Politico seemingly blamed Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., Monday for outing a CIA source, even though the mistake is entirely the fault of the State Department.
“Gowdy appears to accidentally release CIA source’s name Citing ‘human error,'” read the Politico headline.
However, the article itself added later, “State Department acknowledges it failed to delete name when clearing email for disclosure.”
Gowdy, who heads the Select Committee on Benghazi, has been slowly releasing batches of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails to the public. The releases are part of an effort by the panel to make its ongoing investigation into the events surrounding the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, appear more transparent.
But one of the emails posted Sunday to the committee’s website “included in one instance the name of ‘Mousa Kousa,’ an alternative spelling of Moussa Koussa, a former Libyan government spy chief and foreign minister. The name appeared to have been redacted in several other instances but was included in a subject line of a forwarded email,” Politico reported.
The panel quickly pulled the email in question and replaced it with a copy containing the appropriate redactions.
However, perhaps undercutting the seriousness of the entire ordeal is that the CIA “did not consider the information classified,” Politico reported.
State wanted the name withheld, citing “privacy concerns.”
“The CIA normally would treat the names of its alleged sources as confidential. However, Koussa’s contacts with U.S. intelligence have been publicly acknowledged for years,” the report alleged.
This suggests that the reveal is not that big of a security screw-up as implied by the story’s headline and opening paragraphs.
Aides to the South Carolina congressman said Monday the State Department is indeed responsible for failing to redact the source’s name from one of the recently released emails. State has also owned up to the mistake, blaming “human error.”
“There was one case — I think it was just human error in our desire to get these documents to the Benghazi Committee as quickly as possible,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday in a press conference.
He added that the CIA had no qualms with the source’s name being made public.
Yet, even with these admissions from State, Politico’s headline unfairly blamed Gowdy for the redaction failure, a few in media suggested after the story’s publication.
“How on earth is that fair? Politico’s decision to focus blame on Gowdy only makes sense if you assume that his decision to release the emails in the first place was wrong. But that’s a political judgment, not the sort of judgment reporters ought to making. And again, if Gowdy’s decision was reckless, it was only reckless because he put his faith in the State Department and they dropped the ball,” Mediaite’s Alex Griswold wrote.
He also accused Politico of downplaying the seriousness of the issue. If the CIA didn’t object to the already publicly known source being mentioned by name, and that the request came only from the State Department, this suggests that the “security implications for the entire story are basically nonexistent.”
“Reporters file FOIA requests all the time to obtain emails from government officials, which are redacted to exclude personal information, classified information, etc. If the State Department accidentally failed to redact classified information and a Politico reporter posted the full email, would Politico’s headline read that they ‘accidentally’ released that information?” he asked.
“Or would they justifiably blame the people whose only job is to prevent these kinds of messes?” he added.
