U.S. ATTORNEY SENDING A MESSAGE TO THOSE WHO LEAK INFORMATION

DEA employee gets prison term for providing information to reporter

A federal judge in Atlanta has imposed a one-year prison sentence on a
former intelligence analyst charged with stealing government information and
leaking it to a London newspaper.

In a case that the U.S. attorney here says establishes a significant
precedent, federal prosecutors assigned a media market price to the leaked
information high enough to ensure a felony charge and increase the
anticipated prison term.

William S. Duffey Jr., U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia,
said the successful prosecution of former Atlanta Drug Enforcement
Administration analyst Jonathan Randel stands as a warning to government
employees, particularly law enforcement agents, who might consider providing
sensitive, unclassified information to anyone, including journalists,
outside of the federal government.

"It is our intention to prosecute those offenses," Duffey said. "We have to
send that message to everybody within the justice system."

Duffey said Randel was prosecuted because the theft and sale of confidential
government information "jeopardizes the integrity of the justice system.
Here is a person who was hired in an intelligence-gathering function whom we
entrusted with highly sensitive information. He had a duty and he agreed he
had a duty to keep that information secret."

Duffey's prosecution of Randel is in line with a report by U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft's interagency, anti-leak task force, which last year
recommended that government administrators use laws already on the books to
identify and punish employees who leak information.

The law under which Randel was prosecuted has been in existence for decades
and applies to the theft of public money, property and records. It
establishes a maximum 10-year prison sentence for the theft, embezzlement,
or conversion of government property and also extends penalties to anyone
who receives it.

Using that statute, Duffey's office defined information, including e-mail
correspondence, as government property. Federal prosecutors here placed a
market value on the information Randel leaked, claiming it was worth at
least $13,000, the amount Randel eventually received from the Times of
London.

But prosecutors suggested the information may have had a far greater value.
Last August, prosecutors called a London literary agent to testify in a
hearing that the information the Times acquired and subsequently published
had a market value of as much as 50,000 British pounds (about $80,000). The
literary agent based his estimate on the news value of the Times' story in
the competitive London newspaper market.

Neither Duffey nor a DEA spokesman in Washington could cite any other cases
where the government has prosecuted an employee for taking confidential but
unclassified information and provided it to a news organization. A Justice
Department spokesman in Washington could not be reached for comment.

Prosecution Called Very Rare

Kevin M. Goldberg, a partner at Washington's Cohn & Marks and legal counsel
to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, suggests that Randel's
prosecution is, if not unheard of, extremely rare. So broad is its potential
application that, if applied across the board, the law might well have
netted FBI staff attorney Coleen Rowley-whose May 2002 memo to FBI Director
Robert Mueller documented how agency higher-ups brushed off her field
office's pleas to investigate a terrorist co-conspirator prior to Sept. 11,
Goldberg said. Time this year included Rowley among three whistle-blowers it
named as "Persons of the Year."

In sentencing Randel last week, U.S. District Judge Richard W. Story made it
plain that he considered Randel's actions "a very serious crime."

While acknowledging, "No investigation was put at risk, lives were not
lost," as a result of Randel's actions, Story said, "Anyone who would leak
information poses a tremendous risk." The judge also compared Randel's
actions to a "drunk driver who gets in a car and gets home without killing
anybody. & No agent got killed but the risk was certainly there."

Randel's lawyer, Atlanta attorney Steven H. Sadow, is appealing the
sentence, seeking less time and house arrest or confinement to a halfway
house.

Data Banks Tapped

In a plea agreement, Randel admitted that he supplied information from DEA
data banks in 1999 to a British television correspondent who freelanced for
the Times. Federal prosecutors say Randel sold the information for $13,000.

Sadow and Times solicitor Alastair Brett said the money the newspaper paid
to Randel was to reimburse him for a trip to London to meet with Times
officials after the newspaper was sued for libel. In addition to trip
expenses, Sadow said the $13,000 covered the wages Randel lost by taking off
work to make the trip.

The information Randel supplied-which the Times published in a 1999 series
of articles-concerned Lord Michael Ashcroft, the former treasurer of Great
Britain's Conservative Party, and his bank holdings in Belize. The
controversy forced Ashcroft to resign as party treasurer, said his Atlanta
attorney, Edward T.M. Garland, a partner at Garland, Samuel & Loeb. Ashcroft
hired Garland to lobby federal prosecutors to bring a case against Randel.
Ashcroft is no relation to the U.S. attorney general, a government spokesman
said.

