[Washington Post] Walter Pincus - The Justice Department on Friday formally dropped its four-year-old case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists for allegedly conspiring to violate the 1917 Espionage Act. The two lobbyists had been charged in August 2005 with conspiring to disclose national defense information to people not authorized to receive it - the first time that civilian, non-government employees had been prosecuted under the act. The same charges technically could be applied to academics, think tank analysts and journalists who seek and receive security information in conversations every day. In a March 27 letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., asking the Obama administration to review the case, the defendants' attorneys wrote that they would show that the information relayed to their clients was not classified defense information but material already in the public domain and "not potentially damaging to national security." To demonstrate that, the lawyers wrote that two of the government officials who prosecutors said passed classified information to the defendants "have told both us and/or government investigators that they were authorized to speak with our clients and knew full well (and even intended) that our clients pass the information on to others." The defense lawyers also said the testimony of J. William Leonard, the most recent former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which is responsible for the government-wide security classification system, would "establish that the information was innocuous and that the defendants had every reason to believe that their conduct was innocent."
2009-05-06 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive