On June 9, just days before trial of U.S. v. Thomas Drake in the District of Maryland, the case ended in a plea bargain. Drake, charged last year with, among other things, violating the 1917 Espionage Act by willful retention of classified national defense information, 18 U.S.C. §793(e), claimed that he was simply being punished as a whistleblower.
Drake, who had been employed as a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Signals Intelligence and held a top security clearance with access to classified information, was alleged to have engaged in a scheme to obtain, retain and disclose classified information. He was said to have conveyed unclassified and classified information to a former congressional staffer, who in turn put him in touch with a newspaper reporter. He allegedly exchanged hundreds of encrypted emails with the reporter; copied and pasted both unclassified and classified documents into a Word document while removing the classification markings; retained at his home printed copies of both unclassified and classified documents without authority; emailed to the reporter electronic copies of both unclassified and classified documents without authority; and edited drafts of the reporter’s articles.
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