The Signal Leak Has Little Precedent

Defense secretaries usually take a hard line when it comes to the disclosure of classified information on their watch.

During the George W. Bush administration, Donald H. Rumsfeld said that those who break federal law in doing so should be imprisoned. His successor, Robert M. Gates, said it should be a career-ending offense for anyone in the Defense Department.

But after a leak on a commercial messaging app, the Trump administration has played down the episode and signaled there is little chance of an investigation.

President Trump has insisted that administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had committed only a minor transgression in discussing secret military plans in a group chat on Signal.

Discussing imminent combat operations on a platform not approved for classified information is, by itself, highly irregular. Even more extraordinary was the fact that a senior official had inadvertently invited a journalist to the chat.

Circling the wagons, the Trump administration has adopted the line that advance word of the timing and weapons platforms to be used in an attack were not classified, and Attorney General Pam Bondi signaled on Thursday that there was unlikely to be a criminal investigation.

But usually, any government employee — whether a civilian or a unformed member of the military — would be subject to severe consequences for failing to protect operational security.

A government employee accused of such an act could be prosecuted in court under various statutes if they knowingly transmit national security secrets to a person who is not authorized to receive them, or if they disclose those secrets through gross negligence.

The Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized retention or disclosure of defense information that could harm the United States or aid its enemies, has been used to prosecute both spies and leakers alike.

Last November, for example, Jack Teixeira, a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for posting photos of top-secret documents in online chats using the Discord app. The documents included details about some of the military hardware being supplied to Ukraine and how it would be transported.

The military takes extraordinary measures to keep its plans for imminent operations under wraps. In the naval service, for example, orders to plan and execute combat operations are classified secret and received only through secure and encrypted channels. Typically, commanders then restrict outgoing communications with a simple verbal order: “River City.”

That is most likely nod to a line from the song “Ya Got Trouble” in the Broadway hit and film “The Music Man,” but its meaning is clear when broadcast to the crew at once over the ship’s loudspeaker.

All outgoing phone lines and emails are immediately shut off to all but the highest-ranking officers. Only then will the rest of the crew be briefed on the impending plans.

“When it comes to the mission, there are certain details that you just do not disclose on an unclassified channel,” Sabrina Singh, a deputy Pentagon press secretary during the Biden administration, said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday. “You keep those operational details safe to keep your fighter pilots safe, to keep your military men and women safe.”

In 2002, when details from planning for a potential invasion of Iraq were published by The New York Times, Mr. Rumsfeld said that unauthorized disclosure of classified information could help terrorists and put American lives in jeopardy.

“It is against the law,” Mr. Rumsfeld wrote. “It costs the lives of Americans. It diminishes our country’s chance for success.”

And in a television interview, he said that anyone who leaks should be prosecuted.

“Every once in a while, there are people in the United States government who decide that they want to break federal criminal law and release classified information, and they ought to be imprisoned,” the defense secretary said. “And if we find out who they are, they will be imprisoned.”

Mr. Gates angrily spoke out after a series of leaks in 2009 about an investigation into President Barack Obama’s plans for the war in Afghanistan, as well as a shooting at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 30 wounded.

“Frankly if I found out with high confidence anybody who was leaking in the Department of Defense, who that was, that would probably be a career-ender,” Mr. Gates said.

For most of American history, the government generally did not deal with unauthorized disclosures of national security secrets by criminal prosecution. Rather, people suspected of mishandling classified information were generally dealt with through other means, like losing their security clearances or being fired.

But in the 21st century, the Justice Department has been bringing criminal charges in leak cases much more routinely.

The shift began midway through the George W. Bush administration, amid leaks of secrets about matters like disputed surveillance and torture programs in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and as technology began to make it easier to identify likely culprits.

The new practice continued into the Obama administration. By the end of its eight years, prosecutors had charged more leak cases than were brought under all previous presidents combined.

The Justice Department in the first Trump administration then went further by bringing unprecedented charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for publishing U.S. secrets even though he was only a recipient of the information and not himself a leaker. Under the Biden administration, the department secured a guilty plea in that case.

While a growing number of cases have involved officials with access to classified information from across the government, a subset involved people who worked for the military, either in civilian or uniformed roles. Notable cases include:

In 2011, Thomas A. Drake, a former civilian official with the National Security Agency, a component of the Defense Department, struck a misdemeanor plea deal to end a leak-related case against him. Mr. Drake had been accused in connection with a long-running investigation involving leaks to The Baltimore Sun, a case that began in the Bush years and was charged in the Obama era, but largely collapsed.
In 2013, Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, was sentenced to 35 years in prison — the longest sentence ever in a leak case — after being convicted in a court-martial trial of providing archives of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. In January 2017, Mr. Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence, but she spent about seven years in prison following her 2010 arrest.
Also in 2013, the Justice Department charged a civilian contractor for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, over his leak of large numbers of documents about government surveillance and hacking activities to journalists. Mr. Snowden is living in Russia and is a fugitive from those charges.
In 2015, David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, struck a plea deal with prosecutors for a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information in connection with keeping notebooks with classified information from his time as a top general in the Afghanistan War — some of which he had shared with his biographer.
In 2016, James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general who had been vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with reporters in connection with a leak investigation. Mr. Obama pardoned him before he could be sentenced.
In 2018, Reality Winner, a former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than five years in prison for leaking a top-secret government report on Russian hacking. She was released early for good behavior in 2021.
In 2020, Henry Kyle Frese, a civilian former Pentagon counterterrorism analyst was sentenced by a federal judge to more than two years in prison for sharing national security secrets with a pair of reporters and a consultant.