Glenn Greenwald Will Not Be Doing Trust Falls with the U.S.

Suppose you were, say, an ex-pat living in Brazil who wanted to be free to come and go to your home country, America, without much hassle, but the potential for hassle was greater than 0 percent. See, you had been publishing documents exposing the United States government’s national security secrets, and bragging about it, and promising to publish more, and so the United States government wasn’t very happy with you. They probably didn’t have a case against you, thanks to our dear friend the First Amendment, but powerful members of the government have been making murmurs about how much they’d love to throw you in jail anyway. And though the Justice Department doesn’t—

Greenwald, the journalist who’s published most of Edward Snowden’s revelations, gave an interview to Salon about his fear of returning to the United States for the first time since he started breaking the surveillance stories. It’s a classic episode of Greenwaldian rhetoric, where you may at first roll your eyes at the self-aggrandizement—they may lock me up, but they can never lock up my principles!—but then, if you wish, you see that hey, he’s got some fair points.

In Greenwald’s mind, there’s “less than a 50 percent chance” that he’d be charged of anything if he returns. Still, he says, every legal expert he talks to “recognizes that there’s some risk.”

When congressmen like Mike Rogers or Peter King, or media figures like David Gregory, suggest that Greenwald could be charged with such a crime—the very rhetoric that frightens Greenwald—it doesn’t make much sense. How could they prosecute a journalist for doing journalism? By suggesting that that’s not who he is or what he’s doing at all. “In each case,” Brian Beutler writes in the Salon piece, “the innuendo sidesteps the unseemly appearance of targeting journalists by attempting to distinguish the work of the journalist from journalism.”

And the latest idea that Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has to nab Greenwald is a bit more clever than the typical “he conspired with Edward Snowden to steal classified documents.” From Politico:

A top lawmaker argued Tuesday that journalist Glenn Greenwald is illegally selling stolen material by asking news organizations to pay for access to U.S. intelligence secrets taken from the National Security Agency.

“For personal gain, he’s now selling his access to information, that’s how they’re terming it…. A thief selling stolen material is a thief,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) told journalists after a hearing where the leaks set in motion by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were a major topic of discussion.

Rogers said the information about the documents being for sale by Greenwald came from “other nations’ press services.”

Like all other suggestions of illegality on Greenwald’s part, this seems like a stretch. But the fact that Rogers is even bringing it up shows that there’s a strong appetite in the government to get Greenwald, somehow, someway, by hook or by crook. Lest we forget, the British government found a way to detain Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, under suspicion of “terrorism.” The U.S. has stronger protections for the press, yes. But they also really want to punish Glenn Greenwald! So he is not just having paranoid hallucinations when he suggests there’s some risk in him returning.

The factor most likely to ensure Greenwald has a smooth and easy time if and when he comes back to the United States, though, is the shitstorm that the government would get for charging him with a crime, especially when there’s no way it would prevent the Snowden leaks from continued publishing. Arresting journalists—even if you come up with some forced technical legal argument about how he’s not a journalist—isn’t a good look.