U.S. analyst charged with leak to news reporter
Sep-28-2010

A foreign policy analyst who worked at the State Department has been charged with leaking a top-secret intelligence report to a news reporter, the Justice Department said on Friday.

Stephen Kim, who had briefed former Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials, was indicted for violating a U.S. espionage law barring disclosure of national defense information and lying to the FBI about his contacts with the reporter.

The Justice Department, which announced the charges against Kim, did not identify the reporter and only described the reporter's employer as a "national news organization." The incident occurred in 2009, prosecutors said.

They also gave little detail about the classified intelligence report except to say it concerned the "military capabilities and preparedness of a particular foreign nation." Kim has written previously about U.S.-Korean relations.

Kim, 43, an employee of a federal contractor on detail to the State Department, pleaded not guilty to the charges, his lawyers said. If convicted he faces up to 10 years in prison on the espionage count and five years for lying.

The case is the latest in a series by the Obama administration aimed at cracking down on leaks of classified information.

Earlier this year, a former high-ranking official at the National Security Agency was charged with illegally possessing classified information that he allegedly gave to a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

Kim's defense lawyers Abbe Lowell and Ruth Wedgwood described him as "a dedicated, hard-working, law-abiding and extraordinarily talented analyst who has given 10 years of valuable service to the U.S. government and has helped it better understand issues ranging from North Korea to Iran."

They said the news report at the center of the charges contained "completely unremarkable observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its poor behavior."

Lowell and Wedgwood criticized the Justice Department for bringing the case, calling it "campaign to look and act tough."

"In its obsession to clamp down on perfectly appropriate conversations between government employees and the press, the Obama Administration has forgotten that wise foreign policy must be founded on a two-way conversation between government and the public," they said.

Kim appeared before a federal judge and was released pending trial.

Posted by Clay Kohut at 12:43 AM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print