The accused FBI whistleblower indicted by Trump's DOJ allegedly leaked secret rules for spying on reporters

The Trump Justice Department escalated its crackdown on journalists’ sources and whistleblowers this week, charging former FBI special agent Terry Albury with two counts under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking information to an unnamed news outlet, widely believed to be The Intercept.

The case is yet another example of the outrageous—and recently, far too common—use of the World War I-era law, to persecute the sources of journalists for the crime of informing the American public. The fact that whistleblowers have been thrown in jail with increasing regularity using a law meant for spies should be an outright scandal. As First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company, said through their Press Freedom Fund, “The misuse of the Espionage Act chills truth tellers, impedes investigative reporting, and compromises the democratic process.”

But it’s also important to understand what Mr. Albury is alleged to have leaked and how it makes him a true whistleblower. News reports indicate he is accused of providing The Intercept documents related to its “FBI’s Secret Rules” reporting project, an important series of articles that looks into how the FBI secretly conducts investigations.

Notably, the very first story The Intercept published in that series was about a document containing the FBI’s classified rules for specifically targeting journalists with National Security Letters (NSLs), the controversial and due process-free surveillance tool that the agency can serve on telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon to spy on journalists and root out their sources.

The Justice Department’s strict rules for when they can and can’t conduct surveillance of journalists are supposed to governed by the agency’s “media guidelines,” which the Obama administration updated and strengthened after several embarrassing scandals when the Obama-era Justice Department was caught surveilling journalists. But critically, NSLs are completely exempt from those rules.

Instead, the rules for using NSLs against journalists are in the classified appendix of the FBI’s “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” (DIOG), under the heading “National Security Letters for Telephone Toll Records of Members of the News Media or Media Organizations.” The secret rules allow the Justice Department to use NSLs with virtually none of the restrictions or safeguards that are in place if they attempted to get a subpoena or court order for a journalist’s private telephone toll records. You can see the leaked version of the rules from here: