FBI probe rakes up young reporter’s inside story
Seizure of Watkins’ phone and email data plays up her bond with man at centre of probe
The first known leak investigation of the Trump administration has put under scrutiny a 20-something New York Times reporter, who enjoyed a meteoric rise through Washington’s journalism ranks that began while she was still in college.
Ali Watkins hasn’t been charged in the Justice Department’s investigation of the leak of classified information from the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the revelation late on Thursday that the FBI had secretly seized years’ worth of Watkins’ phone and email records, dating back to when she was a student at Temple University, raised questions about her relationship with the man at the centre of the investigation.
Watkins’ romantic involvement with former intelligence committee aide James Wolfe — who was indicted on Thursday — focused attention on her reporting for such news organisations as McClatchy’s Washington bureau, BuzzFeed and Politico.
The news of the seizure of Watkins’ records surfaced on Thursday when Wolfe, 57, was arrested and charged with lying to investigators about his contacts with three reporters, including Watkins, who is now 26. Wolfe’s case is the first known instance of the Justice Department seizing a reporter’s data under the Trump administration.
Editors at McClatchy said on Friday that they were not aware of Watkins’ relationship with Wolfe while she was with the news organisation’s Washington bureau, first as an intern and stretching from mid-2013 to the end of 2014. During that time, Watkins was part of a team of three reporters that produced a series of stories about the intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA and its “enhanced interrogation” or torture programme. The series was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 2015.
The story under scrutiny in the Wolfe indictment was written while Watkins worked at BuzzFeed in early 2017.
“A former campaign adviser for Donald Trump met with and passed documents to a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013,” the story began. The indictment of Wolfe noted that the investigation sought to learn how Watkins had learned that Russian spies had tried to recruit the former adviser, Carter Page.