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Ruthlessly persecuting government whistleblowers has become a month-to-month routine from the Trump Administration on into Biden’s. While the results of Super Tuesday have the candidates positioning themselves as two halves fighting over the soul of America, each was more than happy to see Daniel Hale, a former signals intelligence analyst for the US Air Force, be prevented from explaining his motives during the trail and jailed for as long as was possible.
The judge, as WaL reported on in 2021, sentenced Hale to 45 months for securing classified documents on the inner workings of Barack Obama’s secret drone assassination program and handing them over to the investigative journal The Intercept, which published them under the special investigation entitled: The Drone Papers.
The prosecution wanted 9 years as a deterrent against national security employees leaking classified information for their own self-aggrandizement, but the judge ruled against them, saying that it was clear from the few statements Hale was allowed to make that he acted on his conscience and didn’t take risk or reward into account.
Reporting from The Dissenter, which publishes news and updates about whistleblowers, their revelations, and their legal status, claims that Hale is under federal custody at his home until July.
Critically during his trial, Hale was not determined to have placed American lives in danger, a charge the prosecution sought to level against him by showing videos of Islamic State training manuals containing material from the documents he presented to The Intercept. However, the judge again ruled in Hale’s favor, saying that if the American intelligence offices knew ISIS had the materials, they could just as easily change their methods.
For these reasons he was given half as long a sentence as the prosecution wanted, but despite it, he was transferred to the Communications Management Unit (CMU) in Marion Federal Prison, a place where Muslim prisoners were imprisoned without trial during the George W. Bush Administration, and which they called “Little Guantanamo”.
Biden and I
As his first act of continuing defiance, Hale published an interesting op-ed in Al-Jazeera in which he compared the details of his trial to the findings of Special Counsel Robert Hur during his recently-concluded investigation of President Biden’s handling of classified documents in 2009 as Vice President.
“After reading Special Counsel Hur’s report, I was curious to find the similarities between my case and that of the investigation into the president,” Hale wrote. “According to the report, President Biden kept classified information outside of a secure facility at his home and office – as did I. The president later spoke with a reporter about the classified information he retained – again, as did I”.
“Both President Biden and I expressed to our respective reporters the concerns we had about official US policy – his about the failed 2009 surge in Afghanistan (as vice president) and mine about the consequences of that policy,” he added, referring to the drone assassination program run by Biden’s boss at the time.
Yet despite the similarities, Hur elected not to charge Biden under the Espionage Act which sealed away almost 3 years of Hale’s life in the harshest prison conditions available in the American penal system. The Special Counsel reasoned that Biden would have been seen as too sympathetic a figure to convict, citing both his current doddering mental faculties and sincere motivations of concern for Obama’s policy at the time.
So why two standards, Hale asks. After all, Hale was prevented from addressing the court as to his motives because of the government’s pre-trial motions which argued against his right to present evidence of what it called his “good motives,” worrying he too would be seen as too sympathetic.
Trail of tears
Biden was not convicted under the Espionage Act, but his Administration has not reflected the generosity of Special Counsel Hur.
Hale’s case was the first conviction of a whistleblower under the 1917 Espionage Act for the Biden Administration, which since the Vietnam War has exclusively been used to punish government whistleblowers, and attempt to punish Julian Assange, who is a journalist and not a government employee.
Several more cases have followed. Per The Dissenter, IRS whistleblower Charles Littlejohn was severely punished for revealing Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times, while the DoJ also finally pinched the individual responsible for providing the Vault 7 materials to Wikileaks, former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte. He recently received a 33-year prison sentence after the prosecutors were able to convince the judge he was a terrorist.
The Vault 7 leak was the largest in the history of the CIA, and exposed how America’s spymasters designed some of the most sophisticated hacking programs to ever be known about publically. Born from within the Center for Cyber Intelligence at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, their malware tunneled its way into products from Samsung TVs and smartphones to the Apple iPhone and the Google Android software.
These techniques permitted the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide, and Cloackman. The Agency also ran a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users, as well as OSx, Linux, and all other major PC operating systems. Vault 7 also showed that the US Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base.
Another high-profile conviction is likely on the cards for the Biden DoJ, as Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeria pleaded guilty on Monday for leaking Pentagon documents to a chat server on the gaming platform Discord that surfaced in the media last year, and revealed US government lies about the Ukraine proxy war.
Most importantly, it showed the Pentagon had low confidence that the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive which proved a disastrous defeat, could ever succeed, and showed that deniable US forces, i.e. Spec. Ops or other covert units, were operating inside Ukraine.
It’s expected that Teixeira will serve 11 to 16 years in federal prison under the Espionage Act. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: Whistleblower Daniel Hale, from Marrion Maximum Security Prison. PC: Daniel Hale Support Network, retrieved from X.
