DANIEL ELLSBERG

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers told NPR it's obvious why the Supreme Court wants to keep their process secret: "No organization really wants to show how the sausage is made."

There’s nothing official Washington loves better than a juicy whodunit.

The former Treasury official is going to prison for leaks that fed small stories. She never really got credit for the big one.

The former Treasury official is going to prison for leaks that fed small stories. She never really got credit for the big one.

The president was a tragic figure destined to fall, writes Michael Dobbs.

Daniel Ellsberg said he is releasing top-secret crisis study as tensions mount between the United States and China over Taiwan.

Early indications are that a fight broke out during what police called an unannounced and unauthorized concert in a neighborhood late Saturday, North Charleston police said in a statement. Officers were called to the scene around 10:30 p.m. Saturday and found some of the people wounded by gunfire, North Charleston police Deputy Chief Scott Deckard said. More than a dozen people were shot, Deckard told media outlets.

British health officials expressed optimism Sunday that the coronavirus restrictions remaining in England can be lifted in June after an official study found that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines offer effective protection against the variant first identified in India. Authorities in Britain have expressed concern in recent weeks that increasing cases of the Indian variant could jeopardize the U.K.’s so-far successful plan to reopen its economy. More than 2,880 cases of the Indian variant have been recorded in England, figures show.

Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison and food columnist Jenn Harris taste-test chicken sandwiches from Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, Carl's Jr., Jollibee, Church's Chicken, Burger King, McDonald's, Arby's and KFC and declare which is the best.

The GOP-controlled legislature in Alabama has lifted the ban imposed in 1993 out of fear the exercise form would spread eastern spirituality.

They actually added $3 million for a new police recruiting class, and they’ll have a record voters can judge them by.

Two brothers have received a $75m payout over their wrongful 1983 murder conviction.

Man was awaiting trial on charge of destroying a National Park Service vehicle on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Jewish groups wrote to President Joe Biden Friday expressing concern about the surge of antisemitic hate crimes amid tensions in the Middle East.

Florida’s Department of Health on Saturday announced 3,406 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the most since May 14. The state also announced 22 new deaths. Of those who died, all 22 were residents.

