6 Other Leaks That Rocked Washington – Washingtonian

Politicos publication of a draft Supreme Court opinion that signals the end Roe v. Wade has hit Washington like a thunderbolt, triggering protests outside the Supreme Court, generating blowback for pro-choice Republican Senators who supported Trumps nominees for the bench, and sparking an investigation to determine how the sensitive materials ended up in the hands of reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward. Because of the profound consequences that the draft opinion portends for abortion access in America, its publication is among the most significant leaks in Washingtons history. Here are six other bombshell leaks that rocked the nations capital.

In 1971, the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent copies of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times. The revelations about how badly the Vietnam war was going for American forces stunned the public, and the episode also led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming that the newspapers had the right to publish the material.

At the start of the 1970s, a high-ranking FBI official,Mark Felt, reinvented himself as Deep Throat, the anonymous source who provided the Washington Posts reporting duoBob Woodward and Carl Bernsteinwith the secret information they needed for their historic Watergate scoops. The bombshell revelations would push Nixon out of the White House, inspire a Hollywood movie, and endow the Washington Post with its romantic mystique.

In 2003, Richard Armitage, the then deputy secretary of state, disclosed the identity of a CIA officer to the conservative columnist Robert Novak. Though Armitage would later insist that hed made the disclosure inadvertently, the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative would trigger a federal investigation into the source of the leak, embroil the Bush administration in controversy, and lead to the conviction of Dick Cheneys former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, on obstruction of justice and other charges. Armitage didnt reveal himself to be Novaks original source until 2006, according to CNN.

Ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 provided information to journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post that exposedclassified government surveillance programs that harvested telecommunications data of millions of citizens. After American law enforcement authorities filed espionage charges against Snowden, he fled to Russia.

In July of 2016, Wikileaks released an embarrassing cache of roughly 20,000 emails that had been sent and received by senior figures in the Democratic Party. The emailswhich had been hacked by Russian operativesshowed top DNC officials disparaging Bernie Sanders,led to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairand stirred discord inside the Democratic Party.

After former President Trump fired him in May 2017, former FBI director James Comey used the assistance of a friend to leak the contents of a memo that,among other things,contained his recollection of a discussion in which Trump suggested that the bureau scrap its probe into Michael Flynn, according to NBC News.A subsequent report by the Department of Justices Office of Inspector General concluded that Comeys actions broke FBI policy,but the DOJ declined to prosecute him.

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Senior Writer

Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the citys levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregorys ouster as moderator of NBCs Meet the Press, the collapse of Washingtons Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.

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6 Other Leaks That Rocked Washington - Washingtonian