What's up with Clinton's and his signature in Chapultepec?
The Supreme
Court declined to
step in Monday on
behalf of James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author who faces potential
jail time for not identifying a source.
So what does this mean for Risen’s case? Will the Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter be sent to prison? What does he have to say about the
decision? And how does this fit into the Obama administration’s war on leaks?
Here’s a primer on what is going on, where things stand and what could happen
next.
Who is James Risen?
Risen is a
reporter for the New York Times who writes about national security issues. In
2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about the Bush
administration’s domestic wiretapping program. He continues to write
about national security, and published a front-page story Sunday about how the National
Security Agency is intercepting massive numbers of images shared to social
media platforms to use in facial recognition programs. (This story, written
with Laura Poitras, was based on documents obtained by Edward J. Snowden, the
former contractor who leaked a trove of
classified information to journalists.)
Why is he facing jail time in the first place?
Risen is the author of the 2006 book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration.” A chapter of that book detailed a CIA plan to sabotage
Iran’s nuclear program. Prosecutors believe that Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former
Central Intelligence Agency operative charged with leaking classified information, gave Risen
information that was used for this chapter.
Risen’s legal history
Since his book’s publication, Risen has fought multiple summonses demanding that he testify
about his sources. He was subpoenaed in 2008 by a federal grand jury in an attempt to get
him to reveal his sources for the book. Risen fought that subpoena and did not
have to testify before it expired. In 2010, he
was subpoenaed again and ordered to provide documents and testify
before a grand jury. Again, he fought the subpoena and it was quashed by a federal district judge.
In
2011, federal prosecutors subpoenaed
Risen to try
and force him to testify at Sterling’s trial. Prosecutors said that
Risen could essentially help them admit statements from the book into the
trial. Risen vowed to fight the subpoena at the time, calling the issue “a
fight about the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
Judge
Leonie M. Brinkema largely agreed to quash the subpoena, writing in
July 2011 that a
“criminal trial subpoena is not a free pass for the government to rifle through
a reporter’s notebook.” That decision was reversed last year, when a three-judge panel for the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond ruled in a 2-1 decision
that the First Amendment didn’t protect a reporter from being forced to testify
about “criminal conduct that the reporter personally witnessed or participated
in.”
Risen’s
attorneys wrote in the appeal
filed to the Supreme Court that for journalists such as Risen, “their jobs would be
impossible without the ability to promise confidentiality to sources.” (The
Washington Post was among the news organizations filing briefs on Risen’s
behalf.)
Where
things stand now that the Supreme Court weighed in.
This brings us to the Supreme Court’s action Monday. The court declined
Risen’s appeal, offering no explanation, but in refusing to overturn the
lower court’s decision, the government’s contention that Risen should testify
prevailed.
Risen has said he will go to prison rather than testify
about his sources.
“I will
continue to fight,” Risen wrote in an e-mail to The Post on Monday. Dean
Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, praised Risen’s work
and called the decision troubling in a statement issued Monday.
“Jim Risen is a groundbreaking national security reporter
who continues to do powerful work,” Baquet said. “Journalists like Jim depend
on confidential sources to get information the public needs to know. The court’s failure to protect
journalists’ right to protect their sources is deeply troubling.” An attorney
for Risen said Monday that the issue now reverts to prosecutors, who must
decide whether they want to push the issue further.
“The ball
is now in the government’s court,” Joel Kurtzberg told the Associated
Press. “It
can elect to proceed in the Sterling trial without Jim’s testimony if it wants
to. If they insist on his testimony and Jim refuses to testify, the court will
need to have a hearing to determine if Jim is in contempt and, if so, what the
consequence of that will be.”
The Obama
administration, leaks and the press.
The case against Sterling is one of several the Justice
Department has brought against people charged with leaking government secrets.
This crackdown on leaks has been accompanied by investigations into
journalists, which included the Justice Department secretly obtaining telephone records for Associated
Press journalists and investigators extensively tracking the movements of a Fox News
reporter. In addition, law enforcement officials looked extensively into
Risen’s phone calls, banking records and travel history, a court
filing noted in 2011.
Journalists
have criticized the administration’s handling of leaks and reporters. Earlier
this year, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in
at least a generation.” Margaret Sullivan, public editor for the Times, has
written about the administration’s “unprecedented attacks on a free press.” In a report for the
Committee to Protect Journalists, former Washington Post executive editor
Leonard Downie Jr. called the administration’s efforts to control information “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”
Several
media representatives met last week with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
to discuss the
rules concerning subpoenas and other efforts to get information from journalists who have
written about classified material or cited confidential sources.
So will Risen be sent to jail?
It’s
impossible to say for sure, but during the meeting last week with reporters,
the nation’s top law enforcement officer indicated that jail time was unlikely.
“As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter will go to jail for doing his
job,” Holder said, according to people who attended the
meeting.
The Justice
Department said that Holder wasn’t talking about any particular case. But as Charlie Savage noted after the meeting was made public,
while Holder has made similar comments in the past, the newest statement
specifically touched on reporters and imprisonment. And the case involving
Risen is perhaps the most high-profile situation involving a reporter facing
potential jail time.
Washington Post
Washington Post
