that is the subject of the Espionage Act prosecution, they left the
State Department and talked outside of the State Department, and the FBI
portrayed this fact, that they left the department in order to talk, as
something very suspicious, that they were doing something that they weren’t
supposed to do, even though that precise act of leaving the State Department to
talk is what they had done the very first time when they were introduced by a
State Department official.
46.
Goodman:
In fact, Stephen Kim was not used to speaking to reporters. He was asking the
State Department for guidance on why he should be doing this.
47.
Maass:
Stephen Kim was very—had very little experience dealing with reporters,
basically had not talked to any American reporters, had talked to some Japanese
reporters that had been sent—brought into his office somewhat recently before
this. He was interested, he told me, in talking to a reporter and asked for
suggestions from Herzberg, and Herzberg suggested James Rosen. Kind of unusual
for a State Department official, press official, to kind of first go, perhaps,
to Fox News, which isn’t loved in the State Department, which isn’t loved in
the Obama administration. But the bureau where Stephen Kim worked, which was in
charge of basically seeing that—making sure that arms control agreements were
complied with, was kind of a redoubt of hardliners. And Herzberg himself,
actually, had donated to the Bush-Cheney campaign, etc., so he had some
sympathies and had a friendship with Rosen. And so, the decision was made Rosen
would be the person that Kim would be introduced to. And that decision was made
by Herzberg.
48.
Goodman:
And so, take it from there. What happened next?
49.
Maass:
That was in the spring of 2009, and they continued talking on their own,
without Herzberg or anybody around. And then, on June 11, 2009, Rosen calls
Stephen Kim, calls him a number of times. And then they leave the State
Department building once in the morning, and they go out and talk, and then
they come back in. And then Stephen Kim looks at—back at his office, at a
classified—a new classified government report on North Korea. And then they go
back outside again, Kim and Rosen, having arranged to do so. And they talk
for—maybe it was 15 minutes, something like that. Kim goes back into the
office.
50.
Three hours later
approximately, Rosen publishes a story on the Fox News website that says,
according to a new classified report, North Korea—U.S. government report, North
Korea is planning, in response to the United Nations sanctions, to detonate
another nuclear weapon, etc., etc. And that report, the classified
report that Rosen’s story was based on, and Rosen’s story itself, is the
subject of the Espionage Act prosecution, because the government contended that
this was classified information, harmful to national security, and Stephen Kim
leaked it to James Rosen. The curious thing about this whole prosecution is, A,
no document ever changed hands. The government never accused him of actually
providing a document. It was just a discussion about a document. And then one
of the things that I found out in the course of reporting this story, going
through, for example, this very kind of lengthy court docket that a lot of
people hadn’t looked at, is that the FBI interviewed government officials about
what happened and about the report, and one of these government officials told
the FBI, “This classified report that they talked about, it’s a nothing burger.”
That was the phrase that was used, a “nothing burger.” This is what
an official told—
51.
Goodman:
A nothing burger.
52.
Maass:
And another official said, about the Rosen story, about this nothing burger of
a classified report, said that the report, Rosen’s report, was nothing
extraordinary. So, the government even had people that it interviewed inside of
the government who were saying, “Look, this report wasn’t a big deal.” Now, of
course, there were people in the government who thought it was a big deal. The
biggest problem for Kim, though, I think—and this kind of came out in the
course of the reporting—was that his timing was terrible, because he talked to
Rosen at a time when the Obama administration had pretty much had it with leaks
and had decided, unlike previous administrations—and all administrations, they
don’t like leaks, unauthorized leaks. Official leaks, that’s fine, they help the
administration, it’s for PR purposes. Unofficial
ones that they don’t control, they hate. The Obama administration, in
contrast to the ones that preceded it, decided to use the Espionage Act to
prosecute people who leaked, who talked without authorization to reporters. And
Stephen Kim happened to be a person who talked to a reporter without
authorization about a subject that the government did not find very flattering.
53.
Goodman:
Well, he had original authorization.
54.
