Greenwald responds to some unflattering profiles cropping up, peppered with homophobia, including one yesterday in the New York Daily News that dug up a dispute with his condo board over the size of his dog. He’s even accused of being a businessman for a while, some back-tax issues with the IRS and the various sundry, occasionally embarrassing things that will accumulate if you live a life. I was once “power-gluted” myself. I can’t see how any of it detracts from his role in doing what he believed was right in the Snowden case – and I know for a fact that this has been a sincere and principled passion on his part. But I wouldn’t say it’s a function of the persecution of a journalist who rattled those in power – which is too easy a victim card to play for a big boy like Glenn; it is, alas, simply a fact of today’s public life.
Meanwhile, Erik Wemple finds that Greenwald is probably safe from prosecution under the Espionage Act, no matter what David Gregory thinks:
Attorney Jeffrey J. Pyle, a partner in the Boston-based firm Prince Lobel Tye LLP, takes a whack at that question in this post on Greenwald’s exposure:
To prove that Greenwald acted willfully, the government would have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted “with an evil-meaning mind, that is to say, that he acted with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful.” Bryan v. United States, 524 U.S. 184, 191-92 (1998). For all we can see, Greenwald acted in the time-honored tradition of investigative reporting. It would be next to impossible for the government to prove that he knew his conduct was unlawful.
Hold on: Greenwald clearly knew that the information from Snowden was classified and closely held by the government. So why wouldn’t he have known quite well that his conduct was unlawful? That’s an easy one, according to Pyle. Decades of U.S. history tell us that the government has leaked all manner of classified information to journalists — it’s a commonplace occurrence around these parts. Yet journalists haven’t been prosecuted for publishing that information. When was the last time Bob Woodward faced indictment?
To slam-dunk the situation, consider that around the same time that Greenwald dropped his first NSA scoop, Attorney General Eric Holder said this: “[T]he [Justice] Department has not prosecuted, and for as long as I’m attorney general of the United States, will not prosecute any reporter for doing his or her job.”
The Dish 