i believe the answer is in that it relates to Russia gate and catching more of the conspirators.
Watkins broke the Carter Page angle of the “Russia investigation” back in April 2017 with a story called “A Former Trump Adviser Met With A Russian Spy.” In it, Watkins claimed, “The revelation of Page’s connection to Russian intelligence — which occurred more than three years before his association with Trump — is the most clearly documented contact to date between Russian intelligence and someone in Trump’s orbit.”
Yeah, so if you accept my premise that the FBI & DOJ aren't going to prosecute newspapers, TV networks or their reporters over a low-level leak like this, then the other conspirators have to be other people in the Government.
And that gets really interesting. If he was the leaker was he acting on his own? Or was he doing the bidding of some (or, even all) of the SSCI?
The material being leaked was Executive Branch material. The SSCI can't arbitrarily decide to de-classify a lot of it. Were some of the members of the SSCI co-conspirators?
Here are the current members. Membership might have been slightly different prior to Jan 2017, when some of the leaking was taking place.