Posted on 06/02/2006 3:52:43 PM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON -- Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources.
Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China.
The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed to pay Lee $750,000 as part of the settlement, which ends contempt of court proceedings against five reporters who refused to disclose the sources of their stories about the espionage investigation.
Lee said of the settlement: "We are hopeful that the agreements reached today will send the strong message that government officials and journalists must and should act responsibly in discharging their duties and be sensitive to the privacy interests afforded to every citizen of this country."
The payment by AP, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and ABC is the only one of its kind in recent memory, and perhaps ever, legal and media experts said.
The companies said they agreed to the sum to forestall jail sentences for their reporters, even larger payments in the form of fines and the prospect of revealing confidential sources.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
This is another entry for the Hall of shame.
I have been covered up and have not followed thru on my desire to create the hall of shame for fairpress.
And to this day we do not know the truth about Wen Ho Lee.
And the U.S. is supposed to be intelligent...
...Or what was pushed off the front pages when this occurred.
This guy ought to have been put up against the wall and shot. Instead, he seems to have hit the jackpot. Only in America.
Can't be true.
When are they going to give him a medal?
They paid Richard Jewell, and now this. It's encouraging, but I'd like to see the FCC get interested in something besides bare boobs. We are poorly erved by media with no respect for the truth. The Drive by media executes people to serve as hors d'ouvres during the cocktail hour.
Had the FBI and other agencies done their jobs correctly, Lee may have been in jail. The government's prosecution of this case was about as incompetent as any.
Did they ever settle what happened to the legacy tapes?
Thanks bert. This one's still a curiousity. Anyway, in a somewhat related episode, Sandy Bergler, caught red-handed stealing top secret docs from the national archives was fined how much??? It would appear Lee's hurt feelings are worth a lot more than our national secrets, eh?
Updated story with Bill Richardson's involvement.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1642851/posts
WND Exclusive REMEMBER LOS ALAMOS
FBI begs Wen Ho's wife
for missing nuclear tapes
Violating plea bargain, Lee stiffs feds, forcing them to turn to spouse for help
Posted: November 27, 2001
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- Former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee has broken his plea agreement by failing to help FBI agents recover classified computer tapes he stole from Los Alamos National Laboratory. But instead of refiling dropped charges against him, federal prosecutors are pumping his wife for clues to the missing tapes, WorldNetDaily has learned....
Lee was caught downloading from a secret lab computer network so-called legacy codes covering the entire history of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program – including large volumes of bomb-testing data used in developing nuclear weapons through computer simulations. The codes are considered extremely valuable to China. He then copied them onto 10 portable computer tapes.
Six of them are still missing.
Lee was released Sept. 13, 2000, after nine months in solitary confinement, on his guilty plea to a single felony count of mishandling classified information. He acknowledged copying secrets onto tapes and removing them from Los Alamos.
The U.S. government dropped 58 other charges – including injuring the U.S., aiding a foreign nation and violating the Atomic Energy Act, which could have brought a life sentence – and gave him immunity from prosecution provided that he tell authorities what he did with the tapes and cooperate in ongoing espionage investigations.
But despite intensive debriefing by the FBI, Lee has not adequately explained why he copied the files to the tapes and what he did with the tapes. The tapes remain missing. Authorities don’t buy his innocent claim, first made on CBS' "60 Minutes," that he copied the information to back up his work, because numerous measures had been built into Los Alamos’ computing system to protect against file loss. Lab physicists, moreover, testified that there was no legitimate reason for one scientist to have made backups of the entire library of source codes, since they normally work on just one small piece at a time. Authorities also say Lee’s claim he tossed the missing tapes in a trash bin behind his office at Los Alamos didn’t check out. And why toss those, yet keep the others?
Under the terms of his plea deal, Lee agreed to disclose such information
And now Lee is going to cash in thanks to Reno and company.
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