Sessions gets more aggressive on leaks
AG vows action, says probes on issue have tripled
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions pledged Friday to rein in government leaks that he said undermine American security, taking an aggressive public stand after being called weak on the matter by President Donald Trump.
Sessions said the Justice Department has more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared with the number that were ongoing at the end of the last administration, offering the first public confirmation of the breadth of the department’s efforts to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.
The announcement seemed designed both to reassure the president and to scare government officials away from talking to reporters about sensitive matters.
Sessions said he was devoting more resources to stamping out unauthorized disclosures, directing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to actively monitor every
investigation, instructing the department’s national security division and U.S. attorneys to prioritize such cases, and creating a new counterintelligence unit in the FBI to manage the work.
Sessions also said he was reviewing the Justice Department’s policy on issuing subpoenas to reporters.
“We respect the important role that the press plays and will give them respect, but it is not unlimited,” he said. “They cannot place lives at risk with impunity.”
President Donald Trump has complained vociferously about unauthorized disclosures of information, particularly when the leaks result in stories that are unflattering to the administration. Many Republicans have argued that the issue deserves as much attention as the investigation into whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.
Sessions, too, has said previously that illegal leaks are “extraordinarily damaging to the United States’ security” and confirmed that such disclosures were already resulting in investigations. Last week, though, Trump wrote on Twitter that his attorney general had “taken a VERY weak position” on “Intel leakers.”
Rosenstein refused to rule out the possibility that journalists would be prosecuted, saying, “I’m not going to comment on any hypotheticals.”
It has long been Justice Department practice in leak probes to try to avoid investigating journalists directly to find their sources. In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said that as long as he was heading the Justice Department, “no reporter is going to go to jail for doing his or her job.”
The policy instead has been for investigators to first focus on government employees who may be responsible for leaking. In some cases, when the scrutiny of employees has been exhausted, senior Justice Department officials may authorize investigations of journalists, possibly by examining their phone records.
As a result, leak investigations are often slow moving, and many never lead to charges. Within the FBI and the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors who handle leak cases have long argued that if they could investigate journalists earlier and more aggressively, they could be more successful in prosecuting leak cases.
Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats said the hunt for reporters’ sources would go well beyond the intelligence agencies.
“These national security breaches do not just originate in the intelligence community. They come from a wide range of sources within the government, including the executive branch and including the Congress,” he said.
Not all leaks are illegal, and many of the disclosures about palace intrigue at the White House that have irritated Trump violated no law. However, the Espionage Act and several other federal laws do criminalize unauthorized disclosures about certain national security information, like surveillance secrets.
Several prominent conservatives lauded Sessions’ announcement, while open-government and free press groups said it was worrisome. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said it would “strongly oppose” revising department guidelines on issuing subpoenas to reporters, and Danielle Brian, executive director at the Project on Government Oversight, said leak investigations might inappropriately target well-intentioned whistleblowers.
“Whistleblowers are the nation’s first line of defense against fraud, waste, abuse and illegality within the federal government, the last thing this administration wants to do is to deter whistleblowing in an effort to stymie leaks,” Brian said in a statement.