White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks

Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez said last week he could not comment based on the advice of newspaper attorneys. Representatives of the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, which is conducting the inquiry, also declined to comment.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck declined to discuss details of the leak investigations there but said they were being conducted independently of the White House and were not aimed at pressuring journalists.

In prosecuting a former Defense Department analyst and two pro-Israel lobbyists for allegedly spreading sensitive national security information about U.S. policy in the Middle East, the Bush administration is making use of a statute whose origins lie in the first anxious days of World War I.

The Espionage Act makes it a crime for a government official with access to "national defense information" to communicate it intentionally to any unauthorized person. A 1950 amendment aimed at Soviet spying broadened the law, forbidding an unauthorized recipient of the information to pass it on, or even to keep it to himself.

Lawyers for American Israel Public Affairs Committee staff members Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman say the vagueness of the statute makes the Justice Department's prosecution of their clients unconstitutional. One count of the indictment specifically charges them with passing "classified national defense information" to a member of the media in 2004.

The Justice Department said "there plainly is no exemption" for the media under the Espionage Act, but added, "a prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing classified information leaked to it by a government source would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly, indeed, the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."

Staff writer Charles Lane and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.