Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Marcy Wheeler, otherwise known as Empty Wheel.
That's EmptyWheel.
FireDogLake.com for her blog.
And she's been keeping up with the story of the New York Times reporter James Risen and his legal troubles in the criminal case of one something, what, Jeffrey Sterling, right?
Welcome to the show, Marcy.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Did I get his first name right there?
Yeah, Jeffrey Sterling.
Yes.
Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA guy who left the CIA with an equal opportunity employment complaint and the government alleges that he was the source for James Risen's story in his book on a program called Merlin.
Alright, well, let's start with that.
Why don't you tell us all you know about Merlin and what James Risen reported about it back when his book came out?
The book came out in 2006.
The government alleges that Risen first got leaked details of the program in 2003 and the story is that in 2009, sorry, in 1999-2000 timeframe, as part of our attempt to hurt Iran's nuclear program, we got a former Russian scientist who we had basically brought into the United States to go and deal nuclear blueprints to Iran.
And the gig was supposed to be that the blueprints had errors in them, you know, so the idea was to lead Iran down the wrong path on developing a nuclear weapon, but the Russian scientist noted that right away and told Iran about it and so the implication is that it all backfired, that we gave Iran additional information as part of a purported attempt to keep nukes from them.
Now, this is the CIA that secretly runs everything in the whole wide world.
Their plan was to give nuclear blueprints to Iran through this Russian scientist that would have flaws in them that would lead the Iranians completely down the wrong path in their bomb building project and they noticed the flaws immediately and therefore if they had been attempting to build a nuclear bomb, they would have had perfectly good blueprints to do so with.
Is that right?
Is that what you're telling me?
Yeah, at least some hints about what was wrong with the blueprints, yeah.
Yeah, boy, those guys sound like they could be running a local sheriff's department, maybe.
Anyway, so now the government says that this guy, Jeffrey Sterling, must have been the one who leaked these facts to James Risen, a renowned intelligence beat reporter over at the New York Times.
Is that right?
Yep.
And I think you say in one of your blog entries that the government's case relies upon their accusation that this information isn't true and that if it was true, then they wouldn't be attempting to force James Risen to testify as to this guy being his source?
Well, what they're, you know, so the government wants to call Risen during the trial to testify and they're in the stage where they're arguing back and forth about whether, Risen has avoided having to testify two times already during the grand jury phase of this investigation.
Now the government is saying, well, we need you to testify at trial, here's information we want that's not classified, so you at least have to come and testify and yadda yadda.
But one of the, I'd say, three main arguments they're using to try and rebut Risen's argument is that he has no privilege to protect under a classified agreement with a source, information that ended up being false, which is, you know, I understand that within the journalistic community if a source gives you bad information, then you're supposed to be released from your confidentiality agreement, but they're making a legal argument.
They're basically saying, well, legally if he got false information, then he has to testify to it.
But what's ridiculous about it is, the government hasn't gone before a judge and said, here's evidence that this is wrong, and somebody else say, here's evidence it's not wrong, and the judge or jury decide finally who's right and who's wrong, they've just themselves presented information to the grand jury with nobody rebutting that information, and based on that, they're saying, well, it's wrong.
And one of the things that's amusing about that is, of course, they would never let this evidence be presented in court.
It will never be adjudged whether the information is wrong or not.
They're just trying to use a legal gimmick to introduce one more reason why they say Risen is going to have to testify.
Well, and it's a gimmick because there's nothing in the rules that says that this makes any difference at all, their assertion as to whether it's true or not.
Yeah, during this whole discussion, it's really important that your readers know that the prosecutor involved is a guy by the name of William Welch, who was also in charge of the Ted Stevens prosecution, which was probably a good case to bring, but the prosecution, meaning William Welch and the people who reported to him, screwed up so many things in the trial process that the judge threw out the prosecution.
And we just talked about him.
He's kind of a fishy prosecutor.
We talked about him with you on the show just a few weeks ago.
He's the guy that botched the government's case against the NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.
Right.
Yep.
Very same guy.
So maybe Barack Obama is playing three dimensional chess and he's really on our side and he's appointed the most incompetent federal prosecutor that he's got to go after all these whistleblowers.
My guess is this guy was going nowhere in DOJ and they said, hey, do you want to take a really unpopular job, which is to go after whistleblowers and journalists and given no choice and knowing that he was, you know, pretty far out there as far as prosecutors, he took the job, but he's not doing them any favors.
He's not winning.
I mean, the government, there's a, there's a big question about whether these illegitimate prosecutions or whether the government is just harassing both the whistleblowers and people like Rison.
And I don't think William Welch helped you with, with suggesting these illegitimate prosecutions.
Right.
I mean, how far can they hope to get with James Rison on a case like this?
Obviously he's going to, you know, if he, if he's forced to take the stand, he's going to say, I'm not revealing my sources, sorry.
