Obama’s War on Whistleblowers
by Scott Horton
As a young lawyer,
Obama represented a whistleblower;
as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower
laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of
authority in government.” But as president, Obama has unleashed the
most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever
seen—surpassing even George W. Bush.
The latest example comes in a
remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North
Korea’s nuclear program.
Like most area experts at the top of the game, Kim does
consulting for the State Department. He works for Lawrence Livermore
Labs and was on secondment to the State Department at the time of the
events in question.
Now, however, Kim finds himself under indictment by
the Justice Department. His crime? He spoke to Fox News about how the
North Koreans were likely to react to proposed sanction measures.
Former
prosecutor and Johns Hopkins professor
Ruth Wedgwood
says that the Fox News report “contains completely unremarkable
observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its
poor behavior. These kinds of observations were well known to anyone
paying attention to public sources and ought not be the basis for making
someone a federal felon.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Assistant Attorney General David Kris brought the charges.
The Kim prosecution is portrayed by him as a “warning to anyone who is
entrusted with sensitive national security information and would
consider compromising it.” To prohibit discussing such “sensitive”
information is effectively to censor public debate about vital facts
relating to international affairs and possibly to war.
As Kris and his
friends would have it, we’re supposed to be kept ignorant while the
national-security state cares for us all. It’s also noteworthy that the
Obama Justice Department gets worked up when the “leaks” benefit media
with a critical attitude towards the administration, Fox News.