According to court filings, Randel gave the reporter information from
restricted DEA investigative databases in which Ashcroft's name had
surfaced. The DEA files didn't implicate Ashcroft in any criminal activity,
the Times reported. However, allegations in the Times articles that
Ashcroft's name had surfaced in four separate investigations of drug-dealing
and money-laundering were at the heart of a defamation suit he brought
against the newspaper.

One DEA report stemmed from a request by a Belize attache to research
Ashcroft's activities in Belize because he was "acquiring significant
assets" there. Ashcroft owns the Bank of Belize, according to redacted DEA
reports included in court records. Belize's bank secrecy laws have helped
drug dealers, among others, to shield their financial activities from
scrutiny by investigative agencies. Ashcroft's ownership of the bank caused
his name to surface in DEA reports regarding investigations of at least one
drug dealer who had laundered money through the Bank of Belize.

Sadow said Randel willingly gave information to television correspondent
Toby Follett because "he thought Ashcroft was getting a free ride for
crooked activities. That's why he did what he did. Money had nothing to do
with it."

Defamation Claims Settled

Times owner Rupert Murdoch settled the defamation claims with Ashcroft in
return for a front-page apology in which the Times stated that the paper had
no evidence that Ashcroft had been involved in either drug-dealing or
money-laundering, said Times solicitor Alastair Brett.

Brett acknowledged that the Times did make payments to Randel, but that the
money was to reimburse him for a trip he made to London in August 1999 to
testify after Ashcroft sued.

Garland said that Ashcroft "wanted his named cleared" and that his
representatives met with the DEA and federal prosecutors and asked them to
prosecute Randel for the leaks.

Garland said he sought to have the Times indicted as a co-conspirator
because the statute under which Randel was prosecuted allows for the
prosecution of anyone who solicits confidential information from a
government employee.

"But the government wasn't interested in pursuing it that far," Garland
said.

Duffey wouldn't comment on whether he considered indicting the Times.

The DEA subsequently released some of the information that Randel had given
to the Times to other London newspapers under the federal Freedom of
Information Act. Some of the information in DEA reports Randal released had
been obtained from Dunn & Bradstreet, a company that sells business
information.

But Duffey said the government's decision to make the information public
occurred after Randel released it to the Times and had no bearing on his
prosecution.

"We look at the offense at the time it was committed," he said. "When this
offense was committed, it was in violation of this employee's duties. What
might have happened after that was irrelevant to the prosecution. At the
time the information was disclosed by Mr. Randel, it was protected,
sensitive information, and he had a duty not to disclose it."

Swap Called 'Standard'

Catherine S. Manegold, a James M. Cox Jr. professor of journalism at Emory
University, said that Randel's prosecution ignores the fact that the
unofficial flow of information between government employees and the
reporters who cover them "is absolutely standard operating procedure for
both sides."

Manegold said that although allegations that Randel sold the information
make the situation ethically murky, the government's decision to prosecute
him on a felony charge "sets up a dangerous precedent. & It's not too
different from McCarthyism. If an official says something, we all report it
because we know it to be true. There is no counterbalance, no checks."

If people other than designated spokesmen are dissuaded from talking with
the media because they fear prosecution, journalists "can't create a prism
of information that gives us our one hope at a sense of real truth. If we
are confined to official, pre-vetted statements, that's a terribly dangerous
place to be."

DEA spokesman Will Glasby said that comparing the documents that Randel
released to the Times to the information that law enforcement agents release
to beat reporters "is like comparing apples and oranges."

"Absolutely, we provide information to the media," said Glasby. "But we're
not selling classified information that is clearly in violation of federal
law. Oranges is providing public information to a reporter just as I'm doing
now. He provided written reports. & You'd never get written reports out of
me."

Court documents filed by federal prosecutors describe the information Randel
provided to the Times as "sensitive and confidential" but not classified.

Rebecca Daugherty, the FOI Service Center director for the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, called the decision to
prosecute Randel "shocking."

"I think it's shocking the DEA took it that far," she said. "If it were
classified information there would certainly be a reason to look at it. &
But sensitive and unclassified information is available to the public under
the FOI act. I can't see how you can have a person jailed for giving that
information out."