And if he's held in contempt, he's held in contempt.
It's either that or, you know, sell out and retire, but he'd never be a reporter again if he gave up his source.
Come on.
Well, that's what, that's what I think the really interesting argument is because Rison argues that the government is calling him to testify simply to harass them.
Um, and he argues that they're doing that not necessarily because he published the Merlin story, but because he published, remember, he also published the warrantless wiretapping story, exposed that the Bush administration was illegally wiretapping Americans.
And that he argues is the reason why they're setting him up.
So if he doesn't testify at the trial, he's going to end up doing jail time.
So in other words, this is a backdoor way to imprison a journalist.
How much time could he conceivably do for contempt of court on this issue?
It'll be interesting because the judge in this case, um, you know, I'm guessing that they had a hearing on this yesterday.
I'm guessing she's going to agree to let Rison testify, but she's going to make the government argue for every question that they want to ask him.
So in other words, she's kind of, um, putting the baby with, that's my guess.
And we don't know what she's going to do, but that's my guess.
Um, but, but I think, I think she is skeptical of a lot of what the government is doing in a, um, in opinion from last year when they tried to get him to testify before the grand jury, she, she actually agreed that it could well be the government is harassing Rison.
Um, I think Rison could have made a stronger argument, um, not just that he's being harassed, but that the government is using these two investigations, for example, by, by one of the things they, they did was, was collect evidence of phone calls between Sterling and Rison.
Um, and there's a possibility that they didn't just collect evidence in the phone calls, but they collected what's called a community of interest, meaning, you know, not just the phone, the phone contacts between who you talked to, but also the phone contacts between who the people you talk to talk to.
And if that's the case, it would expose all of Rison's sources on the warrantless liar tax case.
And we know they, their calls were, were, uh, presented to the grand jury.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We'll have to leave it there for this break.
It's Marcy Wheeler.
We're talking about the case of Jeffrey Sterling and the New York Times reporter, James Rison, who the government is trying to force to testify.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler is her actual name.
She blogs at EmptyWheel.
FiredogLake.com and we're talking about the case of, uh, Jeffrey Sterling who's being prosecuted, uh, cause the government says that he's the source of James Rison's story about Operation Merlin where they accidentally gave completed nuclear bomb blueprints to the Iranians and, uh, how they're trying to force James Rison to testify.
And where we left off, uh, Marcy, you were talking about, um, the evidence that I guess has come out in the hearings so far that the government not only, uh, knew, uh, or claimed to know that James Rison and, uh, Jeffrey Sterling had talked to each other on the telephone, but who else James Rison had talked to, uh, on the telephone.
Then we were interrupted.
So I wasn't sure quite where you were going with that and pick it up there if you like.
Yeah.
One of the things I'm concerned about is one of the things the government does is, um, when they're wiretapping or when they're not wiretapping, but when they're collecting, uh, which phone calls somebody has made, um, it used to be they just collected the phone calls directly.
So in other words, I'm just going to get the people who Scott Horton has had a conversation with.
But as part of their response to 9-11, they started taking it a step further.
So in other words, saying, I'm not going to see just who Scott Horton is talking to, but I know that he's talked to Marcy Wheeler, so I want to see who Marcy Wheeler has talked to.
So in other words, it's like a two degrees of separation collection of who's made phone calls.
And I, I, I wonder, and this is my speculation, based on the fact that the government did get records of calls of people to Rice and in the other investigation, which was the warrantless wiretap investigation, and it's possible they wired, they got a list of who James Sterling, Jeffrey Sterling talked to as a way to figure out who the suspects would be in the warrantless wiretap investigation.
So in other words, they were doing these two investigations at the same time, and it's really hard for the government to claim that, um, that they weren't piggybacking off each other and that the effort to go after Sterling wasn't a backdoor way of, of making their investigation of the warrantless wiretapping case much easier.
Um, and Rice and tried to find out from the government how they had gotten his phone records because they're not supposed to get the phone records of a journalist without telling the journalist and they still haven't told him that.
So, you know, it seems that they've abused their own guidelines at one level, one way or another, um, by collecting the calls of people Rice and made, not just Jeffrey Sterling, but a bunch of other people that the government won't explain how.
Hmm.
Well, and so this also goes to, I think your earlier point about, uh, the harassment, not just of this journalist, but of journalism and, uh, the chilling of sources and the effects that this has, uh, you know, on, on, uh, on, uh, reporters who would dare cover very controversial subjects, if they're going to actually get busted and how many, uh, people inside the government who are whistleblowers, who are the kind of people who might pull James Risen aside and say, Hey, I have a document.
I think you need to see might be too afraid to, you know, put their family through all this, et cetera, et cetera.
Where, like you say, cause they know they can't really under American law, get away with much of this, right?
It's just sort of a gimmick.
