Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers, among the possible candidates for the next CIA director, leaked classified information about the hunt for Osama bin Laden to filmmakers of an acclaimed movie, Pentagon investigators have concluded, McClatchy Newspapers reports.

The Justice Department, however, has declined to pursue criminal prosecution since receiving the case in September, McClatchy reported, citing two senior U.S. officials.

Investigators with the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s Office said Vickers disclosed to filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty” the name of a U.S. Special Operations Command officer involved in planning the May 2011 raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.

Revealing classified information is a crime.

Vickers is among the possible candidates to replace retired Army Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director.

“Mike Vickers is an outstanding defense and intelligence professional and is well respected inside the Department of Defense and the intelligence community,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

Ron Machen Jr./doj photo

Attorney General Eric Holder assigned the U.S. Attorneys from D.C. and Baltimore to launch criminal probes into national security leaks to members of the media.

In a press release issued Friday, Holder said D.C. U.S. Attorney Ron Machen and Baltimore U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein will lead the probes.

The leaks center around the the disrupted bomb plot by al Qaeda and a New York Times story about the U.S. cyberattack program targeting the Iranian nuclear program.

“These two highly-respected and experienced prosecutors will be directing separate investigations currently being conducted by the FBI,” Holder said. “I have every confidence in their abilities to doggedly follow the facts and the evidence in the pursuit of justice, wherever it leads.”

The Justice Department’s bullseye on the FBI and NYPD via a grand jury probe into leaks in terrorism cases appears to have been prompted a year ago by a news story about an Al Qaeda mastermind, sources said.

The story was an Associated Press exclusive from Washington about the impending indictment of Adnan Shukrijumah, who had recruited Najibullah Zazi and his Flushing High School pals to blow up New York subways in 2009.

The indictment of the fugitive Shukrijumah, in New York’s Eastern District, linked the Zazi subway plot to another Al Qaeda terrorist plot in Manchester, England.

But the AP published its story before Shukrijumah’s indictment was announced.

The story forced law enforcement officials overseas — in Norway, of all places — to scramble and speed the arrests of two suspects in Oslo. The pair had been under surveillance for a year.

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By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON – Sometimes leak investigation fade into the sunset, never to be heard again.

That appears to be the case with the Justice Department, which has quietly dropped the  criminal investigation into a lawyer who admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times. The Times ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize with the help of that disclosure, according to Josh Gerstein of Politico.

“The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005 revealing that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush ordered the interception of certain phone calls and email messages into and out of the U.S. without a warrant — a move many lawyers contend violated the 1978 law governing intelligence-related wiretaps,” Gerstein wrote.

To read more click here.

By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON -- A contract worker for the State Department has been indicted here on charges of unlawfully disclosing national defense information to a national news outlet, the Justice Department announced Friday.

Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, 43, was charged with leaking the information and lying to the FBI. The indictment was unsealed Friday.

The Associated Press reported that the leak was made to Fox News and it involved information about North Korea.

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By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON – A leak investigation involving a  Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent  is stirring up controversy.

The Washington Post reports that the union representing ICE agent claims the agency is harassing an agent suspected of leaking information about controversial quotas to the media.

The American Federation of Government Employees National Council 118 claims the agent has been targeted in the leak probe because his surname is Asian, as is that of the Washington Post reporter, Spencer Hsu, who wrote the story, the Post reported.

To read more click here.

OTHER ICE STORIES

• Calls for Resignation for Head of ICE “Just Part of Territory” (Washington Post)
  

Patrick Fitzgerald discussing a previous case

Things aren’t looking up for you when a high-profile U.S. Attorney and the special agent in charge of the local FBI testify against you in a federal trial. 

By Robert Mitchum
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — When Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose reported to Chicago FBI headquarters on Sept. 6, 2006, he thought he was receiving information on a terrorist fugitive authorities wanted him to pursue.

But when he opened the door of a conference room on the building’s 10th floor, he found the two most powerful men in Chicago federal law enforcement: U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald and Robert Grant, special agent-in-charge of the Chicago FBI office. There was a leak in the witness protection program, they told Ambrose, and investigators had traced the breach to him.

On Monday, Fitzgerald and Grant took turns on the witness stand at Ambrose’s trial, testifying about what happened on that morning 2½ years ago. After being confronted with evidence, Ambrose admitted to telling a family friend about the valuable witness he had protected twice, both officials testified.

“He said, ‘I bleeped up, I shot my mouth off … but it’s not what you think,’” Fitzgerald quoted Ambrose as saying that day.

 Fitzgerald’s nearly four hours of testimony was the centerpiece Monday as Ambrose’s trial entered its second week. Ambrose stands accused of an unprecedented leak of information from the highly confidential witness-protection program while he served on the security detail of hit man-turned-witness Nicholas Calabrese in 2002 and 2003.

Attorneys for Ambrose tried to block Fitzgerald’s and Grant’s testimony in pretrial hearings, arguing that he was not read his Miranda rights before the 2½-hour interview. But U.S. District Judge John Grady ruled that Ambrose’s admissions that day were valid evidence, clearing the way for Monday’s high-powered testimony.

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