Press Can Be Prosecuted for Having Secret Files, U.S. Says

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR2006022101947.\

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Press Can Be Prosecuted for Having Secret Files, U.S. Says

 

By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 22, 2006; Page A03

 

The Bush administration said that journalists can be prosecuted under

current espionage laws for receiving and publishing classified

information but that such a step " would raise legitimate and serious

issues and would not be undertaken lightly, " according to a court

filing made public this week.

 

" There plainly is no exemption in the statutes for the press, let

alone lobbyists like the defendants, " Justice Department lawyers wrote

in response to a motion filed last month seeking to dismiss charges

against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former lobbyists for the

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

 

Last August, the two men were accused of receiving classified

information during conversations they had with government officials,

one of whom warned Weissman that " the information he was about to

receive was highly classified 'Agency stuff,' " according to the

government's indictment. That official was Lawrence A. Franklin, who

worked at the Pentagon. He recently pleaded guilty to violating the

Espionage Act.

 

One argument made in the defendants' motion was that the two

pro-Israeli lobbyists were doing what reporters, think-tank experts

and members of congressional staffs " do perhaps hundreds of times

every day " in receiving leaked classified information and passing it

on to others.

 

In its Jan. 30 response unsealed this week, the government said Rosen

and Weissman, as lobbyists, " have no First Amendment right to

willfully disclose national defense information. " The government went

on to say: " Stating this, we recognize that a prosecution under the

espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing

classified information leaked to it by a government source, would

raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken

lightly, indeed, the fact that there has never been such a prosecution

speaks for itself. "

 

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who first

disclosed the government filing on his Web site,

http://www.fas.org/sgp , said yesterday, " The idea that the government

can penalize the receipt of proscribed information, and not just its

unauthorized disclosure, is one that characterizes authoritarian

societies, not mature democracies. "