Former Air Force intelligence analyst accused of disclosing UAV secrets from the Obama era

May 9, 2019, 14:09 UTC

By Pete Williams

WASHINGTON – A former Air Force member, who served as an intelligence analyst and a government claimant, was charged Thursday with illegally giving out information. confidential to a journalist.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville, Tennessee, was arrested Thursday morning and would make his initial appearance later in the day.

Court documents indicated that Hale gave the journalist more than a dozen classified documents, which were subsequently published in whole or in part on an information website. Although the documents do not mention the journalist or the news agency, federal officials confirmed that he was the journalist, Jeremy Scahill, and that the online news site was The Intercept. Scahill is on the website among the three founding writers.

A grand jury said that Hale had met the reporter during a reading tour to Washington on April 29, 2013, which had started several months of conversations with each other, in person and through an application of encrypted messaging.

The FBI said that while he was working at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Hale had printed 11 secret or top secret documents describing counter-terrorism operations conducted by the United States under US law. President Barack Obama's administration. Court documents indicated that one person described a military campaign against Al Qaeda and another contained information collected by US intelligence about "specific targets".

Prosecutors said that out of nearly two dozen documents printed by Hale that were not related to his work as an entrepreneur, he had provided at least 17 to Scahill or The Intercept. Scahill has published a book called "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battleground" and has written on drones for The Intercept. He also directed a documentary film, "Dirty Wars".

In the indictment reiterating Hale, the documents he provided "were published by the reporter 's online press point and collected and published in a book written by the journalist".

Scahill's article on drones for The Intercept, published in 2015, indicates that the documents published by the latter were "provided by a whistleblower".

"The source stated that he had decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he felt that the public had the right to understand the process whereby people are listed on murder lists and eventually murdered." by order of the highest level of the US government, "says the article. I said.

The source quoted the source cited by Intercept: "This scandalous explosion of watch lists, monitoring people and their ranking on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them" baseball cards ", inflicting them death sentences, on a world battlefield – was, from the first example, wrong. "

Hale has been charged with illegally obtaining and disclosing classified information relating to national defense and theft of government property.

In August 2018, a former NSA contractor, Reality Winner, was sentenced to five years in prison for disclosing to The Intercept classified documents describing in detail Russian efforts to hack computers at a company that manufactured software for local election officials. She pleaded guilty to having sent the documents to the news site.