A former CIA officer serving prison time for leaking government secrets to a reporter lost a bid to clear his name on Thursday.
A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed all but one of Jeffrey Sterling’s convictions and said there was no need for him to be resentenced.
He was sentenced to 3 1/2 years after he was convicted under the Espionage Act in 2015 on charges that he divulged details of a CIA mission aimed at stalling Iranian ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. Sterling maintains he was not a source for a book by New York Times journalist James Risen.
The operation, described in Risen’s 2006 book “State of War,” involved using a CIA agent nicknamed “Merlin” to deliver flawed nuclear blueprints to Iran in the hopes that they would spend years trying to develop a product that would never work.
Citing anonymous sources, Risen suggested it was a reckless and botched operation that may have actually helped advance the Iranians’ nuclear program. The CIA has strongly disputed that idea.
The 4th Circuit said prosecutors failed to prove that the transfer of a letter detailing information about the program from Sterling to Risen began or happened in the Eastern District of Virginia — where the man was prosecuted.
But the court rejected Sterling’s other arguments and said a “rational jury could have found that Sterling passed along at least some classified information about the program to Risen, who then approached the CIA shortly afterwards.”
Judge William Traxler Jr. wrote that he would have upheld all of Sterling’s convictions.
Sterling, 50, can ask the full 4th Circuit to hear the case.
His wife said Thursday that they’re unsure when he’ll be released, but he had been told he could be sent home or to a halfway house as early as December.
“I continued to hold out hope that the truth would ultimately prevail and it didn’t,” Holly Sterling said, fighting back tears.
Edward MacMahon Jr., who represented Sterling at trial, said he believes in Sterling’s innocence.
“I think he has a long and productive life ahead of him when he gets out,” MacMahon said.
Sterling’s attorneys argued that the CIA only charged him because Risen’s story made the CIA look foolish. They say the leak likely came from a Capitol Hill staffer after Sterling shared his concerns about the program with staffers at a Senate intelligence committee in 2003.
After spending years trying to force the reporter to reveal his source, and despite the 4th Circuit’s order compelling him to testify, Risen was never directly asked in court whether Sterling was his leaker.
In the end, prosecutors obtained enough circumstantial evidence by seizing emails and phone messages to win a conviction.
The government did not have recorded phone calls or emails showing the actual exchange of classified information. During a December hearing, prosecutor Eric Olshan pointed to an email Risen wrote Sterling in 2004, which said “I want to call today. I’m trying to write the story … I need your phone number again.”
Prosecutors argued that Sterling provided the information to Risen in retaliation for multiple grievances he had against the agency. Sterling had unsuccessfully sued the agency for racial discrimination and was upset that the CIA had blocked him from putting certain information in his memoir, prosecutors said.
In a column published Wednesday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sterling again asserted that he communicated with Risen only about his discrimination case and called his imprisonment “an injustice.”
“My case serves as a warning that basic communication between journalists and government employees, no matter the subject, could be treated as espionage,” Sterling wrote.
(AP)
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One Response
Really strange. His lawsuit against the CIA for discrimination was in 2000 (under Clinton) and his contract with the CIA ended in 2002, under Bush. Intercepted e-mails ranged from 2002-2004. In 2003 (after the Senate Intelligence Committee had been in formed about the CIA operation) the government strong-armed the NYT to stop it reporting on the operation in question. Risen’s book that exposed the CIA operation in question came out early 2006.
Indictment in 2010 under Obama and conviction some 5 years later, under Obama. The government case is based on 2002-2004 evidence that they had know for 6 years before indicting and 11 years before conviction?