Maass:
Well, he had original authorization to talk with Rosen, exactly. There wasn’t
explicit authorization for him to go out and talk to Rosen about this
particular report. So that was kind of a slight distinction there. But his timing was terrible, because that story, the Rosen
story, came out just at the moment when the Obama administration, when Dennis
Blair, as head of national intelligence, was looking it over and saying, “We’ve
got to stop this. We have to prosecute people. We need to,” as Blair told The
New York Times later on, “hang an admiral, make an example of somebody.” And
Stephen Kim popped up onto the radar screen right then. It was very unfortunate
for him that Rosen, unfortunately, had not been terribly careful in his
contacts with Kim. So, for example, when the government decided, like, “OK, we’re
going to investigate this leak,” it was very easy for them to figure out where
Rosen got it from, because Rosen had used his phone at the State Department—he
was a State Department reporter then—to call Stephen Kim several times that
day. He had used his cellphone to call Stephen Kim several times that day. They
left the building at the same time. They returned at basically the same time.
So, for the FBI, you don’t have to be a very good FBI agent to figure out very
quickly who James Rosen talked to, who had access to that report. And they
zeroed in on Stephen Kim quite immediately. And then they found a series of
emails that Rosen had sent to Stephen Kim asking Kim for internal documents
from the State Department. Case closed. I mean, not case closed, but that, for
the government, was the entire case, basically.
55.
Goodman:
We’re talking to Peter Maass, an award-winning investigative journalist, author
and senior writer at The Intercept, who has just published a major report
headlined “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now
He’s in Jail. This is His Story.” So let’s take it from there. Talk about how
Stephen Kim was first approached by the FBI, questioned, and what happened
next.
56.
Maass:
This is one of the many surprising things. The FBI came to him in his State
Department office, and they told him they were there to talk about an
investigation. Stephen Kim did not know what the investigation was. And they
asked him a lot of questions, and some of the questions were about the story
that Rosen had reported. They didn’t tell him that he was the target of the
leak investigation. He didn’t know at the time, when he was first talking with
the FBI, that he was the target. They did not tell him that. And that was, in
some ways, what at least Stephen Kim’s lawyer refers to as kind of a perjury
trap—not in those precise words, but basically that—
57.
Goodman:
And this is Abbe Lowell, who is—
58.
Maass:
This is Abbe Lowell, who’s—
59.
Goodman:
—a well-known attorney, who even represented President Clinton.
60.
Maass:
President Clinton during his impeachment hearings, exactly. He regards it as
something close to a perjury trap, wherein the FBI—and this is something the
FBI has done and law enforcement does quite frequently. They go to suspects, interview them very casually, don’t tell the
suspects, “You’re actually the target of our investigation,” and they get the
suspects sometimes to not tell the entire truth, because the suspects don’t know that they’re under investigation, that it’s
a big deal, etc. And so, Stephen Kim, when the FBI first came to him, didn’t
tell the entire truth. He said, “Well, I’ve only met James Rosen once. I
wouldn’t talk to him about, you know, anything else, and I never talked to him
again,” which was not true. If he had known that he was the target of an
investigation, he would have probably lawyered up, and he would probably have
been very careful about what he said. When the FBI came to him the second time,
which was about nine months later, then they kind of laid down everything they
had. They said, “You’ve broken the Espionage Act. There’s a body of work,” is
the phrase that they used, according to Stephen Kim. They threatened him with
multiple counts of the Espionage Act. And this was in August of 2010 that he was
finally indicted under one count of the Espionage Act and one count of lying to
the FBI. That was 2010. He decided to fight against the
government, and for four years he fought. And he got Abbe Lowell, who’s
a very good, but very expensive, lawyer to take his case on. It cost millions
of dollars, only part of which actually Stephen Kim could afford to pay. And it
took everything out of him. And this is one of the things that to me was—I
guess it’s not surprising, because we’ve seen this happen. But when the U.S.
government goes after somebody, and goes after somebody in what the government
considers a high-priority case, it has virtually unlimited resources. And the effect that this had on Stephen Kim was to deplete
his life savings, deplete his family’s life savings. His marriage broke up. His
young son had to move away. He contemplated suicide. And he talked to me about
this. You know, when you’re kind of accused of basically—of espionage, which is
what the name of the act is, your entire reputation is shot even before you
have the first chance to stand up in a court and say, “I’m innocent, and this
is why.” And he googled how many sleeping pills it would take to kill
himself. He thought of jumping in front of a train, not because he was guilty,
but because he was innocent and didn’t feel that he would be able to get a fair
trial, that he would end up spending many years of his life in jail.
61.
Goodman:
And so, then explain what happened, how this was, if you could call it,
resolved.
62.
