{"id":16992,"date":"2016-01-27T13:09:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T18:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16992"},"modified":"2016-01-27T13:09:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T18:09:26","slug":"almost-12-years-after-calling-a-reporter-doj-whistleblower-slapped-with-ethics-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16992","title":{"rendered":"Almost 12 Years After Calling a Reporter, DOJ Whistleblower Slapped With Ethics Charges"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Almost 12 Years After Calling a Reporter, DOJ Whistleblower Slapped With Ethics Charges<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

The D.C.\u00a0Office of Disciplinary Counsel<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the legal body responsible for overseeing the D.C. Bar\u2019s professional\u00a0rules \u2014 has filed ethics charges against Thomas Tamm, the former Justice Department lawyer who contacted the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0about\u00a0President Bush\u2019s warrantless wiretapping program in 2004.<\/p>\n

The office\u2019s\u00a0charging papers<\/a>, which were released Tuesday and first reported by the\u00a0National Law Journal<\/a><\/em>, cite two counts of professional misconduct. In addition to charging him with referring his client\u2019s secrets to a newspaper, they also allege that Tamm\u00a0\u201cfailed to refer information in his possession that persons within the Department of Justice were violating their legal obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a 2008\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>,\u00a0Tamm did ask his\u00a0supervisors about \u201cthe program\u201d (as it was referred to by the administration). He was told\u00a0that it was \u201cprobably illegal,\u201d and that he\u00a0should drop the subject.\u00a0He even reached out to the staff of the\u00a0Senate Judiciary Committee, who\u00a0refused to discuss the program\u00a0with him on the basis of its secrecy.<\/p>\n

The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel declined to comment.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Tamm joined the Department of Justice\u2019s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, the agency responsible for filing individualized warrant requests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He soon\u00a0discovered that one\u00a0category of cases was\u00a0treated differently<\/a>: under \u201cthe program,\u201d only the attorney general could sign the warrant applications, and only one FISA Court judge was allowed to review\u00a0them. Tamm\u00a0inferred that the evidence gathered to prepare the warrants must have been obtained illegally. In\u00a0the spring of 2004, he walked to a nearby payphone to call\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0journalist Eric Lichtblau. The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0would go on to win a 2006\u00a0Pulitzer Prize<\/a>\u00a0for its reporting on the NSA\u2019s\u00a0warrantless wiretapping program.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Almost 12 Years After Calling a Reporter, DOJ Whistleblower Slapped With Ethics Charges The D.C.\u00a0Office of Disciplinary Counsel\u00a0\u2014 the legal body responsible for overseeing the D.C. Bar\u2019s professional\u00a0rules \u2014 has filed ethics charges against Thomas Tamm, the former Justice Department lawyer who contacted the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0about\u00a0President Bush\u2019s warrantless wiretapping program in 2004. The office\u2019s\u00a0charging papers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12001,4873,301,577,12002,765,5567,12003,6261,12004],"class_list":["post-16992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-alex-emmons","tag-bush","tag-fbi","tag-nsa","tag-office-of-disciplinary-counsel","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-thomas-tamm","tag-us-department-of-justice","tag-us-senate-judiciary-committee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16993,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16992\/revisions\/16993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}