The Rosen Case: Questions About the Kim Warrant

Below is a newly disclosed document from the Obama Administration’s case against Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department adviser accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 by allegedly giving classified information about North Korea to the Fox News reporter James Rosen.

The document, which includes an application for a warrant to search Kim’s personal Yahoo e-mail account, doesn’t reveal much new information. Many of the facts outlined in the Kim warrant were repeated in a subsequent, more controversial warrant for Rosen’s Gmail account, which was uncovered last week. But I’m posting the Kim warrant for people who are following the case closely.

Three things strike me as notable:

1. Even before the government sought this search warrant, and certainly after it executed it, the case against Kim was strong. Early on, the government was able to find crucial e-mails between Kim and Rosen by monitoring Kim’s State Department computer, which Kim used to check his Yahoo account. The government also had detailed phone records documenting numerous calls between the two men, including a call at the very time Kim was logged into his secure computer and was accessing the classified material that showed up in Rosen’s article.
2. Whether Justice should be using the outdated Espionage Act to go after leakers at all is an important question (there may be legal routes that are more apt). But, if you put that aside for a moment and assume it’s an appropriate tool, the strength of the government’s case against Kim, which is clear in this newly disclosed search warrant, makes one wonder again why Attorney General Eric Holder allowed his prosecutors to take the unprecedented step of naming Rosen as an “aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator” to the alleged crime in order to search Rosen’s e-mails.
3. There is some evidence in this search warrant that the government realized that going after Rosen’s personal e-mail would be controversial. A footnote in this document says, “The FBI is not at this time seeking a search warrant for [Rosen’s Gmail account]. Rather, it is restricting its request for e-mail search warrants to accounts associated with Mr. Kim.” That was a notable moment of prosecutorial restraint in a case defined by overreach.

Unfortunately, a few months later, the government reversed course and went after Rosen’s account. Kim Yahoo Search Warrant (PDF) Kim Yahoo Search Warrant (Text)

Photograph by Maria Lokke.

Read Lizza’s posts on the full forty-four-page Justice Department application for the search warrant of Rosen’s Gmail account, how the Department has seized more than thirty phone numbers, and an unexpected turn in the case.