DON'T LET MEGAMOLE DEUTCH ESCAPE!!
Deutch May Plead Guilty to Misdemeanor, Avoid Prison Time
By David A. Vise and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 19, 2001;
Former CIA director John M. Deutch is negotiating with the Justice Department over the possibility that he might plead guilty to a misdemeanor for keeping classified information on his home computers, sources familiar with the talks said yesterday.
Attorney General Janet Reno had wanted to resolve the high-profile case before she left office yesterday, but her interim successor, Eric H. Holder Jr., has assumed responsibility for overseeing its resolution, the sources said.
Although Deutch has been reluctant to agree to plead guilty, a one-count misdemeanor plea would enable him to avoid prison time and eliminate the threat of a criminal indictment on felony charges.
Uncertainty over former senator John D. Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general has increased pressure on Deutch to cut a deal, because it is not clear whether a new attorney general would decide to prosecute him on more serious felony charges for mishandling classified information, the sources said.
Deutch's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell of Williams & Connolly, did not return phone calls seeking comment last night.
The Justice Department initially declined to prosecute Deutch in April 1999 after CIA security officials discovered he had written and stored hundreds of highly classified intelligence reports on unsecure home computers linked to the Internet. Deutch's conduct -- for which he later publicly apologized -- was discovered as he was leaving the CIA in December 1996 after a year and a half in office.
Reno asked prosecutor Paul E. Coffey to take a second look at the case after a leaked CIA inspector general's report ignited controversy on Capitol Hill early last year. Coffey later concluded that criminal charges should be filed against Deutch, who returned to his professor's post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At the time Coffey began his review, Justice Department officials said they were worried about the appearance of a "double standard" after filing a massive, 59-count felony indictment against former Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee for downloading classified nuclear weapons data.
Authorities initially identified Lee as an espionage suspect and held him in pretrial solitary confinement for nine months. But the Taiwanese-born scientist ultimately pleaded guilty in September to a single felony count of mishandling classified information.
Provisions of the espionage act make the willful mishandling of classified defense information a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Taking classified information home without authorization is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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