Latest in Secrecy & Leaks
A letter this week from two Republican House members to John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, revealed that the lawyer for former FBI General Counsel James Baker had said that Baker could not answer certain questions during his congressional testimony because Baker was the subject of a criminal investigation into leaks being conducted by Durham.
The Department of Justice submitted an unusual court filing in litigation over the release of the Carter Page FISA, arguing that the president's statements on Twitter concerning the Page FISA should not be assumed to be accurate or based on the president's personal knowledge of the underlying issue. The document, which was filed on Nov. 30 and first flagged by USA Today reporter Brad Heath, is available here and below.
In June, a grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted former Senate intelligence committee security director James Wolfe on three counts of making false statements to federal investigators. On Monday, Wolfe assented to a plea agreement with the Justice Department, pleading guilty to one of those counts.
One month ago, the three of us filed a petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for the release of the so-called “Watergate Road Map”—one of the last great still-secret Watergate documents. Last week, Chief Judge Beryl Howell, acting in a separate case, ordered the document’s release.
On Sept. 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral argument in McKeever v. Sessions. Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Judge Sri Srinivasan, and Judge Gregory Katsas reviewed the D.C. District Court’s denial of Stuart McKeever’s petition for the release of records of a grand jury investigation into the 1956 disappearance of Columbia University professor Jesus Galindez.
According to countless media accounts and President Trump’s own lawyers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is writing some
This past Tuesday, congressional candidate and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger announced that her political opponents appeared to have acquired a copy of her SF-86, a form used by the federal government to collect sensitive personal information from job applicants for background checks and security clearances.
At the order of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the National Archives and Records Administration has unsealed the 1999 special master's report on possible leaks from the independent counsel's office in the Starr investigation. The report is available here and below.
The ongoing publicity tour by former senior White House staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman, once designated as one of the “nastiest TV villains of all time,” is the culmination of the questionable hiring choices made during the early days of the Trump White House.
On Monday, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York filed a 13-count superseding indictment against Joshua Schulte in connection with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.