Shane Harris digs into the background of "leak" prosecutor William Welch in a lengthy piece in today's Washingtonian: “Bully” Prosecutor Is the Obama Administration’s Point Man to Stop Leaks"
Harris details Welch's history of overreaching:
“There’s a fine line between being zealous and overly zealous,” says one defense attorney who has lost to Welch in court. “He crossed that line on several occasions.”
Welch is currently under criminal investigation for his role in the botched prosecution of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. But this did not stop the Justice Department from putting Welch in charge of its record-breaking policy of prosecuting so-called "leakers" - who are more often than not whistleblowers - under the archaic and problematic Espionage Act.
Up until the prosecution's case collapsed in the face of negative rulings in court and overwhelming negative media coverage, this aggressive "bully" prosecutor had National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in his cross hairs.
The Washingtonian piece follows a front-page piece in yesterday's conservative Washington Times describing Drake's whistleblowing and the ultimate collapse of the retaliatory prosecution against him for blowing the whistle on the NSA's billion-dollar boondoggle (Trailblazer), which needlessly sacrificed Americans' security and privacy in order to award billions in contracts to contractors:
In 2005, NSA Director Michael Hayden told Congress that Trailblazer was “a couple to several hundred million” dollars over budget and months behind schedule. The program was abandoned in 2006.
“In the end, they delivered nothing,” Mr. Drake said of contractor SAIC, which was paid $280 million for the demonstration phase of the program. Mr. Drake said executives at NSA, including the deputy director at the time, William B. Black, were former SAIC employees and the contract was “hard-wired for SAIC.”
Thomas A. Drake says continuing mismanagement and malfeasance have turned the nation's premier electronic spy agency into “the Enron of the U.S. intelligence community.”
Washingtonian closely examined Welch's prior cases as a prosecutor, and paints the picture of an overzealous prosecutor who is
. . . often overly aggressive in deciding which cases to bring and how to prosecute them . . .
I've chronicled Welch's overzealous, shady tactics of late on Kos, which have included twice subpoenaing former
New York Times reporter Jim Risen, calling whistleblowers "more dangerous" than spies, and subpoenaing a defendant's former attorney.
The Washingtonian article suggests his role heading up the Justice Department's war on whistleblowers could save his career:
For Welch, the leaks cases offer a path to career redemption.
If Welch is looking for redemption, he did not find it in the Drake case. The Justice Department's case completely unraveled days before trial, and last week, a federal judge sentenced Drake to one year of probation and community service, a far cry from the 35 years he was facing under the original indictment. I attended the sentencing. The New York Times described the Judge's take on the case:
Judge Bennett reserved his strongest condemnation for the Justice Department. . . The visibly angry judge said that Mr Drake had been through "four years of hell" and that the dragging out of the investigation--and then the dropping of the major charges on the eve of trial--was "unconscionable". . . "It doesn't pass the smell test," he said . . .[The judge's] remarks, following the collapse of the major charges against Mr. Drake, were another embarrassing setback for the government.