Upon
Harold Martin’s arrest in 2016, an Obama administration official
said his case was being kept under wraps “to keep this guy from
becoming another NSA martyr.” The tactic seems to be have paid
dividends.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
1
In early
October 2016, news broke that a contractor for the National Security
Agency (NSA) had been arrested over the possible theft of state
secrets. Since then, little media attention has been given to what
the U.S. government has called the largest theft of classified
information in U.S. history, or the man allegedly behind it.
Initially
arrested in August 2016 — after terabytes upon terabytes of
classified information were discovered at his home, information that
was taken over a period of two decades — Harold T. Martin III has
been held in pre-trial detention ever since. Martin, who worked for
the same government contractor as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,
has yet to enter into a plea agreement for the 20 felony counts he
faces, as government prosecutors have struggled to build a strong
case against him. Yet, unlike in the cases of Snowden and other
alleged leakers awaiting trial like Reality Winner, the press
coverage of Martin’s case has been scarce.
The lack
of coverage stems in part from the fact that the government has
struggled to build its case against Martin, who was initially
nicknamed the “second Snowden,” as it remains unclear what Martin
did with the estimated 50 terabytes of data – a cache nearly 20
times greater than the Panama Papers.
Given
that the government has so far been unable to prove whether he
intended to or succeeded in sharing the documents with others,
Martin’s legal defense, led by public defender James Wyda, has
worked to distance Martin from the cases of Snowden and other NSA
whistleblowers — painting him instead as a “hoarder” who
accumulated troves of classified documents driven by a “mental
disorder” and an obsessive need to hone his craft and prove himself
to dismissive co-workers. Wyda, who previously defended NSA
whistleblower Thomas Drake, has also argued that Martin “never
tried” to give the documents – stored at his home and in his car
– to the press, a foreign country, or anyone for that matter.
Indeed,
there is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that Martin is, in
fact, a hoarder or had some other type of mental condition that led
him to pilfer so many classified documents over such an extended
period. As John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower who exposed the
agency’s illegal torture program, told MintPress News, “There
is a strong legal argument to be made for [Martin] having hoarded
this information, these documents due to some sort of mental
condition, whether it’s PTSD or a hoarding disorder.” If this
is the case, Kiriakou asserted that Martin shouldn’t “necessarily
even be held accountable. If he has a mental illness, he needs
treatment, not prison.”
Yet,
just as there is evidence that Martin accumulated such a massive
cache of classified government documents due to a mental condition,
there also exists evidence that suggests he may be a whistleblower.
However, given the government’s crackdown on whistleblowers under
Obama and now Trump, Kiriakou notes that Martin’s legal defense has
avoided this evidence, as focusing on Martin’s mental health makes
“a stronger legal defense than would a whistleblower defense.”
“It
doesn’t serve him in any way to be called or known as a
whistleblower, as very few legitimate whistleblowers come out ahead
at the end of their cases,” Kiriakou told MintPress.
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