Man does The Intercept have bad luck protecting leakers from the government. A second leaker was caught, and this guy is in big trouble.
From Minneapolis Public Radio:
A Minneapolis FBI agent who started his career with the agency as an intern in 2000 has been charged with leaking classified information to the news website The Intercept.
Terry James Albury, who was assigned as Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport liaison working on counterterrorism matters, was charged this week by the Justice Department’s National Security Division with one count of “knowingly and willfully” transmitting documents and information relating to national defense to a reporter for a national news organization. Albury was also charged with a second count of refusing to hand over documents to the government.
He’s saying he did it because he was driven by his conscience:
Albury’s attorneys, JaneAnne Murray and Joshua Dratel, said in a statement that their client, the only African-American FBI field agent in Minnesota, was “driven by a conscientious commitment to long-term national security and addressing the well-documented systemic biases within the FBI.”
“Terry Albury served the U.S. with distinction both here at home and abroad in Iraq,” the statement read. “He accepts full responsibility for the conduct set forth in the Information.”
As a reminder, here’s the first big leaker that was caught way back in June of 2017:
Meet Reality Leigh Winner. The 25-y-o was charged today with leaking top secret NSA report on Russian hacking to @theintercept pic.twitter.com/YhKk688LWJ
— The Smoking Gun (@tsgnews) June 5, 2017
Remember Reality Winner? Yeah she’s not winning so much no more. And it looks like she’s going to get some company.
NPR describes how they caught him:
In January 2017, The Intercept published a series titled “The FBI’s Secret Rules,” based on Albury’s leaked documents, which show the depth and broad powers of the FBI expansion since 9/11 and its recruitment efforts.
The Intercept made two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI in late March 2016. The requests contained specific information identifying the names of documents that were not available to the public. In addition, the FBI identified about 27 secret documents published by The Intercept between April 2016 and February 2017.
“The FBI believes that the classified and/or controlled nature of the documents indicates the News Outlet obtained these documents from someone with direct access to them,” according to the warrant. “Furthermore, reviews of the FBI internal records indicate ALBURY has electronically accessed over two thirds of the approximately 27 documents via trusted access granted to him on FBI information systems.”
But that has to be taken with a grain of salt – I wouldn’t expect the FBI to let everyone know all the methods they have to catch leakers. They’d release just enough to nail them in a court of law…