00:01Tomorrow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions
00:03is expected to announce a new game plan for busting leakers,
00:06both in the White House and across U.S. intelligence agencies,
00:10who continue to undermine and humiliate the president.
00:13Just this morning, another leak surfaced.
00:17Embarrassing transcripts of phone calls Trump made
00:19to the leaders of Mexico and Australia
00:21back in his first week in office.
00:23These people should be fired.
00:25They should be out of government.
00:26They're disloyal to our government.
00:27— So far, those leakers have managed to remain anonymous.
00:31But the Justice Department does have one alleged informer
00:34to make an example out of.
00:36Reality Winner, a government contractor
00:39accused of handing classified information to the press.
00:42She's currently being prosecuted under the Espionage Act,
00:45a once-rare practice that increased dramatically under President Obama
00:49and could become even more common under the Trump administration.
00:53The first American ever charged under the Espionage Act
00:56for releasing information to the press was Daniel Ellsberg,
01:00a military analyst who, in 1971, leaked the top-secret indictment of the war in Vietnam,
01:05known as the Pentagon Papers.
01:08Ellsberg narrowly escaped conviction and became an anti-war activist.
01:12David Noriega visited Ellsberg at his home in California.
01:16— Daniel Ellsberg's home office is crowded with books, notes,
01:25and pictures from the time he spent in Vietnam as a member of the Foreign Service.
01:29— This is when you were in Vietnam for a couple of years.
01:31— Ah, yeah, for two years. I was a civilian.
01:33— In the late 60s, working as an analyst for the Rand Corporation,
01:38Ellsberg helped write the Pentagon Papers before he turned against the war and leaked them.
01:43He was not only charged with a felony for the leak.
01:46The Nixon White House also sent a team of burglars,
01:49including some who would later participate in the Watergate break-in,
01:52to steal files from his psychiatrist.
01:54— Parts of the 27,000-page file that the FBI kept on Ellsberg are lying around his office.
02:01— It begins with a memo about the break-in.
02:07— Really? What?
02:08— Mm-hmm. Oh, that's interesting.
02:09— That's the first memo on the second.
02:11— I frankly have never read any of these. It's just too much.
02:14— The Nixon administration went after Ellsberg hard, but he escaped by a hair.
02:19The case against him fell apart when the judge found out about the break-in.
02:22— There were a lot of right ways to end this political prosecution, and this was one of them.
02:28— If convicted, Ellsberg would have faced 115 years in prison.
02:32— I assumed I was breaking a law and that I would be prosecuted,
02:36and that the effect would probably be a life sentence.
02:39— So you had to square yourself with the idea of spending the rest of your life in prison
02:43before you could really start releasing this information?
02:45— I think I wouldn't have thought of doing that if it weren't for the example of young Americans
02:48who were going to prison to protest the war nonviolently, and it didn't take a lot of thought or anguish.
02:57— So the decision to be willing to go to prison to end the war wasn't that difficult for you?
03:03— No. It was a question of realizing that this could make a difference,
03:06and that it was worth going to prison if there was even a small chance of shortening the war.
03:12— So there's this moment of realization or radicalization, perhaps, where you realize
03:18that you're willing to make this sacrifice.
03:20— Yeah.
03:20— Do you think it's possible for the government to effectively and decisively suppress that?
03:25— They suppress it in nearly everyone.
03:29It seemed to me so self-evident that this was worthwhile at the moment when I came to it,
03:35that I hoped that my example would make many other people realize,
03:41oh, I can do that, and that's the right thing to do.
03:43It didn't happen until Chelsea Manning.
03:46And then three years later, we had Snowden.
03:48It's basically not easy to find others, those of the three,
03:52who've done that on a large scale in 40 years.
03:56— Elsberg sees Snowden and Manning as fellow travelers.
04:00He's ardently defended them in the face of controversy.
04:03— And he draws a distinction between them and people who leak for political advantage
04:08and with the tacit approval of their bosses.
04:11— So the people who are leaking, I think, are doing so in part for institutional reasons
04:15to protect their institution.
04:18It's not so much the public at large.
04:20We're really seeing leaks that are dangerous to the president,
04:24embarrassing to the president, by agencies that feel themselves endangered by the president.
04:30— And that's the standard kind of leak.
04:34— You were the first person to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for releasing information to the American public.
04:40Since then, the use of that statute in that context has skyrocketed, you could say.
04:47— Nine or ten prosecutions under Obama doesn't seem like so many,
04:52but it's three times more than there were before Obama.
04:56Now, I expect there to be quite a few under Trump.
04:59I think that Obama set a very bad precedent there of using the act.
05:04— We have our first sort of high-profile, likely Espionage Act case with Reality Winner.
05:11And I guess I'm wondering if Trump begins to use the Espionage Act against leakers and journalists to an unprecedented
05:20degree.
05:21— Yeah, which he hasn't done yet.
05:22— Which he hasn't done yet.
05:23But do you think that could ever completely chill the impulse of the whistleblower?
05:28— There will be people like Manning and Snowden who are prepared to take the consequences.
05:34The Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan, I'm sure, would look just like the Pentagon Papers of Vietnam.
05:39— I'm sure we can stand more whistleblowing than we're now getting.
05:42We need it.
05:44You can't have a free society, you can't have a democratic society without unauthorized disclosures.
06:09— We need it.
06:09— There's no need to have a governance.
06:10— We need it.
06:10— We need it.
Comentarios