According to federal prosecutors, former State Department contractor (and fellow Hoya!) Stephen Jin-Woo Kim was a bad little boy:
Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, 43, then a senior adviser for intelligence on detail to the State Department’s arms control compliance bureau, was charged with disclosing national defense information in June 2009 to a national news organization, believed to be Fox News, and lying to the FBI. Kim pleaded not guilty before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Although unnamed by the government, Fox News reporter James Rosen wrote a report posted June 11, 2009, saying that U.S. intelligence officials had warned that North Korea planned to respond to a new round of U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. Rosen reported that the CIA warning was developed through sources inside North Korea.
According to the indictment, Kim disclosed “Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information” that concerned the military capabilities of a foreign nation and intelligence “sources and/or methods,” which “could be used to the injury of the United States.”
My first instincts are to say 1) predicting North Korea would conduct a nuke test after getting hit by sanctions hardly requires secret intel, and 2) holy crap, the CIA has assets in North Korea?
Well, at least Mr. Kim’s lawyers love him:
“In its obsession to clamp down on perfectly appropriate conversations between government employees and the press, the Obama Administration has forgotten that wise foreign policy must be founded on a two-way conversation between government and the public,” said Abbe D. Lowell and Ruth Wedgwood in an August 27 statement (pdf) on the case.
“It is so disappointing that the Justice Department has chosen to stretch the espionage laws to cover ordinary and normal conversations between government officials and the press and, in doing so, destroy the career of a loyal civil servant and brilliant foreign policy analyst,” they said. “There is no allegation that a document was given, that any money changed hands, that any foreign government was involved, or that there was any improper motive in the type of government/media exchanges that happen hundreds of times a day in Washington.”
Well, leaking secret intel to the media is wrong, but this guy doesn’t sound like Robert Kim, either.
More at TPM.
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