With respect to the dissemination of information contained in the NIB to the press, the Vice President advised that it is possible to talk about something contained in a classified document without violating the law regarding declassification. For example, the Vice President has made numerous public statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which were based on and, in some cases tracked, his reading of classified information, including theNIE . However, he did not violate any relevant laws or rule making these statements because he did not reveal the confidential sources or methods involved in gathering the classified information. Vice President Cheney advised that he believed it was justifiable to rely on classified information to shape and inform what one says publicly. He further advised that his own public statements at times tracked theNIE and were informed by data within the NIE. Vice President Cheney believed this was a perfectly appropriate way to use the NIE.
At the same time Cheney was offering his "Fourth Branch" of government version as to how the declassification process works, the Department of Justice was prosecuting under the Espionage Act two non-Government officials for doing a whole lot less. In a prosecution that became known as the "AIPAC case," the prosecution’s premise was that non-Government officials who do not possess security clearances, such as lobbyists, reporters, and think-tank specialists, can be criminally culpable for further disseminating information shared with them by Government officials, even if they solely received the information by word-of-mouth and were not necessarily informed in the first place that it was supposedly classified . They dismissed as irrelevant the defendants' position that much of the supposed classified information was classified not because of its substance but rather because of the intelligence sources and methods used to collect the information; and that the defendants had no knowledge of those sources and methods, let alone disclosed them to others.
Thus, according to the standards used by the Department of Justice in bringing the AIPAC case, Cheney is guilty of violating the Espionage Act by virtue of his "numerous public statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which were based on and, in some cases tracked, his reading of classified information."
Actually, as I advised the defense in the AIPAC case, the above is an oversimplification of the classification/declassification process. Yes, it is possible to quote from an otherwise classified document without disclosing classified information. However, to do so requires ensuring that the otherwise unclassified quotation is not source revealing itself. For example, just the mere fact that the U.S. Government knew specific information at a specific point in time could be source revealing itself if there were only a limited number of ways we could learn that information. In the case of theAIPAC defendants' none of the supposed closely held information they were accused of disclosing was source revealing.
Can the same be said for Cheney?
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