A Familiar Name in an Unlikely Spot

I was doing research yesterday on the case of General James Cartwright, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  General Cartwright pled guilty to giving Top Secret information to the New York Times, but was pardoned by President Obama.  In written statements given to the court, Cartwright's lawyers said he did not give the information to the Times, but did try to stop the damage it might do.  I didn't understand at the time why a person would plead guilty, then deny having done what he pled to. 

I never thought Cartwright was guilty, and apparently President Obama agreed.  Another person who agreed was David Sanger, one of the reporters he was supposed to have given the information to at the Times.  I'm reading Sanger's book, The Perfect Weapon.  Sanger tries to maintain a fiction that he pieced the whole story together from his own sources, without mentioning the Top Secret material he received from the White House.  He may have been trying to protect his sources, which every good reporter should do, but a public court case makes that harder. 

Along the way, I read the plea agreement between the Justice Department and Cartwright.  It was the usual legal language in this type of agreement.  I was looking for clues that would suggest the government knew Cartwright was not guilty but accepted his plea anyway.  It was not likely there would be any such thing in the document and there wasn't. 

But one thing that got my attention was the signature page where the person accepting the plea agreement for the government was Rod Rosenstein, who has been in the news quite a lot lately as the de facto lead for Justice on the Mueller Special Counsel probe of the Trump campaign et al.  I started to wonder how much Rosenstein knew about the case and who actually did give that information to the Times reporter.  President Obama knew that once Cartwright was pardoned, there was not likely to be much interest in the case, nor who might have given those documents to the Times.  It might do a reporter some good to research the connection between the Obama White House, Cartwright, and Rosenstein.  The circumstances are too much of a coincidence, and Washington hates coincidence.