WASHINGTON — When communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was. U.S. military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release. The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times While it has been known in broader strokes that United States officials considered using atomic weapons against mainland China if the crisis escalated, the pages reveal in new detail how aggressive military leaders were in pushing for authority to do so if communist forces, which had started shelling the so-called offshore islands, intensified their attacks. The crisis in 1958 instead ebbed when Mao Zedong’s communist forces broke off the attacks on the islands, leaving them in the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Republic of China forces based on Taiwan. More than six decades later, strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s status — and about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend it — persists. The previously censored information is significant both historically and now, said Odd Arne Westad, a Yale University historian who specializes in the Cold War and China and who reviewed the pages for The New York Times. “This confirms, to me at least, that we came closer to the United States using nuclear weapons” during the 1958 crisis “than what I thought before,” he said. “In terms of how the decision-making actually took place, this is a much more illustrative level than what we have seen.” Drawing parallels to today’s tensions — when China’s own conventional military might has grown far beyond its 1958 ability, and when it has its own nuclear weapons — Westad said the documents provided fodder to warn of the dangers of an escalating confrontation over Taiwan. Even in 1958, officials doubted the United States could successfully defend Taiwan using only conventional weapons, the documents show. If China invaded today, Westad said, “it would put tremendous pressure on U.S. policymakers, in the case of such a confrontation, to think about how they might deploy nuclear weapons.” “That should be sobering for everyone involved,” he added. In exposing a historical antecedent for the present tensions, Ellsberg said that was exactly the takeaway he wanted the public to debate. He argued that inside the Pentagon, contingency planning was likely underway for the possibility of an armed conflict over Taiwan — including what to do if any defense using conventional weapons appeared to be falling short. “As the possibility of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied about this very year, it seems very timely to me to encourage the public, Congress and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them,” he said about what he characterized as “shallow” and “reckless” high-level discussions during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis. He added, “I do not believe the participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in the current Cabinet.” Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence Kutner, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the U.S. government to block the plan. “There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” Kutner said at one meeting. At the same time, officials considered it very likely that the Soviet Union would respond to an atomic attack on China with retaliatory nuclear strikes. (In retrospect, it is not clear whether this premise was accurate. Historians say U.S. leaders, who saw communism as a monolithic global conspiracy, did not appreciate or understand an emerging Sino-Soviet split.) But U.S. military officials preferred that risk to the possibility of losing the islands. The study paraphrased Gen. Nathan Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that if atomic bombings of air bases did not force China to break off the conflict, there would be “no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.” He suggested that such strikes would “almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa,” the Japanese island where U.S. military forces were based, “but he stressed that if national policy is to defend the offshore islands then the consequences had to be accepted.” The study also paraphrased the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as observing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “nobody would mind very much the loss of the offshore islands but that loss would mean further communist aggression. Nothing seems worth a world war until you looked at the effect of not standing up to each challenge posed.” Ultimately, President Dwight Eisenhower pushed back against the generals and decided to rely on conventional weapons at first. But nobody wanted to enter another protracted conventional conflict like the Korean War, so there was “unanimous belief that this would have to be quickly followed by nuclear strikes unless the Chinese communists called off this operation.” Ellsberg said he copied the full version of the study when he copied the Pentagon Papers. But he did not share the Taiwan study with reporters who wrote about the Vietnam War study in 1971, like Neil Sheehan of The Times. Ellsberg quietly posted the full study online in 2017 when he published a book, “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” One of its footnotes mentions in passing that passages and pages omitted from the study are available on his website. But he did not quote the study’s material in his book, he said, because lawyers for his publisher worried about potential legal liability. He also did little else to draw attention to the fact that its redacted pages are visible in the version he posted. As a result, few noticed it. One of the few who did was William Burr, a senior analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, who mentioned it in a footnote in a March blog post about threats to use nuclear weapons in the Cold War. Burr said he had tried about two decades to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a new declassification review of the study — which was written by Morton Halperin for the RAND Corp. — but the Pentagon was unable to locate an unabridged copy in its files. (RAND, a nongovernmental think tank, is not itself subject to information act requests.) Ellsberg said tensions over Taiwan did not seem as urgent in 2017. But the uptick in saber-rattling — he pointed to a recent cover of The Economist magazine that labeled Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth” and a recent opinion column by The Times’ Thomas Friedman titled, “Is There a War Coming Between China and the U.S.?” — prompted him to conclude it was important to get the information into greater public view. Michael Szonyi, a Harvard University historian and author of a book about one of the offshore islands at the heart of the crisis, “Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line,” called the material’s availability “hugely interesting.” Any new confrontation over Taiwan could escalate, and officials today would be “asking themselves the same questions that these folks were asking in 1958,” he said, linking the risks created by “dramatic” miscalculations and misunderstandings during serious planning for the use of nuclear weapons in 1958 and today’s tensions. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information. Enacted during World War I, the Espionage Act makes it a crime to retain or disclose, without authorization, defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its wording covers everyone — not only spies — and it does not allow defendants to urge juries to acquit on the basis that disclosures were in the public interest. Using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers was once rare. In 1973, Ellsberg himself was charged under it, before a judge threw out the charges because of government misconduct. The first successful such conviction was in 1985. But it has now become routine for the Justice Department to bring such charges. Most of the time, defendants strike plea deals to avoid long sentences, so there is no appeal. The Supreme Court has not confronted questions about whether the law’s wording or application trammels First Amendment rights. Saying the Justice Department should charge him for his open admission that he disclosed the classified study about the Taiwan crisis without authorization, Ellsberg said he would handle his defense in a way that would tee up the First Amendment issues for the Supreme Court. “I will, if indicted, be asserting my belief that what I am doing — like what I’ve done in the past — is not criminal,” he said, arguing that using the Espionage Act “to criminalize classified truth-telling in the public interest” is unconstitutional. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

The only abortion clinic in Mississippi is facing what could be its biggest challenge. The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear arguments this fall over a Mississippi law that would limit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

