WASHINGTON, June 9: US Attorney General Eric Holder appears to have little choice but to launch a new round of investigations into media leaks, the very issue that consumed him for the last month and led to renewed calls for his resignation.
Holder’s Justice Department was called upon to identify the leaker of sensitive information when yesterday the super-secret National Security Agency filed a report requesting a criminal investigation.
US officials said an investigation will undoubtedly try to uncover the leaker who gave a secret court order to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, as well as whoever gave a document describing surveillance methods to both the Guardian and the Washington Post.
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday blamed the outlets for what he called “reckless disclosures” of classified spy agency material.
The test for Holder comes as he deals with fierce bipartisan criticism for his agency’s tactics in pursuing media records in other leak investigations. President Barack Obama ordered him last month to review Justice Department procedures for handling media cases, leading Holder to conduct a series of private meetings with news executives and lawyers.
Those sessions focused on two Justice Department leak inquiries that brought an outcry after media records were seized without advance notice and one news reporter was labeled a criminal co-conspirator in documents seeking his records.
Clapper yesterday aggressively defended secret US data collection, blasting the Guardian and the Post for disclosing the highly classified spy agency project code-named PRISM.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
“It will be an interesting chance to see if the Justice Department has learned anything,” said Gregg Leslie, legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a journalists’ advocacy group.
Even after the Guardian unveiled its exclusive story on the court order, Holder was reassuring news outlets on Thursday that he would not prosecute working reporters for doing their jobs.
But the publication of NSA materials – and Clapper’s strong condemnation of it – puts Holder back in the position of having to evaluate whether the leaks compromised valuable sources of information used to protect the public.
“I don’t see how they couldn’t pursue leak investigations in the case of the disclosures this week,” said Carrie Cordero, a former Justice Department national security lawyer.
POLITICAL INSULATION
Cordero, now the director of national security studies at Georgetown University Law Center, said it would be unthinkable for prosecutors to bow to recent media criticism.
“The Justice Department is by tradition supposed to be politically insulated when it’s conducting an investigation, and I don’t see any reason why that would change now – as unpopular as it might be,” she said.
(AGENCIES)
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