Selective Leak Investigations

From Newsweek:

The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm's desktop computer, two of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

It's astounding to me that the administration would still be pursuing this criminal probe. Remember, these leaks relate to a program that has been declared illegal several times now, most recently in a secret opinion handed down by the FISA court. Moreover, given that the New York Times elected to sit on the story (at the administration's request) for well over a year, it's quite possible that the leaks in question date back to the time period when the Justice Department itself had determined the NSA program to be illegal and most of its top officials were prepared to resign over it.

In other words, this is a classic whistleblower scenario. Investigating people who expose illegal government conduct is a terrible way to expend prosecutorial resources.

Moreover, the administration itself recently leaked classified information on these very same activities in a transparent effort to push back against charges that the Attorney General perjured himself. Where's the criminal probe? And I look forward to the raid of House Minority Leader John Boehner's residence in response to his divulging the existence of the secret FISA court opinion on Fox News the other day.

I have no idea what Thomas Tamm's role was in this affair, but if he is being investigated solely because he was one of the dozens of sources who leaked information about the administration's illegal surveillance program to the New York Times and other news organizations, then that's a travesty.