So whats the FBI's angle here?
The DOJ announced a
long time ago that they were going to track down these leakers and prosecute them, but for some reason all the stories about it vanished and everyone stopped paying attention to it. I guess they all just assumed that business was going to carry on the same as usual when it came to the prior administrations, which basically let reporters leak whatever the fuck they wanted and they did very little to bother trying to stop it. I can't remember where I'm pulling the number from, and I'll update* this if I recall, but last I checked Rosenstein and Sessions have
at least 27 active leak investigations underway, and each one of those could involve multiple leakers and
definitely multiple journalists, just like this one did. *(Update:
Here it was.)
It's not as though these people weren't warned to
knock it the fuck off quite a ways back, but they just kept on plowing forwards. Ali Watkins was running around and insinuating that
Trump's lawyers were the ones leaking all of this information to begin with, and now we know that
she was the bitch doing it the whole time. Hell, Ben Smith from Buzzfeed is trying to make it sound as though reporters have a
Constitutional right to publish classified information whenever they want. Begging your
fucking pardon Ben, but no,
you do not.
I can
absolutely guarantee you that there are a lot of politicians and a lot of reporters who are going to be losing sleep, tonight. The leaking of classified information purely as a partisan, political attack, or in the case of the New York Times leaking the name of the
"Dark Prince" just because they fucking could (Seriously, that guy permanently lost his job, it could have gotten him killed, and there was no reason to leak that), is going to leave a
lot of these people butting heads with
18 U.S. Code § 798.
Mind you: It is
not inherently illegal to publish classified information, but there is a
very narrow window where it's allowed. If you can prove beyond any doubt that the information you leaked was leaked to
expose government misconduct then you're still going to
piss off the government and feel an
awful lot of heat, but you are constitutionally protected to
some extent. That's the gist of why Ellsberg was (ultimately) allowed to publish the
Pentagon Papers, because his leak fundamentally proved that the government was lying about its operations in Vietnam both to the public, and to Congress.
Modern-day reporters seem to misread that case and assume that reporters have some blanket constitutional right to publish any classified information that's handed to them, but just because
decades have passed without the government deciding to penalize reporters for publishing classified information does
not mean that what they've been doing is legal, it just means that the law
wasn't being enforced. There are a
lot of people about to learn a
very rough lesson, and the
next indictment in this cluster is already headed our way in the next few days.
