In the story, Risen gives a personal account of his struggles to publish significant stories involving national security in the post-9/11 period and how both the government and his top editors at the Times suppressed his reporting on stories, including the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, for which he would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Risen describes how his story would have come out right before the 2004 presidential election of President Bush over John Kerry, potentially changing the outcome of that election. But under government pressure, The New York Times refused to publish the story for more than a year, until Risen was publishing a book that would have had the revelations in it first.
James Risen talking:
it’s in the spring of 2004. I was meeting with a source, who—I was talking to this source, and in the process of talking, the source said, “There’s something that I know that I think is the biggest secret in the government, but I’m too frightened to tell you about it right now.” And it obviously took me aback, and I kind of tried to convince the source to talk more about it, but I couldn’t. And I just decided to try to keep meeting with this source over the next few months. And finally, several months later, as I was leaving a meeting with this source, I just turned to the source, and I said, “You’ve got to tell me now what it is that you’re talking about.” And finally, the source just kind of started talking about what he—what the source knew, and eventually, you know, in the course of about 10 or 15 minutes, told me the outlines of the NSA’s domestic spying program, that had begun under the Bush administration, both the warrantless wiretapping and the broader effort to gather email and phone records of Americans. And it was the outlines of this massive program that we later learned was codenamed Stellar Wind.
And I then found other people who could confirm this story, and also found that a reporter sitting next to me in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, Eric Lichtblau, was also hearing similar things, and so we started working together. And we had a story, a draft of a story, by that fall of 2004. And I decided to just go through the front door and call Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA. And I called the press person at the NSA and kind of bluffed my way and said, “I need to talk to Hayden right away.” And to my surprise, the bluff worked, and he got on the phone. And I started reading him the top of the draft of the story that Eric and I had written, and he just let out this very audible gasp and said, “Well, whatever we’re doing is legal and effective and operationally, you know, legitimate,” or something. And then he got off the phone.
And that—I think pretty soon after that, he called the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, Phil Taubman, and that began a very long—that was kind of the beginning of the negotiations between The New York Times and the government over whether to publish the story. And we had meetings—started meetings in the fall, before the election, had a meeting with the acting CIA director, John McLaughlin, and his chief of staff and me and Phil Taubman, who was the Washington bureau chief, at the Old Executive Office Building, where they were trying to convince us not to run the story, although they kept saying not—where they kept refusing to admit that the story was true. They just kept saying, “Hypothetically, if this story—if something like this was going on, it would be too important for the government for you to—a newspaper, to report on it.”
what we later learned, they had grabbed—they were—the NSA, which was supposed to spy on foreigners overseas, had been turned inward on the United States by the Bush administration, and so they were spying on Americans when they were only supposed to spy on foreigners. And they were getting—they were listening in to the phone conversations of Americans’ international phone calls with foreigners, without search warrants, without any warrants from the secret FISA Court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. And they were also gathering the phone records, logs and email addresses and messages of Americans throughout the country.
And so, basically, this was the—what I was told about was the outlines of what we now know as all of the domestic spying that has been going on since 9/11. It’s the same program that Edward Snowden later leaked documents about. He provided greater, you know, detail and showed how it had expanded beyond what it started out as by the end of the Bush administration.
what the impact would have been, if we had written the story before the election. You know, obviously, I don’t know. It’s possible it could have had a fairly significant impact. But what happened instead was, you know, we wrote the story, we had a draft, and then we had meetings with the editors. Eric and I and our editor, Rebecca Corbett, met—went to New York to meet with Bill Keller and Jill Abramson. And Phil Taubman, who was the bureau chief, went up, as well. And Keller decided not to run it before the election. And we had—you know, I describe the meeting, that meeting, in my piece. And it was a very tense, tense meeting, where we had some tense exchanges.
And then, afterwards, after the election, Eric and I convinced the editors to let us try again and try to get it into the paper again. And in December of 2004, we, you know, had rewritten it and re-reported the story. And they killed it again.
the same grounds, that the Bush administration argued that it was too valuable for the counterterrorism programs in the United States, that it was the most—their argument was it was the crown jewel of counterterrorism programs, it was the most important thing that the U.S. was doing against al-Qaeda, and that if we revealed it, we would be responsible for hurting America’s national security. And so, that was the basic argument. And the editors agreed with that at the time.
