The State Department contractor's trial was expected to begin in April. Contractor pleads guilty in leak case

A State Department contractor charged with leaking top-secret information about North Korea to Fox News entered a guilty plea Friday and agreed to serve a 13-month prison term.

During an 80-minute hearing at U.S. District Court, Stephen Kim pleaded guilty to a single felony count of disclosing national defense information to an unauthorized person, Fox News reporter James Rosen.


Kim admitted providing Rosen with the contents of a top-secret intelligence report on North Korean intentions to carry out nuclear tests. The contractor acknowledged that he and Rosen stepped out of their offices at State Department headquarters for a short meeting nearby on the morning of June 11, 2009.

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Within a couple of hours, Rosen published a story on the Fox News website reporting that U.S. intelligence had concluded “through sources in North Korea” that the secretive communist nation planned to carry out four nuclear tests in response to an expected U.N. resolution. The resolution passed the next day, but no such tests took place.

After prosecutor Michael Harvey laid out the facts at Friday’s session, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly led Kim through them a bit at a time.

Kim, wearing a blue suit and dark tie, stood at the courtroom lectern, flanked by defense attorney Abbe Lowell.

“Yes,” Kim said over and over when asked if he agreed with the facts set out by the prosecution. On a couple of occasions, Kim spoke so softly that the judge had to ask him to speak up.

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Near the end of the hearing, Kollar-Kotelly asked Kim how he pled to the count of unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

“I plead guilty,” Kim said calmly.

A small number of Kim’s friends looked on from the gallery during the plea hearing.

“Faced with the draconian penalties of the Espionage Act, the tremendous resources that the federal government devoted to his case (a half-dozen prosecutors and a dozen FBI agents), and the prospect of a lengthy trial in today’s highly-charged climate of mass disclosures, Stephen decided to take responsibility for his actions and move forward with his life,” Lowell said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

”It was the State versus a single individual, an uphill struggle to begin with. He took it on and did the best he could. Now we decide to stop,” Kim’s sister Yuri Lustenberger-Kim added in a statement on behalf of Kim’s family.

Under the terms of a plea bargain with prosecutors, the North Korea security expert agreed to a 13-month prison sentence, and to spend a year on supervised release. No fine would be imposed under the plea deal.

The proposed 13-month term is a modest one compared to the ten-year maximum a judge could have imposed on the charge to which Kim pled guilty, although judges usually sentence defendants in accordance with sentencing guidelines that tend to call for sentences well below the maximum.

Under the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to drop a false statements charge that allowed for a potential five additional years behind bars.

The terms of the deal suggest the government was eager to avoid a trial in the case. In addition to eliminating the possibility of an acquittal, a guilty plea also rules out the possibility that additional classified information could be disclosed at trial and eliminates the need for government officials to testify.

Kim’s lawyers had aggressively pursued discovery in the case, demanding records about the access various high-ranking current and former government officials had to the top-secret intelligence report. Recent court filings mentioned current White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel.

The defense could have sought to call one or more of those officials as witnesses to testify about handling of the intelligence report.

Lowell complained Friday that Kim was being pursued criminally while leaks from more senior officials never trigger such prosecution.

“Our system for prosecuting ‘leaks’ in this country is broken and terribly unfair. Lower-level employees like Mr. Kim are prosecuted because they are easier targets or often lack the resources or political connections to fight back. High-level employees leak classified information to forward their agenda or to make an administration look good with impunity,” the defense attorney said.

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The proposed 13-month prison term for Kim, which could ultimately amount to about 11 months under federal prison rules, is also relatively short compared to others imposed recently in high-profile leak-related criminal cases.

Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, convicted by a military judge of leaking a massive trove of military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, was sentenced last year to 35 years confinement.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who pled guilty to leaking the identities of CIA personnel involved in interrogating terror suspects, was sentenced last year to two-and-a-half years in prison. Former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, also got a two-and-a-half year sentence for lying and obstructing justice in a probe of the leak of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. President George W. Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence, so he never actually served time.

Kollar-Kotelly accepted the guilty plea Friday, but did not immediately approve the sentence. She set sentencing for April 2, about four weeks before Kim’s trial had been set to begin.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, the judge must eventually accept the agreed sentence or reject it outright?, in which case Kim could withdraw his plea and the government could seek to prove him guilty on both counts — leaking and lying.

During Friday’s proceedings, Kim admitted to the leak, but not to lying to the FBI.

Kim’s plea included an unusual stipulation that he did not act as a whistleblower in disclosing the intelligence information to Rosen.

Some published reports said Stephen Kim may have been motivated to leak the report out of concern that the U.S. government wasn’t doing enough to address the threat posed by North Korea. However, Harvey said Friday that Kim was conceding that he did not act to expose any “government waste, fraud or abuse or any kind of government malfeasance or misfeasance.”

Lowell dismissed the statement in court as just “background,” but prosecutors seized on the concession.

“Today Stephen Kim admitted to violating his oath to protect our country by disclosing highly classified intelligence about North Korea’s military capabilities,” U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen said in a statement.

“Kim admits that he wasn’t a whistleblower. He admits that his actions could put America at risk. Within hours of the dissemination of a top secret intelligence report about North Korea, he exposed its secrets, which were then broadcast to the world. As this prosecution demonstrates, we will not waver in our commitment to pursuing and holding accountable government officials who blatantly disregard their obligations to protect our nation’s most highly guarded secrets,” said Machen.

In their public comments Friday, Harvey and Kollar-Kotelly were vague Friday about the impact of the leak.

Harvey said Kim’s actions could have had a negative impact on the U.S. “ability to ferret out information about North Korea.”

The judge was a bit more direct.

“North Korea could do a review of what our potential sources might be,” Kollar-Kotelly said, in describing the facts the government laid out about the leak.

Lowell denied that Kim’s actions had such fallout.

“Stephen did not reveal any intelligence ‘sources’ or ‘methods,’” the defense lawyer said. “The information at issue was less sensitive or surprising than much of what we read in the newspaper every day. At the time of the disclosure and during the case, many former government officials and media commentators noted that the information was nothing significant, that much of it was in public sources, and that the prosecution [based on] this information was another example of the ‘over-classification’ of information by the government.”

North Korea has reportedly executed dozens of people in recent years over suspicions of disloyalty to the regime, including one of President Kim Jong-un’s uncles. It’s unclear precisely what damage the U.S. believes the Kim leak did. Information on the source of the intelligence report, whether that be a person or some technical capability, has been carefully redacted from public court documents.

Revelations that Justice Department investigators seeking access to Rosen’s e-mail records had described him as a co-conspirator in the crime contributed to a public furor last year that resulted in Attorney General Eric Holder issuing new guidelines limiting the use of similar tactics in the future.

Fox News’s main evening newscast reported the guilty plea in a 23-second voice-over Friday night. A network spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the plea.