Former NSA Employee Charged With Leaking To Newspaper

About time.

A former senior executive at the National Security Agency was charged Thursday with lying and obstruction of justice in an investigation of leaks of classified information to a newspaper.

Federal prosecutors said Thomas Drake, 52, served as a source for many articles about the NSA in an unidentified newspaper, including articles that contained classified information.

A federal indictment filed in Maryland charges that Drake used a non-government e-mail account to transmit classified and unclassified information. Authorities also charge that Drake lied to federal agents about what he'd done.

The indictment does not identify the reporter, the newspaper, or the subject matter of the stories. It says the stories were published between February 2006 and November 2007.

I always found it interesting that liberals assume the intelligence apparatus is a bunch of right wing nut jobs dying to institute some conservative police state. That seems an unlikely goal for people who thought it was 'funny'to leak information designed to hurt George Bush's electoral prospects.

Add to that the absurdly politicized NIE on Iran that no one thought was accurate and was clearly designed to tie the hands of the last administration, you start to wonder where the idea that the intelligence services were Bush's pawns came from.

Hopefully this guy will get a fair trial followed by the long prison sentence he seems to have merited.

More: Mainjustice.com takes a look at the indictment and has interesting information on Drake's relationship with the reporter and a congressional staffer.

posted by DrewM. at 12:38 PM

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