Former FBI agent is second person charged in crackdown with leaking classified information

Actually the rules on the handling of classified information apply to everyone, even Hillary Clinton. At least in theory they do. In practice almost no one is ever charged with the leaks, which is why they go on constantly, and federal employees, contractors and members of Congress toss around leaks like dinner rolls to serve their ideological or personal agendas. When Attorney General Sessions announced a crackdown on leaks of classified information - reluctantly, and only after President Trump brow-tweeted him over it - it was treated as a radical and unprecedented move. Up until today, only one significant person - 25-year-old contractor Reality Leigh Winner - had been charged in the crackdown. No more. Now an FBI agent is going down, and his lawyers don't even deny that he did it:

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.

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Albury believed the FBI had grown too powerful since 9/11, and claims he was leaking information to The Intercept in order to document this and highlight its "systemic biases," whether that refers to racial bias or perhaps something about the targeting of Middle Easterners in investigations. But even if Albury's concerns were legitimate, he had no right to abuse his position as an agent such that he could obtain classified information for the purpose of leaking it. If there were really wrong things going on at the FBI, he either could have reported it to the Justice Department inspector general, of if he didn't think that would get results, he could have resigned from his position and spoken freely about what he believed was going on. Either way, it's not his call to decide which classified information is OK to release to the news media, even if he's convinced his intentions are honorable. And that's the problem with this epidemic of leaks within the federal government. Individual federal employees may want to release certain information for their own purposes, or they may disagree with the rationale that determing something was classified. But someone has the responsibility to make those decisions, and if everyone else just ignores them and makes their own calls, then there is no workable system in place that can protect information that's truly sensitive and needs to be kept under wraps. When FBI agents and other federal employees swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, that includes a recognition that the president is the head of the executive branch and has authority over it. If they simply ignore or disregard that authority whenever they feel like it, they are not keeping their oath, regardless of who the president is or what they think about him. I guess Terry Albury didn't think these principles were being taken seriously. He thought wrong.