Leni
This is interesting read ...who is a Washington lawyer that regularly handles classified matters, including representation of national security whistle-blowers...who does not see Winner as a whistle-blower rather a Traitor...tells the difference...
In our system, someone doesn’t earn the title whistleblower just because her actions might support a particular ideological agenda. The classified document Winner allegedly revealed was obviously newsworthy, but ‘nothing in it exposes any type of fraud, waste or abuse — or, most important, any unlawful conduct by the U.S. government’.... If she was, indeed, the source of the Intercept’s reporting,... Winner failed to blow the whistle on anything.
As a matter of law, no one who leaks classified information to the media (instead of to an appropriate governmental authority) is a whistleblower entitled to legal protection..... That applies to Winner, Snowden and Chelsea Manning, no matter what one thinks of their actions. .....The law appropriately protects only those who follow it.... Anyone who acts contrary does so at their own peril.....
As a person authorized by the government to have access to classified information, Winner had a lawful ‘obligation’ to protect any such material from unlawful disclosure to third parties, including news outlets.... The Trump administration did exactly what the Obama administration did do, at least nine times under the Espionage Act, when faced with an obvious apparent violation of well-settled law.
Few individuals other than the president have the legal right to decide unilaterally what constitutes the national security interests of the United States, and Winner was certainly not one of them.
They caught her because only six individuals had printed this specific document, and only one — Winner — had been in contact with the Intercept from her personal email account, which she had accessed from her work computer...... The case could not have been handed more easily to the government on a silver platter.