So it's a, well, I mean, the way the law is written, they can get away with it.
They can have the judge throw rights and in prison if she believes that he should testify.
Um, the thing is, nobody has pushed it.
I mean, with the exception of Patrick Fitzgerald in the Libby case, then, and the, um, storage case out, out there in California, nobody's been pushing it this far and here, the government is pushing it this far specifically with a whistleblower, specifically with, um, with somebody who exposed a program, which seems really stupid and which, which American really have a right to know about.
And frankly, which, and this is another point that race and made in his court filing when, when I think book came out in 2006, there was, the governor was trying to go to war against Iran.
I mean, the government, there was like all of these leaks about nuclear blueprints that they had found on this laptop.
And it proved that Iran had an active nuclear program.
And one, I mean, as Rison pointed out, look, you know, the government brought us to war in Iraq on Trump's up evidence.
Everyone beat up the press for not having published the counter-argument.
I published the counter-argument and now the government wants to either force me to reveal my sources or send me to jail.
That's what they're doing to Rison is they're saying, you should go to jail because you published a story that shows the government was playing funny business with intelligence in Iran.
Well, now what about other sources?
Because he must have confirmed his story with other sources, even if he did get it straight from Sterling in the first place, right?
Yeah, that's the weird thing.
Apparently, Rison submitted a deposition at one point and he said, or I'm forgetting whether this was a deposition or whether it was the book proposal he made to his publisher.
But in one of those, he said he had multiple sources for this story.
And it's clear from the story that there are three people whose versions are kind of told in a first person narrative.
One is the case officer.
And people think that that's Sterling.
Another one is the Russian scientist.
And then a third is another person involved in the CIA.
And the government's only going after Sterling, even though Rison says he had more than one source, even though there's another person we know who who Rison checked the story with along the way, who has testified to the grand jury.
So they're really picking on Sterling.
And it's not clear they've done the work to make sure that Sterling was the source or the only source.
Well, now they only do this to the whistleblowers, right?
Because as Glenn Greenwald never tires of pointing out at his blog, the administration and people who at least claim they don't have authorization to do so from the White House even leak classified information to The Times and The Post all day long.
And whenever it makes a foreign country look bad or something, it's perfectly fine.
It's only when someone has the temerity to believe the American people have the right to know this embarrassing thing.
Not that anybody could get in trouble for it, but they might be embarrassed by it.
Then those are the people who go up against the wall.
Right.
And that's the thing is, is the Obama administration, like every administration before it, loves to leak really classified information.
I mean, the most one of the most egregious examples in my mind is this Yemeni American Anwar al-Awlaki, who the government alleges is now operational against the United States as part of al-Qaeda.
When his family tried to sue the government to prevent them from killing their son with no due process, the government said it's state secret.
We can't talk about Anwar al-Awlaki.
You know, nobody we can't even talk about it under seal inside a courtroom.
They just leaked more information about al-Awlaki to Charlie Savage the other day to try and trump up the case against this Somali guy they had floating around in a boat.
They're still doing it.
I mean, they've said this is state secret, but they're still going to go out and leak it to Charlie Savage and claim that that's OK, but not if somebody wanted to whistleblow on similar topics or not if somebody tried to actually get due process before the government executed.
Right.
And Charlie Savage, a reporter at The New York Times in this case.
Yeah.
And of course, all the leaks, there must be 100 stories about al-Awlaki that have come from the very top and what they claim.
I remember in the post they said, well, you know, these anonymous sources say that they have reason to believe that he might have ties to al-Qaeda.
That was the worst that they would claim behind anonymity on him.
This guy that they've issued and that they also leak that, yes, we have a death warrant issued for him.
Right.
Although the AP was reporting today that the FBI is actually putting a case against al-Awlaki, which is kind of funny because that means the FBI doesn't yet have enough evidence to indict al-Awlaki, but we've got him on an assassination list nevertheless.
Right.
Well, yeah, there's I guess a silver lining in that cloud is, well, maybe a grand jury means, you know, some sort of Fifth Amendment type process for this American citizen who apparently is wanted really badly by the White House.
Right.
I mean, maybe he'll finally get due process.
It's pretty clear, too, isn't it?
I think as Greenwald again illustrated on his blog, that al-Awlaki's real crime is that he makes a good speech and in English.
And that's what they're going after him for, is that he, I guess, is convincing to people who tend toward that point of view anyway.
That's the only thing they've presented evidence of, you know, that's all we know.
So.
Yep.
So, well, there's the hypocrisy behind it all.
I'm sure that Risen won't talk.
I guess we'll try to keep up with your blog and keep up with this story, see whether he actually goes to jail, whether this case against Jeffrey Sterling just falls apart from this point.
Be nice.
Interesting story.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
That's Marcy Wheeler, everybody.
EmptyWheel.
FireDogLake.com.
