Obama Double Standard: Petraeus Gets Off, Fox News Leaker Gets 13 Months
Image: Obama Double Standard: Petraeus Gets Off, Fox News Leaker Gets 13 Months (Alexis C Glenn/UPI/Landov)
Monday, 16 Mar 2015 04:08 PM
By Joel Himelfarb
A lawyer for an imprisoned government contractor behind bars for leaking classified information to Fox News correspondent James Rosen says his client is the victim of a "profound double standard" benefiting high-profile leakers like retired Gen. David Petraeus, The New York Times reported Monday.
Petraeus is scheduled to be sentenced next month for giving his journals containing notes from his meetings with the president and other secrets including the names of covert agents to his lover and biographer Paula Broadwell.
Petraeus, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor count in the case, resigned as CIA director in November 2012 after it became public that the FBI was investigating whether he had illegally disclosed classified material.
The Justice Department has said it will not seek jail time in the case of Petraeus, one of the most celebrated American generals in modern times.
In response, Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Stephen J. Kim, currently serving a 13-month sentence for disclosing classified information about North Korea to Fox News, says his client should be immediately released from prison.
Lowell wrote in a March 6 letter to prosecutors that the decision "to permit General Petraeus to plead guilty to a misdemeanor demonstrates more clearly than ever the profound double standard that applies when prosecuting so-called 'leakers' and those accused of disclosing classified information for their own purposes."
The letter "serves as a sort of epilogue to the leak crackdown" overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder, according to the Times. He is expected to leave office in the coming weeks after his successor is confirmed by the Senate. More people have been charged with discussing national security matters with journalists during Holder's tenure than during all previous administrations combined.
But unlike Petraeus, most of those people charged were low- or mid-level officials or contractors.
Lowell contends that it is unfair for his client Kim to be required to serve prison time when Petraeus – whose actions, the attorney claims, were basically the same as Kim's – is spared incarceration.
"Our family and our friends think it is just terribly unfair and not right that Stephen was given less consideration and different treatment for doing no more, and even less, than General Petraeus," said Kim’s sister, Yuri Lustenberger-Kim.
Others, however, have said there's a different double standard in effect and that it is working to Petraeus' disadvantage.
When you look at [ATF Operation] Fast and Furious, you look at the IRS, you look at some of these other scandals in the administration, certainly, that violated U.S. security to some degree … no one has been taken to any kind of a trial for all of those deceptions," Gen. Paul Vallely said earlier this month on Newsmax TV.
"And here you have Gen. Petraeus sort of hung out to dry," said Vallely. "So, in a way there is a double standard."
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