Last week, an Israeli-American lawyer, Shamai Leibowitz, pled guilty to leaking to an unidentified blogger five classified documents Leibowitz obtained while working as a Hebrew translator for the FBI. FBI leaker should have raised flags

A former FBI linguist’s guilty plea for leaking secret documents has become a black eye for the law enforcement agency and signals a breakdown in the security clearance process there, according to lawyers who track clearance issues.

“It’s a big embarrassment for the FBI,” said Sheldon Cohen, a Virginia attorney who represents employees who are denied clearances.


Last week, an Israeli-American lawyer, Shamai Leibowitz, pled guilty to leaking to an unidentified blogger five classified documents Leibowitz obtained while working as a Hebrew translator for the FBI from January through August of this year. Court records also said that four documents classified as “secret” were found in an August search of Leibowitz’s Silver Spring home. Leibowitz held a top-secret clearance, the filings said.

But Leibowitz, 39, seems an unlikely candidate for a top U.S. security clearance. After news of the charges against him broke, it took reporters only minutes to track down news articles reporting that he was fired from a legal clerkship in Israel and was publicly chastised by a court there for leaking a judge’s private comments.

Experts were also puzzled that someone with a long history of public activism on polarizing issues would wind up working for U.S. law enforcement in a classified environment and be granted access to sensitive information.

A quick Google search reveals Leibowitz’s public life as an activist and also the frequent controversy that his views incited. Born into a famous family of Israeli Torah scholars and intellectuals, Leibowitz was a Yeshiva student whose experience as a tank commander in the Israeli military during the second intifada horrified him. After that, he wrote and advocated frequently in articles, blogs and public appearances for Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza, and at one time supported U.S. divestment from Israel, a view that he later changed.

“I think whoever was doing the vetting on him didn’t do their job,” Cohen said. “This guy sounds like just a real loose cannon on the deck. How could he slip through?”

Cohen said Leibowitz’s guilty plea shows that the FBI should have taken note of reports in 1999 in the Israeli newspapers Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post that Leibowitz was publicly rebuked by an Israeli Supreme Court justice for disclosing another judge’s comments.

“What he did and what he was reported to have done then are exactly the same. He violated confidences because he thought he knew more, he knew better,” Cohen said.

The FBI said it was reviewing the episode, including whether the agency’s clearance process was handled properly.

“In any case where it is learned that either one of our full-time employees or contract employees has willfully compromised sensitive data, a thorough internal review is automatically conducted to learn the full scope of the information compromised and to identify potential gaps in access control policy and personnel security clearance procedures,” FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told POLITICO.

Leibowitz’s attorney, Cary Feldman, declined to comment for this article.

It isn’t clear if the fact that Leibowitz legally changed his name in Montgomery County (Md.) in August 2008 from Shamai Kedem Leibowitz to Samuel Shamai Leibowitz might have contributed to the FBI apparently overlooking signs of his potential unsuitability for a classified assignment.

Federal records show that Leibowitz had previously worked on contract for the State Department in 2006 as a Hebrew teacher at the Foreign Service Institute. Associates said that Leibowitz lost the job after ideological enemies learned of where he was working and complained in Israeli press reports that he had no business teaching American diplomats about Israel.

Some lawyers said the top-secret clearance awarded to Leibowitz, who describes himself as an Israeli-American, was particularly puzzling because Americans who are also Israeli citizens frequently face clearance denials and delays because of concerns they might harbor an allegiance to Israel.

“I’m very surprised he got the clearance,” said David Schoen, an Atlanta lawyer who helped an employee of a defense contractor win back a clearance he lost because of ties to Israel. “I don’t mean to say I think dual citizens of America and Israel should get extra scrutiny, but given our case and our experience they do. But forget the dual citizen issues, he’s a character. There were some warning signs here, not that he would take information and pass it to the Israeli government, but just the opposite. … I think it’s bizarre.”

Interviews with associates of Liebowitz in Israel and the US, as well as a review of Leibowitz’s writings, suggest a person who does not fit easily in the various communities in which he has a foothold. The grandson of a famous Torah scholar, Orthodox and left wing, Leibowitz alienated some Israelis when, as part of PLO leader Marwan Barghouti’s 2002 criminal defense team, he likened the Palestinian’s targeting of Israelis in terrorist attacks to Moses killing an Egyptian. The radicalism of some of his positions have put him on the fringe of the left-leaning Mideast peace camp.

Last year, Leibowitz wrote a letter to the Washington Post advocating a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most Jews, even those on the left, recoil at that idea.

“As an Orthodox Jew, Shamai is also in a minority in his own community, which tends to be very hawkish,” one American pro-peace blogger friend of Leibowitz’s said on condition of anonymity. “He has suffered a great deal of ostracism as a result of this.”

“He is a wonderful, thoughtful, passionate person,” the activist continued. “Shamai is a fearless advocate for peace between Israel and the Arabs. … Whatever happened in this case was no doubt motivated by his wish to see a peaceful resolution of this conflict.”

The friend declined to speculate on the charges.

Leibowitz “is a good guy who fouled up,” said another friend, declining to discuss case details because Leibowitz hasn’t been sentenced yet. The friend said that all the media speculation about the nature of what was leaked so far has been “cold, cold, cold.”

Another associate, apparently familiar with the nature of the leak, told associates only that it was not that spectacular, something many U.S. foreign policy watchers likely came across on the unidentified blog in question and probably thought was not a big deal. “It’s not what he [leaked], it was that he leaked,” is how the associate characterized what occurred in April.

Another Israeli-born friend told POLITICO that Leibowitz contacted him in September, saying he was in trouble at work because of his past political beliefs, and asking him to please remove a link on his blog to a legal analysis he had written in January concerning the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The post was a legal interpretation that told Israeli soldiers, especially those with computer and IT duties, that they had a duty under international law not only to disobey orders that would kill civilians, but to use, if available, nonviolent measures to disrupt operations.

According to an e-mail seen by POLITICO, Leibowitz later contacted another associate in November, also asking him to remove another article Leibowitz had co-written concerning Israeli occupation-related matters. “Because I am working in a very sensitive position for the government, I do not want my views published on the web,” Leibowitz wrote.

Strangely, Leibowitz wrote in the November e-mail that he was working for the government in a sensitive job. But according to the Justice Department, Leibowitz stopped working for the FBI in August.

Cohen said it’s possible that the background check uncovered at least some of Leibowitz’s personal and professional history and that the FBI concluded none of it was disqualifying. While representing an accused terrorist such as Barghouti is highly unpopular in Israel, it is not the same as conspiring with one. Indeed, defense lawyers in U.S. terrorism and espionage cases are sometimes granted top-secret clearances to handle those trials.

“Maybe nothing stuck out under their guidelines except that he’d supported unpopular causes. Every lawyer sooner or later supports unpopular causes. Everyone I represent has done something to make them unpopular,” Cohen said.

Leibowitz, who has agreed to serve 20 months in jail over the document leak, is scheduled to be sentenced March 3.