Former FBI agent charged with leaking classified information

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department has charged a former Minnesota FBI agent with leaking classified information to the online news site The Intercept, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Wednesday.

It said Terry Albury was charged this week by the department’s National Security Division with two counts including “knowingly and willfully” transmitting documents and information relating to national defense to a reporter for a national news organization.

Albury, the only African-American FBI field agent in Minnesota, was assigned as Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport liaison working on counterterrorism matters, MPR News said.

Albury’s attorneys, JaneAnne Murray and Joshua Dratel, said in a statement that their client was “driven by a conscientious commitment to long-term national security and addressing the well-documented systemic biases within the FBI.”

The attorneys said Albury “accepts full responsibility” for the alleged conduct.

The Justice Department and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A source familiar with the case told Reuters that The Intercept was the recipient of leaks for which Albury was charged.

In January 2017, The Intercept published a series titled “The FBI’s Secret Rules” based on Albury’s leaked documents, which show the depth and broad powers of the FBI expansion since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its recruitment efforts, according to MPR News.

The Intercept reported the charges against Albury and published a statement from editor-in-chief Betsy Reed that said the news outlet does not discuss anonymous sources.

“The use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers seeking to shed light on matters of vital public concern is an outrage, and all journalists have the right under the First Amendment to report these stories,” Reed said.

Last year a U.S. intelligence contractor accused of illegally leaking a classified report on Russian interference in U.S. elections to The Intercept pleaded not guilty to an espionage offense.

Reality Leigh Winner was accused of passing the top secret National Security Agency report to The Intercept while working with Pluribus International Corp, which provides analytical services for U.S. defense and intelligence.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year announced a crackdown on leaks, after a series of embarrassing revelations from President Donald Trump’s White House.

Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Additional reporting by Eric Walsh; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Leslie Adler

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Pardon Talk Could Put Trump Lawyer in Hot Water

If John Dowd discussed the possibility of a presidential pardon with lawyers for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort while Dowd was serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, it’s a big deal — definitely for Dowd, and conceivably for Trump.

The president has the inherent power to pardon anyone he wants. But doing so with a corrupt reason — such as saving the president’s skin — would be obstruction of justice.

Supposing that Dowd acted after conversations with Trump, the chain of obstruction would lead back to the president. And even if Dowd acted on his own initiative, he himself could be guilty of obstruction of justice.

Start with an important caveat: This episode is unlikely to lead to Trump’s being impeached or charged with a crime. What we know so far is that someone (or rather three someones) told the New York Times that Dowd discussed the possibility of pardons with lawyers for Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, while both were being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Dowd, who resigned last week as the president’s lead lawyer for Mueller’s investigation, denies the allegations. If they can credibly be shown to be true, they wouldn’t on their own be enough to put Trump in the hot seat. Trump could say that Dowd never discussed the pardons with him. And it would be very difficult to get Dowd to testify against Trump, who was his client at the time.

Technically, what Dowd may have said to other lawyers outside Trump’s presence isn’t likely to be covered by attorney-client privilege between Dowd and Trump. And if a lawyer and a client together conspire to commit a crime, it’s not impossible for prosecutors to break privilege. In theory, it isn’t totally impossible that Dowd could be made to testify against Trump.

In reality, however, it would be unusual for prosecutors to flip a criminal defense lawyer against a client — and all the more so when the client is the U.S. president.

Practically, then, Dowd’s future is more on the line than Trump’s. If he was waving the possibility of a pardon before Flynn and Manafort in order to induce them not to cooperate with Mueller, then he was corruptly trying to influence and obstruct the course of justice.

Dowd has defenses available to him other than the denial he has already issued. He could, for example, say that he was not in any way suggesting that Trump would confer a pardon as part of a corrupt deal to stop Flynn and Manafort from cooperating. He could insist that by mentioning the pardon, he was just reviewing possible options.

There’s something even plausible about that notion: Everyone on earth was speculating about whether Trump might pardon close associates. We know that Trump told then-FBI Director James Comey that Flynn was a good guy. Assuming that Trump meant it, the speculation about a possible pardon was perfectly reasonable.

There’s no law against telling a potential defendant’s lawyer that his client might ultimately be pardoned. Proving that Dowd was implicitly offering some sort of deal to the lawyers for Flynn and Manafort would be pretty difficult. So while Dowd should be hiring his own lawyer today, he probably doesn’t have to fear for his liberty, at least not yet.

That’s the thing about obstruction of justice that would operate through the president’s exercise of authority that would otherwise be lawful. It’s not only that there’s a robust debate about whether such activity could legally be prosecuted as a crime. What really matters is that in practice, it would be very hard to prosecute without concrete evidence of corrupt intent like a quid pro quo.

Of course, obstruction of justice can also be a high crime or misdemeanor for purposes of impeachment, as it was for President Bill Clinton and as it would have been for President Richard Nixon had he not resigned.

But the president’s lawyer isn’t the president. Dowd can’t be impeached, because he isn’t and wasn’t a public official. Conceivably, he could be pressured to testify in a Senate impeachment trial.

But there, as in a criminal trial, it would be risky business to force a criminal defense lawyer to testify against his client. The precedent is terrible. And lawyers like to stick together and look out for the interests of their profession. (OK, our profession.)

The true takeaway from Wednesday’s allegations is that there’s something deeply problematic about a situation in which the president’s personal lawyer was talking to lawyers for the president’s aides — about anything at all. The president’s power to pardon makes any such conversations into a double-edged sword.