My argument was that we had sources saying that it might be illegal or unconstitutional, and that it clearly was—they were clearly going around the system that had been put in place by Congress 30 years earlier. You know, in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set in place a legal structure for the surveillance of Americans and others in the United States for purposes of national security. And what it requires, they set up a secret court called the FISA Court. And when the government wants to do the kind of spying that they were doing in this case, they’re supposed to go to that secret court and get a search warrant. And what we found was that they weren’t doing that. They had decided to go around the FISA Court, ignore the FISA Court, and just start spying, on a massive scale, without telling anybody. And it was—you know, a lot of people who knew about it thought it was illegal.
And, you know, our argument, I think, was, terrorists know that the United States listens to their—tries to listen to their conversations. That wasn’t the big secret. The big secret was that the United States government was ignoring its own laws. And so, I thought that was the reason to publish the story, then and later. But the national security argument from the Bush administration won out in those debates with the editors.
The New York Times didn’t get anything. You know, we—I guess the only thing they got was they angered me. And I decided—after they had decided to kill it a second time, I took a book leave, and I decided to put the story in a book, because I thought that was the only way I could get the story out. And I felt—there had been a whole bunch of other stories that they had killed or held over the previous few years that I kind of detail in this piece. And so, this, to me, was like the final straw, and I wasn’t willing to do this anymore. And I felt like if I didn’t start, you know—if I didn’t do something, that I wouldn’t be able to respect myself anymore. I didn’t feel like I could put—you know, go along with these efforts to kill or suppress stories anymore.
And so, I put this and another story, on a failed CIA operation in Iran, both in my book. And after I wrote the book and had the manuscript ready to go and edited, I told the editors at The New York Times that it was—the stories were going to be in my book and that they should publish them. And I told them that like in the late summer or early fall of 2005, when my—and my book was scheduled to come out in January 2006. So I gave them, I think, quite a bit of time, advance warning, to publish the stories. And so, that—then, when I told them that the stories were going to be in my book, they were very angry at me. They were furious. And, you know, they thought I was being insubordinate and that I didn’t—they didn’t think I had the right to do it. And so, it began a very lengthly series of very tense meetings between me and the editors over what to do next.
they would argue—and there’s some truth to it—that the story was much better by the time—by the fall—by the winter of 2005. It’s true, it was. We had more information, and we had a lot stronger understanding of the program.
The primary—you know, there were several reasons that I think, in the end, they decided to run the story. You know, my book started the whole process all over again. And I think the story was dead at The New York Times after the second time they killed it, in December 2004. And I think you’ve got to say, the only reason they reopened it, the discussion, was because I told them it was going to be in my book. You know, but then there was a whole—they then started this whole series of new negotiations with the government throughout the fall of 2005 and a whole series of meetings. And I was getting very anxious, because I knew my book was coming out in January 2006, and they kept having these very—a whole series of meetings that went on forever, and culminating in that meeting with Bush and Sulzberger. And then, after that meeting between Sulzberger and Bush, the White House still wanted them to meet with more people. And I was, at that point, very concerned that they weren’t going to make up their mind fast enough. And they seemed, you know, not to want to admit that they were facing a deadline.
And then, fortunately, Eric Lichtblau, my colleague on the story, came in with new information right at the end, where he was told by a very good source that the Bush administration had considered getting a court-ordered injunction against The New York Times to stop the publication of the story. And that was the first time since the Pentagon Papers that the government had thought about doing that against The New York Times. And so, that immediately convinced the paper to publish the story that day—or that night. And so that was the final reason, ultimately, that it went in that night. And Keller called the White House to tell them we were about to publish it. And then we—the difference we had between—with The New York Times of the 1970s is, we had the internet. And so, right after he called the White House and told them, we were able to put it online earlier than normal and then have it in the paper the next day. So, it was, you know, a process that lasted—you know, took up almost two years of my life, really, in the end.
