War on Whistleblowers: How the Obama Administration Destroyed Thomas Drake For Exposing Government Waste

When the NSA wasted billions on a government contractor, Drake tried to do something about it. That was his first mistake.

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Equating Whistleblowing With Spying

Thomas Drake’s prosecution is just the most egregious of a series of cases the Obama administration has pursued against whistleblowers. While a number of the cases were initiated under the Bush administration, the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama has used the Espionage Act far more expansively than his predecessors. All told, Obama’s DOJ has prosecuted six whistleblowers and a researcher under the Espionage Act (in addition to Drake, the Obama administration has charged Shamai Leibowitz, Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, Bradley Manning, and James Hitselberger).

“The government, backed by the national security state influence, is using its powers and influence to threaten, scare and try to silence whistleblowers and journalists,” said Greenwald, whose film is a joint project with the War Costs project of the Brave New Foundation, which he founded. “Using its unlimited legal and financial resources the effort to scare [people] into silence even before going through the judicial process is a serious miscarriage of justice and democracy.”

The government effectively maintains that sharing information about American policies with the American public is as bad as secretly dealing top-secret information to one of our enemies.

In both the Sterling case, in which a former CIA officer allegedly provided information on a botched operation targeted at Iran, and the Manning case, in which Bradley Manning leaked information to WikiLeaks, the government has even said as much.

In the Sterling case, the government argued that providing information to the New York Times was “more pernicious than the typical espionage case where a spy sells classified information for money” because by just giving information to the press, “every foreign adversary stood to benefit from the defendant’s unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

In the Manning case, the government justified charging Manning with “aiding the enemy” -- a charge that can carry the death sentence -- by contending that passing information to either WikiLeaks or the Times still amounted to indirectly handing information to al Qaeda.

And it increasingly appears the government is extending that logic -- whistleblowing equals espionage -- in its investigative approach.

The government’s investigation of Drake began not for his role as a source for the Baltimore Sun series, but because it was searching for sources for the devastating 2005 New York Times story, broken by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, revealing the Bush administration’s widespread use of warrantless wiretaps.

Drake was not a source for that story; he wasn’t even “ read into” the program. However, the FBI appears to have identified Drake, the former NSA whistleblowers with whom he had complained to the inspector general, and Diane Roark, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer, as people who had complained internally about ThinThread and TrailBlazer, as related programs. Once they did so, the FBI interpreted actions taken to submit the IG complaint as well as information given to the Intelligence Committee -- which has oversight in such matters -- as proof they were leaking classified information about ThinThread and TrailBlazer.

The investigation clearly ignored the extensive whistleblowing about ThinThread -- whose rejection by NSA, Drake says, laid the groundwork for the warrantless wiretapping that the Bush administration initiated after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

An affidavit justifying a December 2007 warrant for Drake’s emails makes almost no mention that Drake and his colleagues were sharing information, in large part, in an effort to report fraud, waste and abuse -- waste the NSA Inspector General (and, ultimately, Congress) affirmed. Instead, it suggests Drake and the people with whom he was accused of conspiring were in search of profit. While the affidavit treats with skeptism their views that ThinThread performed better than TrailBlazer, it doesn’t appear to mention that the inspector general had investigated the issue and confirmed their views. It presents Drake’s printing of specifically unclassified documents as suspicious: “Drake was then seen rolling up [unclassified] documents ... and placing the documents in the glove box of his vehicle, where they would not be visible to others,” the affidavit alleges, as part of the case for probable cause.