NEW YORK — Police officers in New York state could only use physical force as a last resort, would have to meet a higher threshold for using deadly force and would face new criminal penalties for violating those guidelines under a sweeping legislative proposal unveiled Friday. If adopted, the changes could drastically alter the nature of law enforcement in New York at a time when the issue of police accountability is at the center of a fraught national debate over persistent racism in America’s criminal justice system. The legislation was proposed by Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, who said in a statement that her goal was to provide “clear and legitimate standards for when the use of force is acceptable and enacting real consequences for when an officer crosses that line.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times The proposal — announced nearly a year after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd, a Black man — came amid continuing calls for increasing the accountability applied to officers who are involved in such killings. Although a jury convicted Chauvin of murder last month, the outcome underscored the rarity of such verdicts. Various states have responded to the widespread protests that followed Floyd's death by revisiting laws that guide officers’ use of force, but those efforts have yet to broadly alter the legal landscape related to policing. Some experts questioned whether introducing ambiguous new guidelines could make it harder to secure convictions against officers who use force improperly. James’ proposal — sponsored in the state Legislature by Brooklyn Democrats Sen. Kevin Parker and Assembly member Nick Perry — is certain to face opposition from Republicans and potentially some moderate Democrats in suburban districts. The legislation would amend state law to require officers to exhaust so-called de-escalation tactics, like verbal warnings, before using force and would create a “last resort” standard for justifying such a use of force. “Police officers are imbued with an incredible amount of police power and state power,” James, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Manhattan Friday. “The state has every right to demand that that power is used as seldom as possible, and when it must be used, only appropriately and proportionally.” Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, which represents police officers in New York City, criticized the legislation sharply. “This sweeping proposal would make it impossible for police officers to determine whether or not we are permitted to use force in a given situation,” he said in a statement. “The only reasonable solution will be to avoid confrontations where force might become necessary.” Democratic lawmakers have yet to meet to discuss the proposal, but it appears to have the support from the party’s state Senate leaders. Sen. Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader, spoke in favor of the bill at the news conference Friday. The legislation could become part of a broader police accountability package that lawmakers hope to pass before their current session ends in June. James’ office oversees a unit that is responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed people. The unit, established after the death of Eric Garner in police custody on Staten Island in 2014, has never secured a conviction. While the proposed law could make it easier for prosecutors to bring charges against officers who use lethal force, the way it is written could make it easier to convince juries of reasonable doubt, said Dennis Kenney, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor. He noted that juries have historically given officers the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous circumstances. “It creates a great deal of unnecessary ambiguity,” Kenney said. “They may more easily be able to bring charges, but they’ll have more difficultly getting convictions because it’s easier to create reasonable doubt.” In one recent high-profile case involving the attorney general's unit, James announced in February that a grand jury had declined to indict officers in Rochester who handcuffed and pinned a Black man, Daniel Prude, to the pavement until he lost consciousness. He died a week later. James said at the time that the grand jury’s decision was the result of laws that protect the police. “The current laws on deadly force have created a system that utterly and abjectly failed Mr. Prude and so many others before him,” she said then. If James’ proposal becomes law, New York would be following the lead of New Jersey, which overhauled its use-of-force policies last year to prohibit officers from using physical force against civilians except as a last resort. New Jersey’s attorney general had the authority to rewrite the rules, which he did in consultation with law enforcement and civil right groups, but any changes that New York makes require legislative approval. James’ legislation would also establish criminal penalties for officers who use force that is “grossly in excess of what is warranted” in situations where they cause injury or death. Under the changes, prosecutors could evaluate whether an officer’s actions were responsible for creating the need of force in the first place. In New York City, the Police Department’s patrol guide gives officers almost total discretion with regard to when the use of force is appropriate. The use of de-escalation techniques is encouraged, but only “when appropriate and consistent with personal safety,” the patrol guide says. The Police Department prohibits officers from shooting at a suspect who is fleeing if there is no imminent threat of death or serious injury to the police or other people. Officers are encouraged to use only as much force as is “reasonable” to subdue a suspect. Still, officers who are found to have used excessive force rarely face serious consequences or even any punishment at all within the department, disciplinary records show. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Lupita Gomez will be the first in her family to go to college, and she dreams of one day working at the United Nations. But she also loves playing the viola.

Biden condemned reports saying the Justice Department covertly obtained email and phone records from Washington Post and CNN journalists.

Between May 7 and May 14, more than 17,000 tweets could be found that used variations of the phrase, "Hitler was right," the ADL found.

People leaving Cuba can no longer change their local bills back into dollars, euros or other other hard currency at the official exchange rate under a new policy announced this week. The government closed the airport departure lounge exchange booths that had allowed travelers to change up to $300 at the official rate of 24 Cuban pesos to the dollar — about double the black market rate inside the country. The state's Cadeca exchange company said the measure was due to a drastic drop in tourism during the pandemic and the resulting lack of hard currency.