it was a very, you know, difficult period for me, because, first, we—I was kind of being thought of as being insubordinate. And then we win the Pulitzer for the same thing, so it was this weird, weird process for me of, you know, fighting internally and then getting the praise externally.
the editors didn’t apologize. Yeah, we had the celebration. And I think I write in the story it was very odd for me, because, you know, a few months earlier, I had felt like they were—I was about to get fired, if the story came out in my book first and the paper hadn’t run it before it was in the book. And now, you know, they were having a celebration. And I remember thinking, “This is one of the most awkward moments in my life.” But I just decided not to say anything about that, and just, you know, I looked—I remember I looked over at Keller and Sulzberger and just said, “Well, you know how tough this was.” And it was—I felt like, at that point, I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it again, so…
– It’s about apologizing to the American people or, because it’s a global paper, to the world, around the issue of what it means to publish a story that changes the landscape, the politics of a country.
in 2003, I got this story that showed that the CIA had had this really flawed program to try to influence the Iranian nuclear program. What they had done was they had taken some Russian nuclear blueprints that they had gotten from a defector, and then had American scientists embed flaws into the blueprints. And then they had another Russian—another Russian who was supposed to go give these blueprints to the Iranians and act like he was a greedy scientist who just wanted money. The problem was that, you know, in a letter, clearly, the Russian was worried about what was going to happen. The Russian—because the Russian told the Americans, as soon as he—told the CIA, after he saw these blueprints, “You know, I can—you can see the flaws in these things.” And they still went ahead with the operation, even though the flaws seemed fairly obvious. And he wrote a letter and gave the letter to—left it with the Iranians at their Vienna mission, along with the blueprints, saying, “You will see problems in here.” And, you know, so, he was telling the Iranians that the blueprints he was giving them had flaws in them, which was kind of the whole point of this operation. So, in other words, it’s quite possible—we don’t know exactly how this all played out in Iran, but it’s quite possible that these blueprints—that since they were tipped off to the fact that there were flaws in the blueprints, that the Iranians were able to use them, use the good parts of them and not the bad parts. In any event, so that’s how the program seemed to be flawed.
And so, this was coming—I was starting to work on this right around the time of the invasion of Iraq, when the whole—one of the big justifications for the war in Iraq was this—the WMD program that Iraq supposedly had. So I thought it was really important to write about Iran’s nuclear—you know, the CIA effort on Iran, when Iran looked like it was going to be the next war. There were a lot of people in the Bush administration who, at that time, were talking about, “Oh, well, you know, as soon as we knock off Iraq, we’ll go after Iran or Syria or something.” And so I thought it was a really important story, and very relevant and newsworthy, and would have been in the public interest.
But as soon as I called the CIA for comment, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, called Jill Abramson, who was then the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, and—demanding a meeting. And so, Jill and I went to the White House in late April or early May of 2003, and we met with Rice and George Tenet, the CIA director. And they were adamant that we not publish the story. And I remember Rice telling me, “Never make another phone call about this story ever again. And you should destroy your notes and never talk to anybody ever about this.” But at the same time, you know, they were confirming the story. And the only thing that Tenet disputed in the conversation was that the program had been mismanaged. And so, you know, Jill and I left that meeting kind of very stunned by the over-the-top approach that they had taken to try to get us to kill the story. But I also realized, you know, we had great confirmation now of the story, too.
And so, you know, pretty soon, I wanted to get the story published. But it was happening coincidentally just as the whole Jayson Blair scandal was happening at The New York Times. And if you remember that, it was a very weird time at the paper, where Jayson Blair was this young reporter who had, you know, had some problems, and there was a lot of questions about his reporting. And that led to a big crisis in the leadership of the paper, and Howell Raines, who was the executive editor at the time, was forced out. And then there was an interim editor who came in, and then, finally, Keller, Bill Keller, was named the executive editor that summer. And so, I ultimately took the story to him, and he decided not to publish it. And I tried several times over the next year to get him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t. And so, that was the backdrop. That had been going on before we started talking about the NSA story the following year.
