It's insulting to compare 'selfish thief' Trump to real whistleblowers: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on dozens of federal charges for hoarding highly classified national defense information in unsecured boxes at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida. But he is far from the first person to be prosecuted over classified information — many others, like Reality Winner, Terry Albury, and Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards have faced similar charges.

But there's a huge difference, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist James Risen for The Intercept on Monday.

As Risen tells it, those three aforementioned whistleblowers tried to expose classified information because they believed major government misconduct was being concealed from the public. Trump, meanwhile, was nothing more than a "selfish thief" who wanted to keep documents for himself — and possibly for some unknown, personal use.

"After Trump was indicted last week, there were plenty of facile comparisons in the media between his case and those of others like Winner who have been targeted in leak prosecutions," wrote Risen. "But Winner, Albury, and Edwards were whistleblowers, not narcissists who wanted to hoard government secrets as if they were rare gold coins."

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Winner, for example, was a National Security Agency contractor who handed The Intercept a document showing Russians tried to hack into U.S. voting systems.

"The disclosure was so important that a Senate Intelligence Committee report later concluded that the press played a critical role in warning state elections officials about the Russian attempts to hack voting systems," writes Risen.

Albury, a former FBI agent, turned over material to The Intercept showing "that the FBI could bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses." And Edwards, a former Treasury Department official, leaked documents showing extensive money laundering in Western banks, including “suspicious activity reports” tying these banks to the activities of terrorists and drug cartel leaders.

Trump, by contrast, hasn't used classified information for any sort of public interest purpose. He simply seems to believe he has a right to keep military secrets he finds interesting. In one instance, he even appeared to use a document detailing a hypothetical attack plan against Iran as a way to embarrass a general he was angry with.

"Trump loved sending whistleblowers like Winner, Albury, and Edwards to prison and didn’t care that they had revealed important information that Americans had a right to know," concluded Risen, who also added that the Espionage Act, the very same law Trump is charged with breaking, was the central tool allowing his Justice Department to do so. "Reforming the law to allow for a public interest exception would help future whistleblowers who follow in the footsteps of Winner, Albury, and Edwards. Yet that change would do nothing for Trump. He’s just a selfish thief."