Thomas Drake gets a small break

Former N.S.A. official Thomas Drake's legal woes are finally at an end, with a federal district court judge sentencing him to probation and community service. Drake also got the satisfaction of hearing Judge Richard D. Bennett take the government to task:

The visibly angry judge said that Mr. Drake had been through “four years of hell” and that the dragging out of the investigation — and then the dropping of the major charges on the eve of trial — was “unconscionable.”

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.

I previously wrote about Drake twice: the first time was to discuss Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece where I first learned of Drake's story, and the second time was to note that the government had settled with Drake, after Judge Bennett's refusal to permit the Justice Department to withhold so-called sensitive documents at trial forced the prosecution to seek a plea.

Mayer made a compelling case for Drake as a whistleblower rather than a spy, which is how the government was trying to portray him. No news coverage I've seen has quoted anyone making anything like a reasonable argument in support of the prosecution; all the statements have leant heavily on the usual national-security claptrap. Drake was guilty of the same "crime" as Daniel Ellsberg, namely, airing embarrassing government dirty laundry in public. That's not a crime, that's a public service.

Candidate Obama claimed to be a strong proponent of whistleblowers during his presidential campaign. You'd never know it by the way his Justice Department treated Thomas Drake. Shame on you, Mr. Obama.