as I said, this started happening with the Iran story in 2003. And then, in 2004, I had the NSA story. And so, I was—you know, as I said earlier, I was so frustrated and furious, I decided, once they had killed both of them—and they had also killed other stories I had worked on before that—I just—I decided that I had to write a book, because I didn’t feel like I could cover the war on terror or the post-9/11 world at The New York Times in the way that I wanted. And so I started working on the book. And after they had killed the NSA story for the second time, in December of 2004, I decided to take—I took a book leave that I had scheduled, and I decided to put both of them, both those stories, in my book. And as I said, I came back to the paper, and then, in the late summer, early fall of 2005, I told the editors those stories are going to be in my book and that they should publish them. And it was very odd, but the entire conversations—all the conversations I had with the editors over the next few months were focused on the NSA story and not the Iran story. And we hardly had any discussions at all about the Iran story. And so, you know, they published the NSA story but not the Iran story. And it wasn’t because we had a big meeting at that late point, you know, in the winter of 2005, about the Iran story. We never—hardly ever discussed it during that time period.
And so, after my book came out, the Bush administration launched a couple of leak investigations. The main one was about the NSA story in The New York Times. They wanted to find out who had talked to us. And then, what I found later was that they had started a second leak investigation of my book and that they had—they were looking at several chapters, about several different issues that were in my book but which I hadn’t published in The New York Times. And I became convinced that they were looking for something to get me on, where they could isolate me from The New York Times. And ultimately, they decided on the Iran story. But I know that there were FBI agents and government officials looking at other chapters that had nothing to do with the Iran story, as well. And so, I always felt like they were just looking for things, ultimately, where they could divide me from The New York Times. And that’s ultimately what they did do. They decided—they had a grand jury that was investigating the leak on the NSA story to The New York Times, but they never pursued it. They dropped that. And instead, they had a second grand jury that investigated my book, and that’s what they pursued.
we continued to do reporting for the paper and did a—Eric Lichtblau and I did another big story on the SWIFT program and how the CIA was spying on the banking records of Americans and others. And that led to just a growing chorus in the Bush administration, and among their conservative supporters outside, that they should try to prosecute The New York Times and me and Eric and Keller, in particular, for revealing classified information. So, there was this drumbeat going on throughout 2006 about whether or not the government was going to try to either prosecute us for—under the Espionage Act, or just subpoena us and try to force us to testify about who our sources were. And they decided not to do that.
And then, in—and so I thought that—I kind of thought maybe, you know, they had forgotten about us, until, in the summer of 2007, like a year and a half after our stories ran, I got a letter in a Federal Express envelope at my house from the Justice Department saying, you know, “We’re conducting a criminal investigation of unauthorized disclosures of classified information in your book State of War, and we want you to cooperate and tell us who—where you got this information.” And I realized that it was the precursor to a subpoena, because under the Justice Department’s guidelines for how they deal with the media, they’re supposed to seek to negotiate or ask you voluntarily first, before they subpoena you, whether you will cooperate. And I refused to cooperate. And then, in January 2008, I finally got a subpoena from the Justice Department demanding that I testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, about the chapter in my book that related to the Iran CIA operation. And at that point, I had to get lawyers, and Simon & Schuster, which owned the imprint, the Free Press, which published my book, agreed to provide legal—you know, my lawyers. The New York Times did not provide any legal help for me.
I’m not sure how many meetings there were, because I was—you know, there were meetings between Taubman and Hayden and other people at the NSA. And Hayden describes in his memoir in 2016, which I hadn’t—frankly, I hadn’t read until I started doing this piece. And there was a really fascinating exchange in there, where he describes how, after the first meeting that Taubman and I had with John McLaughlin and John Moseman, his chief of staff, McLaughlin, the former head of CIA.