Maass:
Well, basically, not long before the trial was scheduled to start, the
government made an offer to Stephen Kim’s lawyers, which was that he would have
to spend a slightly modest amount of time in jail—and it ended up being 13
months—plead guilty to the Espionage Act violation, but—
63.
Goodman:
This was after they had said he was threatened with 30 years, then he should
serve seven years to a plea agreement—
64.
Maass:
Right.
65.
Goodman:
—and now it’s down to 13 months.
66.
Maass:
Exactly. And this is—I mean, this is, you know, often a process where the
government kind of threatens to throw the book at somebody unless they plead
guilty, and it creates an enormous amount of pressure. And
Stephen Kim compared himself—or, didn’t compare himself, but said that he
really understood, for example, what happened to Aaron Swartz, Aaron
Swartz being the brilliant computer programmer who was accused, after having
downloaded academic articles from a commercial database, accused of computer
crimes that would have landed him in jail, the government was saying, for, I
think, more than a decade or something like that. And it was a terrible burden
for Aaron Swartz to take, and he ended up taking his own life. Stephen Kim came
very close himself to that. The government doesn’t only crack down on leakers
and whistleblowers. It cracks down really on—very strongly, on anybody who
disseminates data beyond the borders that the government deems appropriate,
whether it’s corporate or government data. And so, for Stephen Kim, it became a
kind of—he described it to me as like a brutal calculus: “OK, if I plead guilty
and get 13 months in jail, that’s it. I’ll be out, maybe after good behavior,
after 11 months. If I take this to trial, if I go to trial, I could end up in
jail for 12 years. It will be another million dollars in legal fees that I don’t
have the money to pay for. Which is the better route to go?” And he took the
route of pleading guilty and taking the 13-month sentence.
67.
Goodman:
And what happened to James Rosen, the Fox reporter?
68.
Maass:
He is a very well-known Fox reporter still. He’s based
in Washington.
69.
Goodman:
He was under investigation.
70.
Maass:
Yeah, well, James Rosen—and this is one of the aspects of the case that got
actually more attention than what happened to Stephen Kim, is what happened to
James Rosen, which is, the government, in order to acquire emails, James Rosen’s
emails, more than they actually already had, they applied for a search warrant.
And in the search warrant, they referred to Rosen as a potential co-conspirator
in violating the Espionage Act. They accused him of basically kind of being
this minstrel who was trying to operate, aspiring with Stephen Kim collecting
data, and maybe unnamed other people collecting data. Rosen
came that close to being indicted himself. When
this was revealed, that the government, A, called him an unindicted
co-conspirator, and, B, got his cellphone records, got his emails, tracked his
physical movements, when this was finally revealed—and this came out in 2013—it
was a huge controversy in the press, because it was taken, legitimately so, as
an attack on the freedom of the press, that you—
71.
Goodman:
You had James Rosen at Fox and James Risen at The New York Times.
72.
Maass:
Yes, it can get confusing at times.
73.
Goodman:
Different stories.
74.
Maass:
Different—very different stories and very different journalists, but there was
something very similar in both of their cases, which is that the force of the
government was brought to bear on journalists in order to connect them to
crimes or get them to talk about alleged crimes.
75.
Goodman:
And meanwhile, Stephen Kim continues to serve this 13 months in jail in
Cumberland, Maryland.
76.
Maass:
He is in jail.
77.
Goodman:
That does it for the show. Peter Maass, award-winning investigative journalist,
we’ll link to his piece
at The Intercept called “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim
Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story.”
Two
days later.
78.
Goodman:
Here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue looking at the case of jailed State Department
whistleblower Stephen Kim, we’re joined by Peter Maass, a senior writer at The
Intercept. His new article
just out today is titled “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to
a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story.” Peter Maass, welcome back to Democracy
Now! You’ve been on this story for a while now. You actually accompanied
Stephen Kim on his journey to jail, where he sits right now. So what did the
government say in introducing Stephen Kim to James Rosen, someone who was
inexperienced in talking to reporters?
79.