Emerson C. Buck IV, a registered sex offender, attacked his uncle with a knife and killed him.

FILE - This Jan. 16, 2001, file photo shows G. Gordon Liddy, a Watergate conspirator, arriving at Baltimore's federal courthouse. Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talk show host after emerging from prison, has died at age 90. (AP Photo/Roberto Borea, File)WASHINGTON – G. Gordon Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talk show host after emerging from prison, died Tuesday at age 90 at his daughter’s home in Virginia. After his release from prison, Liddy became a popular, provocative and controversial radio talk show host. His syndicated radio talk show, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, was long one of the most popular in the country.

FILE - In this Monday, June 9, 1997, file photo, G. Gordon Liddy kneels next to his Corvette outside the Fairfax, Va., radio station where he broadcasts his syndicated radio talk show. Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talk show host after emerging from prison, has died at age 90. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)WASHINGTON – G. Gordon Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talk show host after emerging from prison, died Tuesday at age 90 at his daughter’s home in Virginia. After his release from prison, Liddy became a popular, provocative and controversial radio talk show host. His syndicated radio talk show, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, was long one of the most popular in the country.

His account of the Vietnam War, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” took him 15 years to write. Sheehan served as a war correspondent for United Press International and then the Times in the early days of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Soon, The Washington Post also began publishing stories about the Pentagon Papers. When Sheehan and Ellsberg bumped into each other in Manhattan in 1971, Ellsberg accused Sheehan of stealing the papers, just as he had. Neil and Susan Sheehan had two daughters, Catherine Bruno, and Maria Gregory Sheehan, both of Washington and two grandsons, Nicholas Sheehan Bruno, 13, and Andrew Phillip Bruno, 11.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will find out Monday Jan. 4, 2021, whether he can be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. to face espionage charges over the publication of secret American military documents. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)LONDON – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will find out Monday whether he can be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. to face espionage charges over the publication of secret American military documents. U.S. prosecutors indicted the 49-year-old Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse that carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. His legal team argued that Assange would, if extradited, likely face solitary confinement that would put him at a heightened risk of suicide. Assange and his legal team will be hoping that developments in the U.S. bring an end to his ordeal if the judge grants the U.S. extradition request.

Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange take part in a protest outside the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in London, Monday, Sept. 14, 2020. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)LONDON – An American constitutional law expert said Thursday that the United States indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under an “extraordinarily broad” spying law that has been used in the past for politically motivated prosecutions. Leaker Daniel Ellsberg faced 12 Espionage Act charges and faced up to 115 years in prison, but the charges were dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct against him. He said it was not relevant to his analysis of the Espionage Act, and noted he was a very junior lawyer at the time. He disagreed with a suggestion by a prosecution lawyer that Assange took a “cavalier attitude” to redaction.

He told London's Central Criminal Court that the pair had very comparable political opinions. The dump, similarly coordinated at various stages with some of the world's leading newspapers, was arguably the biggest single leak since the Pentagon Papers four decades before. Like Assange, Ellsberg faced the prospect of decades, at least, in prison. He also said that Assange took great care not to willfully expose anyone to harm. Assange has been in a British prison since he was ejected from his refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019.

Bailyn, one of the countrys leading historians of the early U.S., has died at age 97. Bailyn was best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, among the most influential historical works of the past few decades. (AP Photo/Julia Malakie, File)NEW YORK Bernard Bailyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and educator of lasting influence whose The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution transformed how many thought about the countrys formation, has died at 97. This logic of rebellion led the founders not only to defy their colonial rulers, but to envision Americas destiny in the context of world history, Bailyn wrote. An acknowledged landmark in scholarship, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize in 1968.

"I would say, 'You are obviously a person of integrity and you take it seriously when you hear about wrongdoing,'" Brockovich, the environmental and consumer activist, said in a recent telephone interview. Presidents, military leaders and corporate executives have raged against them, but whistleblowers have been around as long as the country itself. Whistleblowers have a long, diverse and complicated history, right down to the definition and spelling of the word. "Whistleblower" is now one word, generally unhyphenated, and defined by activists as someone who exposes wrongdoing, often from the inside at personal risk. "It isn't surprising to me that the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower is from the intelligence community," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog Project on Government Oversight.