Sex, Leaks, Lies and Spies: Trump Takes Down Intelligence Community Leakers

Henry Kyle Frese, an employee with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was charged with two counts of leaking classified information to two journalists identified by journalist Matthew Keys and later the Wall Street Journal as CNBC’s Amanda Macias and NBC News’s Courtney Kube. Frese and Macias were romantically involved.

The complaint against Frese said, in or about mid-April to May 2018, he accessed an intelligence report unrelated to his job duties “on multiple occasions.” A week after he accessed the report a second time, “Journalist 1” — believed to be Macias, asked him to speak to “Journalist 2” — believed to be Kube. Frese told Journalist 1 he was “down” to help Journalist 2 if it helped her because he wanted to see her “progress.”

Frese would later search on a classified U.S. government computer system for terms related to the topics contained in the intelligence report. A few hours after searching those terms, he spoke with Journalist 1 for seven minutes, and spoke to Journalist 2 for over half an hour. About half an hour after he spoke with both journalists, Journalist 1 published an article through her outlet, which contained classified information from the report. After Journalist 1 tweeted the article, Frese retweeted it.

In September 2019, Frese accessed two additional intelligence reports, and texted Journalist 2 to tell her to call him. During the call, he transmitted classified information.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Frese “was caught red-handed disclosing sensitive national security information for personal gain.”

“The unauthorized disclosure of top secret information could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security of the United States,” it said.

Prosecutors said Macias published eight articles containing classified defense information between May and July 2018, according to the Guardian. Frese was arrested Wednesday when he showed up for work and was due to appear later that day in U.S. district court in Alexandria, Virginia.

Frese, like the intelligence official who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump asked Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 elections, has a background in Russia and NATO, according to his Twitter profile.

The episode carried echoes of a previous case of  leaking to a reporter he was romantically involved with. In 2018, James Wolfe, a fifty-something senior aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee, leaked classified documents to New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, with whom he was having a romantic relationship.

Wolfe worked at the committee while it was investigating whether President Trump colluded with Russia, and he leaked to Watkins classified material, such as a classified application for a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The announcement of Frese’s arrest broke loose a barrage of anger and mocking, including from conservatives and Trump supporters, who have become increasingly suspicious of intelligence officials leaking and hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.

You are tweeting out the article of the reporter you were leaking to – and living with!

Enjoy jail#RESIST lol https://t.co/I95DmCXOr9

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 9, 2019

The Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway called the culture of politicized leaking “worrisome”:

Review of arrested leaker’s social media shows, in addition to extreme anti-Trump views, confidence there’d be no repercussions for leaking. He freely and openly engages with recipient of stolen information. Our natsec culture of politicized leaking is worrisome.

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