The Department of Justice said it would not call Risen to testify in the U.S. government’s federal court case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, the Times reported.
Likewise, Sterling’s attorneys on Monday said they would not call Risen to take the stand either.
Sterling had raised misgivings about the plot, dubbed “Operation Merlin,” and prosecutors suspect he took those concerns to Risen, who described the program in his 2006 book, “State of War.”
The decisions by both legal teams end a seven-year battle over whether Risen could be forced to identify his confidential sources.
— James Risen (@JamesRisen) January 11, 2015
Just last week, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner testified at a preliminary hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, where he refused to answer all but a few basic questions about his book. He also would not disclose what information confidential sources provided, where or when he met with unnamed sources, or who had not served as a source.
“We said from the very beginning that under no circumstances would Jim identify confidential sources to the government or anyone else,” Risen’s lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, told the Times. “The significance of this goes beyond Jim Risen. It affects journalists everywhere. Journalists need to be able to uphold that confidentiality in order to do their jobs.”
The struggle over whether Risen should be forced to testify came to represent the tension between freedom of the press and U.S. national security.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s administration has been criticized for bringing more charges in leak cases than all previous administrations combined, the Times reported.
The CIA op, one of the most spectacular screwups in the agency’s history, called for a defected Russian nuclear engineer to hand over to Iran a flawed blueprint of an actual nuclear weapon. The engineer, who was granted U.S. citizenship and a $5,000 monthly income, balked and provided the blueprints along with a note revealing that the designs were flawed.
According to Risen’s sources inside the CIA, the "Trojan horse" plan had been used before with America's enemies, but never with a nuclear weapon. Such recklessness could result in a country accelerating its weapons program, not stunting it, Business Insider reported.
Nuclear experts told Risen that Iranian nuclear scientists, who had already received nuclear blueprints from a Pakistani scientist, could compare the two designs to identify the flaw, then pull valuable information from the blueprints anyway.
Sterling’s trial on unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and other charges is expected to begin this week.
