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Ex-Senate staffer faces charges in leak investigation
Washington Post ^ | June 7 2018 | Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima

Posted on 06/07/2018 8:03:36 PM PDT by yesthatjallen

A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been indicted and arrested on charges of making false statements to the FBI during an investigation into the leak of classified information, the Justice Department announced Thursday. As part of the investigation, law enforcement officials seized years worth of phone and email records of a New York Times reporter, Ali Watkins, who had previously been in a romantic relationship with the staffer, the newspaper reported Thursday evening.

The Senate staffer, James A. Wolfe, was indicted on three counts of making false statements while he served as the committee’s director of security, a position in which he was entrusted with secret and top-secret information provided to the committee as part of its oversight of the intelligence community, the Justice Department said in a statement.

The government alleges that Wolfe lied to FBI agents in December 2017 about “repeated contacts” with three reporters, including through the use of encrypted messaging applications. He is further accused of lying about providing two reporters with “non-public information related to matters occurring before the [committee],” the statement read.

It’s rare for the government to obtain the communications of reporters as part of a leak investigation, and the seizure of Watkins’s records, the first known case under the Trump administration, signals the aggressiveness with which officials are pursuing leaks to the press.

A prosecutor informed Watkins in a Feb. 13 letter that the Justice Department had obtained records and subscriber information from communications companies, including Google and Verizon, pertaining to two email accounts and a phone number of Watkins, according to the Times, which learned of the letter on Thursday. The government did not obtain the content of any of Watkins’s messages, the paper said. Watkins worked for BuzzFeed and Politico before joining the Times.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: 201802; 20180213; aliwatkins; buzzfeed; districtofcolumbia; doj; fbi; jamesawolfe; jameswolfe; jimwolfe; metadata; perjury; politico; postedseveraltimes; ssci; ssic; washingtoncompost; washingtonpost; watkins; wolfe
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To: grey_whiskers

It’s always the skill set and the enthusiasm with which it’s deployed.


41 posted on 06/08/2018 5:08:28 AM PDT by Jim Noble (The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers)
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To: yesthatjallen

Who was he working with in the government? He was not a lone wolf blabber.


42 posted on 06/08/2018 5:08:48 AM PDT by bmwcyle (People who do not study history are destine to believe really ignorant statements.)
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To: yesthatjallen

Who was he working with in the government? He was not a lone wolf blabber.


43 posted on 06/08/2018 5:08:50 AM PDT by bmwcyle (People who do not study history are destine to believe really ignorant statements.)
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To: yesthatjallen

He’s been there for 29 years. I wonder how many other presstitutes he worked with. I’ll bet there are some famous women who slept their way to the top of the steaming pile of journalism.


44 posted on 06/08/2018 5:19:20 AM PDT by Betty Jane
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To: cgbg

Excellent.


45 posted on 06/08/2018 6:33:17 AM PDT by moovova
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