President Obama's War on Whistleblowers

Thomas Drake is a whistleblower, a former senior official with the National Security Agency (NSA) who exposed the fact that the agency was illegally spying on millions of Americans with a budget-busting data-mining program that was ultimately shut down. He embodies everything about the principles of “transparency” and “open government” in which the president claims to believe. So why then is the Obama administration threatening to put him in jail for the rest of his life?

By any measure, what Drake did was a public service, providing the kind of check an agency with a classified budget undoubtedly needs from time to time. From 2006 to 2007, he reportedly provided information to a journalist with the Baltimore Sun showing that the agency was wasting millions of dollars in taxpayer money on a massively over-budget initiative that also happened to be facilitating widespread violations of Americans’ constitutional rights.

But in Washington, medals are reserved for incompetent FEMA directors and war criminals; doing the right thing is a tried-and-true ticket to early retirement and maybe even a prison term. And sure enough, in April 2010 Drake’s whistle-blowing was rewarded with an indictment under the Espionage Act by Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department (DOJ). Treated as if he were some Cold War era spy, Drake faces 35 years in prison.

“It sends a very chilling message that, not only are you committing career suicide if you blow the whistle, which had always been the case in the past, but now you face spending the rest of your natural life in jail,” Jesselyn Radack, a former DOJ lawyer turned whistleblower, says in an interview. Now with the whistleblowing group Government Accountability Project, Radack resigned from the Justice Department after officials retaliated against her for exposing gross ethical violations in their treatment of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

Specifically, Drake stands accused of retaining classified information about an initiative called “Trailblazer,” a $1.2 billion data-mining program launched in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks that was ultimately shut down after a scathing report from the NSA’s Inspector General and revelations that it collected millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls. Drake had been a proponent of a rival program, “ThinThread,” that cost one-tenth the money and would have anonymized the data it collected, providing a much greater safeguard against abuse. But then the NSA has never much cared for privacy -- except its own -- and the opinions of Drake and former top agency officials were ignored.

"He tried to have his concerns heard and nobody really wanted to listen," Nina Ginsberg, an attorney for a congressional staffer who shared Drake’s concerns, told the Washington Post.

Now, after already being forced out of the NSA, Drake must prepare for a trial early next year. And Radack says that has a lot more to do with politics than justice. "This is to send a message, and the message clearly is to shut up -- to keep quiet.” But what about President Obama’s pledge that his administration would usher in an “unprecedented level of openness in government”? Good question: less than half-way through his first term, Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for leaking information to the press than any other president in U.S. history.

And the indictment of Drake can’t be blamed on DOJ holdovers from the Bush administration.

“This is completely Obama’s decision,” says Raddack. “He didn’t have to do that. And it’s rather odd he chose to do so in light of his willingness to completely give a pass to the people who committed far more real and serious crimes under the Bush administration.”

“They could have let it die on the vine,” she adds, “but instead, strangely, the Obama administration -- whose edict is to look forward and not backwards at the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed through torture and warrantless wiretapping -- decided to look backwards.”

Perhaps stranger still is that the prosecution of Drake is being handled by William Welch, the same DOJ prosecutor currently under criminal investigation for allegedly witholding evidence during the botched trial of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. That's justice in the age of Obama -- the hero gets a prison term while the crook gets a pension.

In a more just world, though, the president would be lauding Drake as the type of person the government needs to provide the sort of transparency and accountability he loves to talk about on the campaign trail. At the very least, the administration should spare him the indignity of a criminal prosecution.

Join Change.org and the Government Accountability Project in calling on President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to immediately drop the prosecution of Thomas Drake.

Photo Credit: Steven Depolo