Before the 2004 election, he describes how he thought he could work with Taubman, but not with me. And so, that led to further meetings between Hayden and Taubman that I wasn’t included in, and—or Eric was included in. And there was one where he—apparently, Taubman was taken out to NSA headquarters, and Hayden allowed him to meet with officials who were actually involved in the domestic spying program, and let him talk to them and ask them questions. But then he came back to the office, and he told me and Eric that he couldn’t tell us the details of what he had learned, because it was—you know, he had agreed to keep it secret or keep it off the record. And then there was, I think, another meeting between Keller—with Keller and Taubman, where they came back after—I’m not sure who they met—where they came back and said that they had, you know, been given a briefing on the program, and they couldn’t tell us the details of what they’d been told.
I was subpoenaed first in January 2008, which, as you remember, was an election year. And I was—as that case slowly wound its way through the court, I realized, “Well, we’ve only got a few months until the election, and maybe we can—you know, the new president will get rid of this.” And I think the judge agreed. And the judge in my case, Judge Brinkema in Virginia, she was—I think, moved the case very slowly during that year, thinking that, “Well, the new president will get rid of this,” because she didn’t make any decisions for several months, until after the election, like in June or July of 2009. She finally issued this brief little memo saying, “Well, I see that the grand jury in this case has been—has expired, and that means this subpoena is probably moot.” And she said, “I give 10 days to the government to drop this case.” And I think she thought the Obama people were going to drop it, as well.
And instead, the new Obama administration said, “No, no, no, no. Hold on. We want to—we want to issue a new subpoena.” And they issued a new subpoena and then pursued this case throughout the entire administration. And it went on. When she quashed their subpoenas against me to the grand jury, they would issue a new one. And then she would quash the next one. And then, when they issued a trial subpoena to me, she quashed that, and they took that to the appeals court.
And they, finally, in their motion to the—in their brief to the appeals court, they said, “The reason we believe that we want this subpoena is because there’s no such thing as a reporter’s privilege,” which is a fundamental constitutional issue of whether or not a reporter has a right to protect their sources. And they believed that a reporter has no right to do that. And so, in that regard, they were no different from Trump or Bush.
in January 2015. The case had gone to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court refused to hear my appeal of their appeal, and so I had no more legal recourse to avoid appearing in court. And I just refused to—I said I was not going to reveal my sources, when the prosecutor asked me. And at that moment, the prosecutor blinked and said, “OK, we have no further questions for you.”
– You were pursued by the Bush administration, as well. But all through this time, you’re still reporting on these administrations for _The New York Times.
that was very odd, because sometimes I would have to call the FBI or the Justice Department or the CIA for comment about stories, while I was under subpoena, while they were trying to put me in jail. And it was very weird, because I had to have this like dual personality, of, one, trying to continue to report, while you’re also the subject of this massive investigation. And it was very odd. It was very difficult for me to focus on continuing to report, because of—because of all that going on. And sometimes it felt like I was—I had two different lives. And so, that was weird.
But I think the thing that I never—you know, a lot of people in the press have kind of given Obama a pass on the way he dealt with press freedom issues. And I think that’s a big mistake. I think Obama was every bit as anti-press as Bush was. And I think there was something deeply ingrained in the way he viewed the press that allowed him to justify the way he was letting the Justice Department go after whistleblowers and reporters. And I don’t think it was—you know, a lot of reporters at the time tried to write stories that, “Oh, this is just, you know, a continuation of old stories that the Bush administration had started looking into, or that, you know, the Obama people are being forced to do this because of right-wing pressure or whatever.” I just think that that’s an excuse. They actively pursued these cases they had. They developed a very hardcore approach to the press, and they used the Justice Department as a weapon against the press.
– the Obama administration pursued more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.
as I said in my piece, I think it was very shameful what’s happened in this case and in all the other cases where they’ve turned leak investigations into massive witch hunts. And I describe in the story how, you know, before the Valerie Plame case, there really was no—you know, the government didn’t do this kind of aggressive pursuit of leaks, that they allowed leaks to leak. You know, leak investigations basically didn’t go anywhere before the Plame case in 2004, and that it really was Patrick Fitzgerald and his hardheaded approach to the—subpoenaing reporters in the Valerie Plame case that I think had the unintended consequence of leading to many more leak investigations and to the subpoenaing of reporters and to the targeting of people throughout the government. So, I think that had a—and then, after the Plame case, the Obama administration came in and took a zero-tolerance approach to all leaks and made it, instead of something that was a backwater thing—something put on the back burner of the Justice Department, as it had been for years, suddenly they made leak prosecutions and leak investigations a top priority.
before the September 11, 2001, attacks. One incident left me questioning whether I should continue as a national security reporter. In 2000, John Millis, a former CIA officer who had become staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, summoned me to his small office on Capitol Hill.
