5 US News Organizations Settle Scientist’s Lawsuit

WASHINGTON, 4 June 2006 — A former scientist at a nuclear weapons laboratory who was once suspected of being a spy has settled his lawsuit and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations.

Dr. Wen Ho Lee had filed a suit against the US Energy and Justice Departments and the FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy by leaking information to US journalists that he was under investigation for spying for China.

Lee, a Taiwanese-American, formerly worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico but was fired in 1999, arrested and held in solitary confinement for nine months. He was released in 2000 without being charged with espionage, although he did plead guilty to mishandling computer files.

The federal government will pay Lee $895,000 to drop his lawsuit, filed in 1999, which claimed that officials in the Clinton Administration had disclosed to the news media that he was under investigation for spying for China while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Forty-nine states have laws that protect reporters from being forced to disclose their confidential sources. But there is no federal shield law. Friday’s settlement leaves unanswered the question of who leaked damaging information about Lee.

Lee sued the government, not the press. But he subpoenaed five reporters and demanded that they name the federal officials who spoke to them. The unusual agreement heads off a Supreme Court confrontation over whether reporters can be fined and jailed for refusing to reveal their sources to lawyers pursuing a civil suit. District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Rosemary Kollyer had threatened stiff sanctions against reporters who refused to name their sources, starting with fines that the reporters would have to pay out of their own pockets.

The reporters were Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, James Risen of The New York Times, Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of AP, and Pierre Thomas of ABC. Thomas reported on Lee while he was a reporter for CNN, but CNN declined to participate in the settlement, saying in a statement that it had “a philosophical disagreement” over the appropriateness of paying a news subject to avert a subpoena.

The contempt proceedings against the news agencies will be dropped.

The news agencies said in a statement that they were reluctant to pay, but did not want to face further fines or risk prison for their journalists.

“We decided this was the best course to protect our sources and to protect our journalists,” the agencies said in a statement.

Federal courts have been increasingly hostile in recent years to assertions by journalists that they are legally entitled to protect their confidential sources. Last year, Judith Miller, who was a reporter for The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative.

A lawyer for Lee, Brian Sun, said the settlement furthered two goals. “We wanted to send a message to the government that leaking information protected by law is not justified, even if they think it’s politically expedient to do so,” Sun said. “And the fact that the journalists contributed to the settlement recognizes the role they played in the series of unfortunate events that surrounded Dr. Lee’s case.” The settlement included an unusual condition, Sun said. “The government didn’t want any of the money going into his pocket,” Sun said of Lee. In the end, Lee agreed to apply the government’s payment to lawyers’ fees, litigation costs and taxes. The money from the news organizations was unrestricted.

Lee and the government said that the settlement agreement should not be seen as admission by the US government that Lee’s allegations of leaking information about him were true.

Barbara Ferguson, Arab News