Why is Pres­i­dent Obama’s Jus­tice Depart­ment threat­en­ing a Pulitzer Prize-win­ing New York Times reporter with jail over a sto­ry that embar­rassed the CIA dur­ing the George W. Bush administration?

Obama’s DOJ is forcing Risen to choose between risking jail and testifying against his alleged source, Jeffrey Sterling, whom the government is prosecuting under the draconian 1917 Espionage Act, which makes it a potential capital offense to give national defense information to the enemy.

James Risen is one of the few main­stream jour­nal­ists will­ing to take on the CIA. In 2004 and 2005, he exposed scan­dals involv­ing water­board­ing and spy­ing on Amer­i­cans. The cur­rent con­tro­ver­sy con­cerns Chap­ter 9 of his 2006 book, State of War: The Secret His­to­ry of the CIA and the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, which describes a failed CIA plot to give the Ira­ni­ans faulty blue­prints for a nuclear weapon through a Russ­ian sci­en­tist. Accord­ing to Risen’s con­fi­den­tial source, the sci­en­tist warned the Ira­ni­ans that the blue­prints con­tained flaws, and the plot blew up in the CIA’s face.

Obama’s DOJ is forc­ing Risen to choose between risk­ing jail and tes­ti­fy­ing against his alleged source, Jef­frey Ster­ling, whom the gov­ern­ment is pros­e­cut­ing under the dra­con­ian 1917 Espi­onage Act, which makes it a poten­tial cap­i­tal offense to give nation­al defense infor­ma­tion to the ene­my. Of course, the Ira­ni­ans had already been told not to trust the blue­prints. What Risen did was give infor­ma­tion to the Amer­i­can peo­ple about the activ­i­ties of its gov­ern­ment — the pre­cise rea­son our country’s founders estab­lished the First Amendment’s guar­an­tee of a free press.

Of the 11 peo­ple in Amer­i­can his­to­ry who have been charged with espi­onage for leak­ing clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, eight of them have been charged under Oba­ma, who ran for pres­i­dent in 2008 vow­ing to restore our civ­il lib­er­ties after the abus­es of the Bush Administration.

Risen’s sto­ry didn’t jeop­ar­dize nation­al secu­ri­ty; it just embar­rassed the CIA. Nev­er­the­less, DOJ lawyers told the Fed­er­al Appel­late Court in Vir­ginia that forc­ing Risen to tes­ti­fy against his source would serve the government’s com­pelling inter­est in nation­al secu­ri­ty. The mere invo­ca­tion of nation­al secu­ri­ty is gen­er­al­ly all it takes for gov­ern­ment lawyers to win in court, as they did here.

The Supreme Court reject­ed Risen’s appeal last week, leav­ing in place the deci­sion from the Unit­ed States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Cir­cuit order­ing Risen to reveal his source. That means the gov­ern­ment can charge him with con­tempt of court, which car­ries jail time. Risen has vowed that if he ends up hav­ing to choose between betray­ing his source and fac­ing incar­cer­a­tion, he’ll choose the lat­ter, believ­ing that if the gov­ern­ment can com­pel his tes­ti­mo­ny, sources will dry up and we will know even less about what our gov­ern­ment is up to.

When asked by a reporter about the Risen case, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Eric H. Hold­er Jr. said: ​“As long as I’m attor­ney gen­er­al, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail.” Holder’s rhetoric is com­fort­ing but far from con­clu­sive. First, it con­flicts with the actions of the DOJ, which sub­poe­naed Risen, then demand­ed that he reveal his source, then insist­ed that the tri­al court enforce the sub­poe­na, then argued that Risen had no reporter’s priv­i­lege to refuse to tes­ti­fy and urged the Supreme Court to reject Risen’s appeal. Sec­ond, Holder’s state­ment to the press con­tains wig­gle room because Hold­er can lat­er declare that Risen wasn’t doing the job of a reporter when he pub­lished an unau­tho­rized leak from a CIA informant.

That being said, I sin­cere­ly hope that Hold­er and the DOJ will not seek to charge Risen with con­tempt of court. Jail­ing a reporter for refus­ing to tes­ti­fy against a con­fi­den­tial source threat­ens press free­dom and the First Amendment.

Mean­while, in a rare case of con­gres­sion­al push­back against the CIA, Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee Chair Dianne Fein­stein (D‑Calif.) is attempt­ing to declas­si­fy por­tions of a com­mit­tee report that con­clud­ed the CIA had repeat­ed­ly mis­led Con­gress and the White House when it claimed that its bru­tal post‑9/​11 enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion pro­gram (aka tor­ture) pro­duced action­able intelligence.

Oba­ma says he favors releas­ing as much of the report as pos­si­ble, but his lawyers demand a delay on the grounds that the CIA needs to first ​“under­take a num­ber of secu­ri­ty steps to pro­tect the safe­ty of per­son­nel and facil­i­ties abroad.”

While Oba­ma would seem to have lit­tle rea­son to cov­er up CIA activ­i­ties dur­ing the Bush régime, he does have an incen­tive to pre­vent leaks from his own CIA. He has per­son­al­ly tak­en own­er­ship of the CIA drone strikes in Yemen that assas­si­nat­ed Anwar al-Awla­ki, an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, and, in a sep­a­rate strike, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdul­rah­man. With­out pro­vid­ing any evi­dence, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has jus­ti­fied the killing of the father on the grounds that he played an oper­a­tional role in al Qae­da and that cap­tur­ing him was not fea­si­ble. But it has nev­er giv­en an offi­cial rea­son for killing Abdulrahman.

Then there’s Beng­hazi. Accord­ing to an August 2013 CNN report, at the time of the Sep­tem­ber 2012 attack that left Ambas­sador Christo­pher Stevens and three oth­er Amer­i­cans dead, dozens of CIA oper­a­tives were work­ing out of the annex of the U.S. con­sulate on a secret project.

Yet con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tions into the trag­ic events in Beng­hazi have so far focused on the more triv­ial issue of White House talk­ing points. And as long as the nation’s inves­ti­gate reporters can be intim­i­dat­ed, jailed or mar­gin­al­ized, no one will be left to ask the trou­bling ques­tions about CIA activ­i­ties in places like Beng­hazi, or in Yemen, where the al-Awla­ki fam­i­ly has been wait­ing near­ly three years for an expla­na­tion as to why the CIA assas­si­nat­ed their 16-year-old boy, who, like his father, was a U.S. citizen.