[L] J. William Leonard

Dear Friends,

You know things are bad when the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office under President George W. Bush, J. William Leonard, is complaining about the excessive classification of documents under the Obama Administration.  The facts are pretty straight forward, a whistleblower, Thomas Drake, was charged with espionage for retaining an email that had been classified.  The email was part of the proof of his whistleblowing claim relating to government waste and abuse.  The judge in the espionage case slammed the government for classifying the document and bringing the action against Mr. Drake.  Now Mr. Leonard has filed a formal complaint with his former offices and  believes that the people that classified the document and brought the action should be held accountable for their actions. You can read a summary at the Daily Kos (here).  

As I have pointed out over and over again in my posts, President Obama refuses to hold any government officials responsible for their actions.  So I doubt that he will do so in this case even with the formal complaint by Mr. Leonard.

Just as troubling is the continued abuse of executive power by the Obama Administration.  The last two paragraphs from an editorial in The New York Times this morning (here) tells it all.

The Obama administration has misguidedly used the Espionage Act in five such cases of news media disclosures; previously there were no more than four in all of White House history. This comes as officials classified nearly 77 million documents last year — a one-year jump of 40 percent. The government claim that this was because of improved reporting is not reassuring.
Two years ago, President Obama ordered all agencies to review secret material by June 2012 with a goal of promoting more declassification. Unfortunately, the administration’s emphasis since then has all been in the opposite direction. Treating potentially embarrassing information as a state secret is the antithesis of healthy government.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal