LeaksGen. Petraeus's plea agreement highlights disparate application of national-security laws: Critics

General David Petraeus’s agreement to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information in exchange for a prosecutor’s recommendation he serve no jail time has raised some concerns about fairness when prosecuting those who leak classified government information.

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a retired military general admitted to sharing “black books” containing his schedule and personal notes from his time as commander of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, an Army reserve officer with whom he had an extramarital affair. The black books contained classified information about the identities of covert officers, secret operations, military strategy, and information from high-level White House National Security Council meetings.

Petraeus’s affair became public after a Florida woman complained to the FBI she received threatening anonymous e-mails suggesting detailed knowledge of her interactions with military officials in Tampa. The FBI traced those e-mails to Broadwell, who suspected the Florida woman of being a rival for Petraeus’ affections.

On 26 October 2012, FBI investigators asked Petraeus whether he had shared classified information with Broadwell, and he, knowingly and falsely, denied doing so. TheWall Street Journal notes that lying to federal investigators is a crime, but Petraeus did not plead guilty to that as part of his agreement with prosecutors.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer with experience representing government employees caught in leak investigations — including Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor sentenced to a thirteen-month prison term after pleading guilty to a single felony count of disclosing classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen — said the case proved high-level officials are treated differently than other government workers. “The issue is not whether Gen. Petraeus was dealt with too leniently, because the pleadings indicate good reason for that result,’’ said Lowell. “The issue is whether others are dealt with far too severely for conduct that is no different. This underscores the random, disparate and often unfair application of the national-security laws where higher-ups are treated better than lower-downs.’’

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who pleaded guilty in 2013 for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer to a freelance reporter, was sentenced to thirty months in jail. In an e-mailed statement to The Intercept, he wrote, “I don’t think General Petraeus should have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, just as I don’t think I should have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Yet only one of us was. Both Petraeus and I disclosed undercover identities (or confirmed one, in my case) that were never published. I spent two years in prison; he gets two years probation.”

Under Petraeus’s plea deal, prosecutors will recommend a sentence of two-year probation and a $40,000 fine, according to court documents filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina’s Charlotte Division. The deal, the New York Times notes, “allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.”