John Millis opened—he took out a classified document, which was an inspector general’s report from the CIA on how John Deutch, who had been the CIA director, had mishandled classified information on his computer and how the investigation into that had been mishandled by top senior CIA officials, and that nothing had been done, basically, about Deutch. And it was a very devastating IG report, which had been—never been made public before. And Millis read me the whole story of—the whole report. And I went back over it whenever I needed to, so I could write it verbatim, write it down exactly, what was in the report. And I wrote a story about that report, which was very explosive at the time, because it raised questions about the way that this investigation had been handled inside the CIA and how basically nothing had been done to Deutch and how George Tenet and other people at the CIA had kind of, you know, put this whole thing on the back burner.
And Millis, a few months later, committed suicide. And I was—I went to his funeral, which was attended by hundreds of CIA people. And I felt—I wasn’t sure whether my—you know, the story I had done and the leak from him had anything to do with his committing suicide, but I felt like I was in a very weird, dangerous world that I didn’t quite understand. And he—for this piece that I just wrote, I talked to his widow. And she agreed that it was OK to say, finally, that—tell this story about him, and also she said that she doesn’t believe his suicide had anything to do with that leak or that story. But it was a real strange, strange interlude in my career. You know, as you may remember, after that, Deutch—you know, I think the investigation after that into Deutch’s handling of classified information suddenly got reignited, after my story. And finally, I think, as I recall, President Clinton gave him a pardon on the way out of office.
David Petraeus he was CIA director under—for Obama and was—came under investigation for, you know, his mishandling of classified information, in a very convoluted story. And he just got a slap on the wrist in the end, didn’t go—didn’t have to go to jail. And it’s become clear that top officials, if you’re powerful enough and wealthy enough, and if you’re in a—well-enough connected, you know, leak investigations will not ruin your life, and you won’t face jail time. But if you’re lower-level officials throughout the government, you know, they can—they will go after low-level people who are not powerful.
– Michael Hayden was the one who brought down the hammer on your story, and now he’s saying you shouldn’t have to reveal your source.
when Michael Hayden said that, I thought that was a good—I’m glad he had seemed to have had a change of heart about the press. And I know he is now a pretty big critic of Trump. And so, it’s interesting. You know, people can change. They can change their minds, which is good. And I’m—that makes me more hopeful, I guess. It’s possible—you know, I don’t know whether he always felt that way about, you know, sending reporters to jail or not, but it’s good that he felt that way at the time.
– Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos, Wen Ho Lee
I was working on a story. It was basically about the Clinton administration and whether or not they were being too soft on China on—and it led into a story about Chinese espionage. And it kind of—in other words, I kind of came at this story indirectly, first looking at Clinton administration policies towards China on technical issues, and then the way they were handling espionage. And then, specifically, we began to hear that they were—had been soft on this specific espionage case that involved someone at Los Alamos, and eventually wrote a story about this purported espionage case at Los Alamos and involving a Chinese-American scientist as the main suspect at the time.
And looking back, I realize that the way we—I wrote that story and wrote the following stories, I wasn’t skeptical enough of the way the government—of what the government was saying or doing in the case and its handling of the case. And I really believe that we should have been more skeptical. And it was a very difficult learning experience for me. And I think I’ve learned from the mistakes that I made in that case.
I think the criticism of the stories that I did is valid. And it was a—as I said, it was a real learning experience. And I think it helped me become more skeptical of the government and, in a way, helped me avoid some of the problems on the pre-war intel on Iraq. I think the fact that I had gone through that experience and had become more skeptical of the government helped me become more skeptical of the government just before the war in Iraq.
