How to gain expertise in stealing secrets
by digby
Oh my. In light of Jeffrey Toobin’s scathing indictment yesterday of Greenwald, Snowden and David Miranda (comparing them to political assassins and drug mules) this little piece of history unearthed by Kevin Kosztola is very interesting indeed:
In journalist Michael Isikoff’s book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, he described how Toobin was caught “having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents from the office of Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh” in 1991.
Toobin, it turned out, had been using his tenure in Walsh’s office to secretly prepare a tell-all book about the Iran-contra case; the privileged documents, along with a meticulously kept private diary (in which the young Toobin, a sort of proto-Linda Tripp, had been documenting private conversations with his unsuspecting colleagues) were to become his prime bait to snare a book deal. Toobin’s conduct enraged his fellow lawyers in Walsh’s office, many of whom viewed his actions as an indefensible betrayal of the public trust. Walsh at one point even considered pressing for Toobin’s indictment.
Toobin was “petrified” that he would have to face criminal charges for stealing information for a rather dubious book deal. And, according to Isikoff, he either “feared dismissal and disgrace, or simply wanted to move on,” and he “resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn (where he had gone to work after Walsh) and abandoned the practice of law.”
Walsh’s memoir on the Iran-Contra investigation, Firewall, included more details on Toobin’s act:
During our negotiations over the timing of the book’s publication, Toobin and his publisher surprised us with a preemptive suit to enjoin me from interfering with the publication or punishing Toobin for having stolen hundreds of documents, some of them classified, and for exposing privileged information and material related to the grand jury proceedings. I could understand a young lawyer wanting to keep copies of his own work, but not copying material from the general files or the personal files of others.
But hey, it’s not as if he was being a narcissist. He just stole classified information to start his new career as a journalist. That’s important. And totally understandable. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. You have to admit, this does make him something of an expert on the subject although his publications and TV employers surprisingly haven’t explained to their audiences why he is so uniquely qualified to offer his opinion on the subject of stealing classified documents.
I couldn’t help but recall this exchange with Eliot Spitzer back when the Wikileaks story first broke. Spitzer was discussing the fact that Bob Woodward routinely exposes classified information in his books and nobody seems to mind it one bit — he’s heralded as the greatest investigative reporter of his time:
SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?
TOOBIN: I’d have to know a lot more.
SPITZER: But it might be the case.
TOOBIN: It well might be the case.
SPITZER: OK. So you’re sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something maybe not so much.
TOOBIN: I’m not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal — criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don’t put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.
SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discusses our rationale, where we would go, spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.
TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified —
SPITZER: A lot of people who didn’t have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.
TOOBIN: I always wondered why — why Woodward gets away with it. It’s an interesting question.
Yeah, I’m sure Jeffrey Toobin has always wondered why Bob Woodward “gets away with it.” He’s a funny guy.
Meanwhile, there are whole bunch of other sources today who must be irritating Jeffrey Toobin to no end:
The National Security Agency—which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens—has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say…
Details of these surveillance programs were gathered from interviews with current and former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or operate the systems, or provide data. Most have direct knowledge of the work.
I hope they know that according to esteemed scholar Jeffrey Toobin they’re subject to jail time. That’s the rule, right? Or is the fact that they are members of the government and industry giving information about classified programs to the Wall Street Journal that makes all the difference here? It’s hard to know. But Jeffrey Toobin has not been crusading against Barton Gellman or Dana Priest or Bob Woodward and he hasn’t been condemning the sources they are talking to. He certainly hasn’t condemned his own behavior. So you can draw your own conclusions.
It seems apropos to note here two pieces about this case by Jay Rosen. The first is called The Toobin Principle, and it discusses the circular logic which holds that we should be grateful to know about these secret programs so we can reform them in democratic fashion — but throw the book at the person who revealed them to us.
And this from yesterday, called Conspiracy to commit journalism is a brilliant discussion of how journalism is changing in light of the cross border surveillance state — and how it can keep us free.
Update: Jeffrey Toobin sent this court document via email showing that the judge found him not to be liable for these charges because most of the the documents he took didn’t reveal information that wasn’t already public through reporting and hearings etc of the Iran-Contra investigation.
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