Intelligence analyst charged with leaking top-secret information to left-wing reporter Jeremy Scahill
A former intelligence analyst and Afghanistan veteran has been charged with leaking classified information to the media. Daniel Everett Hale, 31, of Nashville, Tenn., was arrested on federal charges Thursday. The reporter that Hale leaked this information to is not named in the indictment, but the charging document identifies him as Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept, an outspoken critic of America’s military activities overseas.
Hale "printed off a series of Secret and Top Secret documents through his position with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, many of which he then provided to the reporter." The day that Hale is alleged to have met with the reporter at the reporter’s bookstore event, April 29, 2013, is the same day Scahill held a discussion and signing for his book Dirty Wars at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. The indictment states that in May 2013 Hale said the reporter “wants me to tell my story about working with drones at the opening screening of his documentary about the war and the use of drones." Scahill’s book accompanied a 2013 documentary of the same name that was critical of secretive U.S. military operations, including drone warfare. The indictment states that Hale again met the reporter at another book event on June 8, 2013 — the same day Scahill was hosted at Busboys & Poets for another discussion about Dirty Wars.
The indictment states that many of the classified documents were disclosed in an October 2015 news article. On Oct.15, 2015, Scahill published an article on the Intercept entitled “The Assassination Complex” and cited “a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars.” Scahill wrote that the documents “were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides. The Intercept granted the source’s request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the U.S. government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers.”
Hale is charged with crimes, including “obtaining national defense information, retention and transmission of national defense information, causing the communication of national defense information, disclosure of classified communications intelligence information, and theft of government property.” Each of those charges carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. This is not the first time that the Intercept has been involved in a criminal leaks case. Reality Winner, a military contractor, was arrested in June 2017 for leaking classified information. The NSA document, which she leaked to the Intercept, was related to Russian efforts to hack into U.S. election systems. The Intercept published a story based on the document and was criticized for failing to protect Winner as a source. Betsy Reed, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, eventually admitted that “at several points in the editorial process, our practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves for minimizing the risks of source exposure when handling anonymously provided materials.” In August 2018, Winner was sentenced to over five years in prison.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/intelligence-analyst-charged-with-leaking-top-secret-information-to-left-wing-reporter-jeremy-scahill
Daniel Hale Indictment
https://www.scribd.com/document/409318747/Daniel-Hale-Indictment#from_embed