The Invisible Man: Jeffrey Sterling, CIA Whistleblower

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13. his initial report was to Senate investigators and it's questionable whether the 'leak' was from him

... and to conflate him with 'Ben Carson' without knowing spit about him, just to deny that he was a whistleblower, is despicable - as is echoing the CIA smear that he went to the Senate investigatory committee because he was 'disgruntled'. It's a reflection of the knee-jerk authoritarianism which has infected these defenses of these government prosecutions.


Sterling Prosecution Long on Rhetoric, Short on Evidence
by John Hanrahan, January 24, 2015

___ FBI special agent Ashley Hunt, who has led the FBI investigation of the Merlin leak for more than a decade, presented the strongest circumstantial evidence against Sterling – the aforementioned chronology. MacMahon got her to acknowledge that she did not pursue – or was blocked from pursuing – certain paths of inquiry that might have turned up other suspects as the source of the Merlin information that Risen received.

Hunt acknowledged under tough questioning that she had once earlier in the investigation written memoranda saying Sterling was probably not the leaker and that the likely source was someone from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC). She also acknowledged writing a memo in early 2006 citing “unified opposition” to her investigation within the committee, which was supposed to be monitoring Merlin. She testified that then-committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) told her he was not going to cooperate with the FBI, and the committee staff director, Republican William Duhnke, refused to talk to her at all.

Two former staffers from the SSIC who met with Sterling in March 2003, when he brought what they and other prosecution witnesses have described as a whistleblowing complaint about the Merlin scheme, did testify as prosecution witnesses at Sterling’s trial. Under questioning, they provided testimony helpful to Sterling that showed that Risen, indeed, apparently had sources on the committee – a committee that was already familiar with Operation Merlin even before Sterling came to them with his concerns.

Defense attorneys hammered on the point through testimony from these prosecution witnesses that despite Risen’s sources and potential sources in both the CIA and on Capitol Hill (including right on the SSCI), none had had their residences searched, their computer’s contents analyzed, their telephone call logs examined, their bank and credit card records searched – as had been the case with Sterling.


...if anything, this looks like the CIA retaliating against this black agent for filing the complaint, in the first place. At the very least, it's a scapegoating for the revelations which could have come from any number of sources Risen was interviewing from the Senate (the Senate committe members already knew of the program before Sterling came to them), many long before Sterling even gave them his information.