Whistle-Blower on N.S.A. Wiretapping Is Set to Keep Law License

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/us/politics/thomas-tamm-nsa-wiretapping-law-license.html

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WASHINGTON — A District of Columbia bar committee has agreed to a deal that would let a former Justice Department lawyer keep his law license even though he said he was one of the sources for a 2005 article in The New York Times about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

The deal calls for a “public censure” of the lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, who admitted revealing confidential client information and could have had his law license suspended or been disbarred. That reprimand would enable him to continuing practicing law as an assistant public defender in Maryland.

If approved by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the deal would end a decade of investigations into Mr. Tamm. The Justice Department said in 2010 that it had decided not to prosecute him for a crime, but in December, in a surprise move, the District of Columbia bar revived ethics charges against him.

“This has been going on forever,” said Mr. Tamm’s lawyer, Paul Kemp. “It has taken a huge toll on Tom, and it’s time to end it.”

The Bush administration started the once-secret warrantless wiretapping and bulk data collection program known as Stellarwind in October 2001. It bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In December 2005, The Times published an article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealing the warrantless wiretapping component of the program. The article won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted a huge leak investigation that came to focus on Mr. Tamm, among other people.

Mr. Tamm told Newsweek in 2008 that he was one of the sources for the article, describing how he had become aware of a secret illegal wiretapping program and used a pay phone to call Mr. Lichtblau and alerted him to its existence. Mr. Lichtblau has never confirmed Mr. Tamm’s account, and the reporters have said they had many sources.

A three-lawyer committee held a hearing last month about Mr. Tamm’s case. In a report filed late on Monday, the panel said it had decided to recommend that the court accept the deal. People familiar with the process said the court generally accepted panel recommendations.

The report said Mr. Tamm’s admitted violation of an ethics rule against revealing confidential client information was “very serious,” but also found that substantial factors militated against a more severe punishment.

Among those factors, according to the committee: He had acted as a whistle-blower; he revealed only the existence of the program, and not any operational details about it; he neither sought nor received financial gain; and he has “already paid a severe price for his actions,” from years of being under criminal investigation.

“While, of course, lawyers are prohibited from revealing client secrets, even when it seems that it is the right thing to do, that Respondent’s motivation was to try to end an illegal program through the only method he believed he had available to him is substantially mitigating, notwithstanding the fact that he now realizes there were other options available to him at the time,” the report said.