Fourth Estate In Defense of David Petraeus So he might have slipped a few secrets to his biographer/lover. Who am I to judge?

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

If you’re bored with defending NSA-megaleaker Edward Snowden, there’s another suspected leaker worthy of your sympathy: Retired Gen. David H. Petraeus.

According to anonymous “officials” cited late last week by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, federal law enforcement officials have recommended that Petraeus—former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as former head of the CIA—be prosecuted for leaking classified documents. According to press reports, the FBI discovered the classified documents in the possession of Petraeus’s biographer (and ex-lover) Paula Broadwell in 2012 while investigating a cyberstalking case. In the ensuing blow-up, the Petraeus-Broadwell affair was revealed, forcing the four-star general to resign from the CIA.


Petraeus has denied passing the documents to Broadwell, and she backs that assertion. Whether Petraeus is guilty or innocent, this leak is as unfair to him as it is predictable. Prosecutors have long leaked like this whenever they can’t make a case against a suspect and hope that a newspaper story will panic him into a plea bargain. The identity of the leakers—and their motivations for leaking—are almost as good a news story as the decision to prosecute. It seems unlikely that Attorney General Eric Holder, who will be leaving the office as soon as his replacement, Loretta Lynch, is confirmed, was behind the leak. Better to speculate that the prosecutors who have been working on the Petraeus case for two years, but don’t really have a case, took the initiative, hoping to score a last scalp as the Holder era fades and their team disbands. Or the leakers could be sending a message to Lynch, saying, “Hey, we’ve got a hot case for you over here.”

Now, there’s plenty of irony wrapped up in the idea of a suspected leaker’s reputation being destroyed by leaks, but that’s not the main reason we should care about this case.

Perhaps, instead, I can stir your conscience by asking if the case should have been brought in the first place. Government officials leak classified information day in and day out, sometimes as “whistle-blowers,” sometimes to float a policy balloon, sometimes to undermine their bureaucratic opponents, sometimes by mistake, and sometimes (I’m only guessing here) to placate the mistress who is writing an adulatory biography. Upwards of 1.4 million people hold “top secret” clearances, and the secrecy machine creates tens of millions of new classified documents each year. That sort of profligacy makes a mockery of the government’s definition of “top secret” as information that “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded as the last century closed, such over-classification tends to leave us less safe, not more, by slowing the information flow between policy makers. If neither justice nor national security are being served by pressuring the general, prosecutors should back off.

Powerful figures in government shouldn’t be allowed to leak anything they want to leak, nor should Petraeus escape reprimand if he broke his oath to keep secrets secret. You can’t very well let him off the hook and still expect lower-ranking government employees to keep classified information safe. That’s not the message anybody wants to send. But it’s worth asking how secret were the documents in the Petraeus case and what, if any, damage to national security did their leak cause? Did we experience a genuine security lapse in the Petraeus case, or are we merely relearning the lesson that Moynihan taught, that the bureaucracy, determined to cover its ass in advance, classifies way too much material? We don’t really have answers to those questions yet, but we do have glimmers. In November 2012, the Washington Post reported (anonymously sourced again) that Petraeus had assigned aides and military officials to give Broadwell documents, but that the documents had “been described as sensitive but relatively benign. Officials who have been briefed on them said they were mostly schedules and PowerPoint presentations classified as ‘secret.’” Another hint of the innocuous nature of the leaks appeared in a recent Bloomberg View piece. Petraeus has maintained his security clearance ever since the investigation began, it reported, and he has been “casually advising the White House on Iraq.” Does the right hand of the government know what the left is doing?

If we assume that Petraeus did violate his security clearance by releasing classified documents to Broadwell, wouldn’t that put him in the legal proximity of Edward Snowden? Snowden gave his classified stash to journalists he carefully selected, hoping that they would advance his policy views. That’s similar to what prosecutors seem to think Petraeus did, namely dumping a stash of documents to advance his policy agenda to a simpatico writer. Okay, okay, stop yelling at me! I know that what Snowden did and what prosecutors think Petraeus did are very different. There’s the matter of volume, scale, and the fact that Petraeus serves those in power while Snowden serves those who dissent.

Ever the strategist, Petraeus surely recalls the saga of John M. Deutch, who served as head of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, and endured a two-year investigation of his own for a security lapse. In that case, President Clinton granted Deutch a pardon, relieving him from the possibility of prosecution. (While we’re at it, let’s not forget the investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, which likewise concluded a security breach but did not result in a prosecution.) Given this precedent, Petraeus probably understands that even if convicted, the first available president will pardon him, making this lengthy investigation and his prosecution a joke. America might be comfortable sending a retired four-star general to jail for burning down a bank. But for passing a bad check? Never.

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