Attention reporters worried about having your confidential source relationships put on blast: Don’t work for the New York Times!
Contrary to what so many in the national media are saying — that Times reporter Ali Watkins had a secret source outed by President Trump’s Justice Department — the only reason the public knows about it is because her own paper told everyone.
The Times reported last Thursday that Watkins, who now covers law enforcement, “had been in a three-year relationship” with James Wolfe, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide who was recently charged with lying to the FBI.
In its investigation of Wolfe allegedly having leaked confidential government information to the news media, the FBI secretly seized Watkins’ email and phone records to discern the nature of her relationship with Wolfe.
The pair were romantically involved until last year and, during their relationship, Watkins broke stories related to the Senate Intelligence Committee for her previous employer, BuzzFeed.
One of those stories revealed that Russians had attempted in 2013 to recruit Carter Page as an agent. Page served as an adviser to the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.
Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in a statement in the paper’s story last week, “This decision by the Justice Department will endanger reporters ability to promise confidentiality to their sources and, ultimately, undermine the ability of a free press to shine a much needed light on government actions.”
During an interview Sunday on CNN, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, who oversaw Watkins’ work during her tenure there, demanded that the FBI explain its “use of this kind of last resort tool of covertly spying on journalists.” (Personally, I don’t think the FBI was “spying” so much as merely acting as an “informant” for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.)
But the Justice Department isn’t prosecuting Watkins or any of the other reporters the indictment alleges Wolfe was in contact with. And the indictment has nothing to do with cracking down on confidential sources, which, by the way, are not a blanket constitutional entitlement.
Watkins isn’t even identified in the indictment. She is referred to simply as “REPORTER #2.”
Here’s how she is described:
– In approximately December 2013, WOLFE and REPORTER #2 began a personal relationship that continued until in or around December 2017.
– From in or around mid-2014 through in or around December 2017, REPORTER #2 was employed in Washington, D.C. by several different news organizations covering national security matters, including matters relating to the [Intelligence Committee].
It says that Wolfe admitted to a relationship with “REPORTER #2” after initially having lied to investigators about it; that “REPORTER #2” wrote “dozens” of stories related to the intelligence committee during their relationship; and that the two were in regular contact, digitally and in person.
How would anyone reading this know that “REPORTER #2” is Watkins? Aside from Wolfe being the subject of the indictment, the descriptors of “REPORTER #2” in it could literally apply to countless journalists in Washington, limited only by the ones with the sense not to date Capitol Hill staffers (Ew!).
And if we don’t know who Watkins is, we don’t know who Wolfe might have been a source for.
A spokesperson for the Times confirmed to me Wednesday that the paper was in fact the first to publicly identify Watkins in its report last week.
The indictment also never makes mention of Page by name. He is only identified as “MALE-1.”
A Justice Department official told the Washington Examiner last week that it had followed proper guidelines in obtaining reporter communication records, which the DOJ does without notifying the affected journalist if “such notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.”
Watkins’ records were seized some time before Feb. 13 of this year, which is the date she got a letter from the Justice Department stating it had them. Her bosses at the Times only found out about that letter last week, the same day that the paper published its story outing her previous confidential source boyfriend.
It sounds to me like the Times was pissed off at her, not the Justice Department.
And what do you know. The Times reported Tuesday that it is now “reviewing the work history” of Watkins, who is, conveniently, “set to leave on a previously planned vacation.”