– Your pieces weren’t making it to the front page of The New York Times in the way Michael Gordon and Judith Miller’s pieces alleging weapons of mass destruction were. Would you say that The New York Times was really campaigning for war on its news pages?
it felt like—at the time, it felt like they didn’t want the stories that I was writing. It was—they didn’t want to hear, or they didn’t really—I wrote a series of stories that were skeptical about the pre-war intelligence, and they would either get cut or buried or, you know, held for long periods of time. And it was very frustrating. And that was, you know, going on in late 2002 and early 2003. And that, for me, was like the prelude to what happened on the later stories, on the CIA-Iran and then the NSA. So, I had this whole period where I was very frustrated, that ultimately led—you know, that frustration ultimately led to what I did with my book and the NSA story. So, it was all part of a continuous period for me of deep frustration.
as I said in my piece, I think there’s some mixed results from all these battles in the post-9/11 age. I think the press, in general, including The New York Times and The Washington Post and a lot of other major news organizations, hasn’t really learned the lessons of the pre-war WMD debacle in the press. I think we are still hyping terrorist threats and hyping WMD threats, in some cases. And I think that leads—that has a major political impact, and it makes it very difficult for anyone in Congress or the White House or any political leader to roll back some of the most draconian laws and policies that have been put in place since 9/11, including the domestic spying programs.
On the other hand, at The New York Times, I think the fight over the NSA story really helped usher in a change in the way that they deal with the government. The paper is now much more aggressive on national security reporting and much less willing than ever—than it was before the NSA story, to agree to hold or kill stories at the government’s request. You know, they require a much higher bar. You know, they still negotiate on stories, when the government wants to negotiate, but I think they’re much more willing to say no to the government today. And I think, you know, the experience on the NSA story had—was a big factor in changing that, the way they think about that.
my lawyers filed a FOIA, you know, Freedom of Information Act, request with several agencies. And they wouldn’t give me any information about the current case, but they were—to my great surprise, they—we started getting these old files on old leak investigations that they had done of my stories, earlier stories. And I was—it was amazing to see all these old leak investigations that I never knew had taken place. And the reason I never knew about them is because they dropped them and they never pursued them. And one of the documents showed—you know, had the—said it was—the FBI was recommending that it be closed and shut down, because they hadn’t, you know, really found anything. And I think there was a—as I said before, this earlier period, where no one really wanted to go to the mats—go to the mat on leak investigations. They just—everyone knew that there was this informal understanding between the press and the government. And they just would go through the motions of leak investigations. And it’s only been in the last few years where that’s changed, and that’s—it’s made Washington a much more difficult place to do aggressive reporting.
Not physical surveillance all the time, as far as I know. But I do—there was—I describe a very strange incident that’s happened recently, actually, in the last couple years, where I was—the FBI set up what I’ve been—what’s been described to me as an ambush of what they thought was going to be a meeting between me and a source. And that meeting didn’t happen, so the ambush didn’t take place. But I had been given evidence that they were thinking about pursuing that, in a way to try to find out—find a source of mine. And so, that was very disconcerting to find out that.
after our NSA story in late 2005, Congress began to finally grapple with how to deal with the NSA domestic spying program. And in 2008, they passed what they called the FISA Reauthorization Act—or FISA Amendments Act, I mean. And that basically gave Bush, unfortunately, most of what—it made legal most of what he had been doing under the domestic spying program. And that FISA Amendments Act then was still in place—has been reauthorized, I think, a couple times and has—then, when Edward Snowden came out with his documents, there were some tweaks to that, limiting certain things, but it’s basically still the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, is still generally the law. And so, I think they’re just reauthorizing that.
For a while, there were some Republicans, over the last few years, who were libertarian, who were opposed to domestic spying, but there’s been very little constituency, unfortunately, in the United States for civil liberties. And it’s very easy politically to demagogue on terrorist threats, and it makes it very difficult for politicians to fight back and actually reduce the power of the government.
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James Risen
best-selling author and The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent.
— source democracynow.org