Maass:
Well, he was introduced, Stephen Kim, to James Rosen by John Herzberg, who was
a press liaison in the State Deparment. And there weren’t, as far as I know,
kind of like precise instructions: “This is what you talk about; this is what
you don’t talk about; this is, you know, the attribution,” or whatever. But it
was an introduction that was intended to begin a relationship where they would
talk about policy. Rosen was a reporter for a major American network who wanted
to know more, as all reporters do, which is good. And Stephen Kim was somebody
who could inform. This was actually a very kind of exemplary act, you know? It
is good for State Department press affairs officers to introduce experts to
journalists, so they can talk, whether on the record or off the record, so that
journalists themselves can be better informed, so that the American public
could be better informed, so that maybe views that aren’t in the White House
press room when the press secretary gets up to talk about the day’s news are
actually filtered out and distributed to the populace. This is the
kind of thing that should happen all the time. But because the
government has, instead of encouraging this, charged and gotten a conviction
against Stephen Kim on the Espionage Act, these sorts of encounters are going
to become rarer and rarer, and we’re the poorer for it.
80.
Goodman:
Can you talk about, ultimately, Stephen Kim’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, famed lawyer
who represented President Clinton around his impeachment, the different legal
strategies he used?
81.
Maass:
Well, Lowell, who had actually been involved in a previous Espionage Act case,
so knew the law and knew how the government operated in regards to these cases
quite well, his first kind of goal really was to find out, well, who else might
have talked to James Rosen of Fox News, or other people at Fox News, about this
same report. And he found out that there were a number of other people who, A,
had access to that report and who had been talking to reporters at Fox News.
Major Garrett, another reporter from Fox News, had talked with somebody at the
National Security Council that day about North Korea. Was somebody else talking
to Fox News, who wasn’t being prosecuted because maybe that person was a senior
official? That’s possible. He also—what Abbe Lowell did was, you know, just
basically kind of make the point that there’s a selectivity involved in this
prosecution. Every day in Washington there are government officials who are talking
to reporters about sensitive issues that may be classified. That’s half of what Bob Woodward does every day, is talk
to government officials who tell him secrets. Some of them, Bob Woodward
writes about. And because those are senior officials
who are very powerful and can’t be indicted quite as easily—let’s say your name
is David Petraeus—they don’t get indicted. In fact, they get rewarded. Their
names show up in the newspaper, they end up on TV, all of that. If you’re
a mid-level official and you talk to a government—and you talk to a journalist,
and the government doesn’t like it, you have no protection. You don’t have all
the networks and all the friends that, let’s say, a general has. And so you’re
very vulnerable. And that’s what happened with Stephen Kim. He was vulnerable.
He wasn’t powerful. He didn’t have kind of influential people in the corridors
of power who would say, like, “Don’t touch this guy.”
82.
Goodman:
So, David Petraeus, it’s known General Petraeus gave classified information to
his girlfriend, who is his biographer.
83.
Maass:
This is one of the—
84.
Goodman:
And you have senators who are standing up on the Senate
floor, like Senator Feinstein, saying he’s a good guy.
85.
Maass:
Exactly. So General David Petraeus has been reported to have been actually
recommended for prosecution by the Department of Justice, but there hasn’t been
any prosecution yet, for leaking classified documents, plural, actual
documents, plural documents, to Paula Broadwell, who was his authorized
biographer, as well, at the time, as his lover. And General Petraeus, there has
not been a case lodged against him yet. He has not been indicted. He may not, and probably not, be indicted. There
are other instances. For example, Leon Panetta, who
was the director of the CIA, actually leaked the name of the team leader of the
team that killed Osama bin Laden to the media. General
James Cartwright has been reported as being the official who leaked
information about Stuxnet, the virus that was targeted against the Iranian
nuclear complex, leaked that information to The New York Times. He has
not been indicted. And the reason that these people
have not been indicted, as far as we know, is basically because they are very powerful,
and they have friends in very high places who make sure that the Department of
Justice doesn’t go after them.
86.
Goodman:
So what happens to Stephen Kim now?
87.
Maass:
Stephen Kim waits in jail until he gets out, which will be sometime later this
year. And, you know, while other government officials, many other government
officials who have leaked far more sensitive things, who have leaked actual
documents, numerous documents, are still at their jobs, are still talking on
TV, and will become very successful entrepreneurs when they leave government
service probably.
88.
Goodman:
Peter Maass, thanks so much for being with us, award-winning investigative
journalist, author, senior writer at The Intercept, has just published a
major report
headlined “Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now
He’s in Jail. This is His Story.” We’ll link to the article and to the video
that accompanies it. It was produced by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Laura
Poitras, Peter Maass and Steven Maing. The video is called The Surrender.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman.
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