A real House of Cards drama and her middle-aged source (News)

Wolfe pleaded not guilty on three counts of lying to FBI agents working on a leak investigation on Wednesday. He has not been charged with unlawfully disclosing classified information.

Trump had said the arrest of Wolfe “could be a terrific thing,” and stressed that “you cannot leak classified information”. Trump supporters have accused the pair of trading sex and secrets to spread anti-Trump stories.

The case bears a strong resemblance to the television drama House of Cards, of which Watkins confessed to be a fan in 2013.

“I wanted to be Zoe Barnes … until episode 4. Sleeping with your source … #badlifechoice @HouseofCards.”

She later questioned whether the character’s sleeping with sources to obtain story ideas was ethical, asking her followers to weigh in.

“So on a scale of 1 to ethical, how does everyone feel about pulling a @RealZoeBarnes for story ideas? #Totally kidding @HouseofCards.”

After Wolfe’s arrest, fans went back to the tweet to respond, with some posting pictures of Wolfe, others noting “Who would have though that you’d actually go and do it”.

Last week, the Times said it was reviewing Watkins’ work history.

Watkins and Wolfe, 57, had an extended personal relationship that ended last year. Prosecutors suspected that Wolfe had leaked classified intelligence to reporters, a claim that he denies.

The review of Watkins’ involvement in the case, including the nature of her relationship with Wolfe and what she disclosed about it to her prior employers. Watkins informed the Times about the prior relationship after she was hired by the paper and before she began work in December. She has said that Wolfe did not provide her with information during the course of their relationship.

Wolfe was one of the highest-ranking aides on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Watkins covered extensively at Politico, BuzzFeed News, The Huffington Post and the McClatchy, where she started as an intern in 2013.  At theTimes, Watkins has covered federal law enforcement, the paper said, but her Twitter profile still describes her beat as national security.

Watkins joined the Times in December, after her relationship with Wolfe had ended. She told the paper about the relationship when she was hired, according to the Times.

But it appears Watkins left previous employers in the dark about her relationship with Wolfe even while she was reporting on the intelligence committee.

Editors at McClatchy have said they were not aware of Watkins’ relationship with Wolfe while she was with the news organisation’s Washington bureau, first as an intern and stretching from mid-2013 to the end of 2014.

During that time, Watkins was part of a team of three reporters that produced a series of stories about the intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA and its “enhanced interrogation” or torture program. The series was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 2015.

“We were not aware of these allegations that Mr Wolfe had a relationship with Ali Watkins until the news of the indictment broke,” said Tim Grieve, vice president of news for McClatchy.

Grieve, who joined McClatchy after Watkins left the company, said he did not know whether Watkins used Wolfe as a source in her stories. “We need to figure that out,” he said. “We just don’t know” whether Wolfe provided information to her.

But he added, “It’s clearly inappropriate for a reporter to be in a relationship with a source and to be reporting on him.”

McClatchy’s series, which was published throughout 2014, was chockablock with revelations about the internal workings of the intelligence committee. Among other stories in its Pulitzer package were stories headlined, “Senate intelligence panel staffer took secret CIA papers years before agency discovered them missing” and “FBI probing alleged removal of documents from CIA by Senate staffers.”

Watkins learnt of the seizure of her email and mobile phone data in a letter sent from the Department of Justice in February, but she didn’t notify the Times of the investigation at the time, according to the newspaper. Watkins’ reporting for the Times is not part of the leak investigation.

When asked about the delay between Watkins’ receipt of the FBI letter and the notification of the Times, Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said it was up to Watkins to respond. She added, “We obviously would have preferred to know.”

The story under scrutiny in the Wolfe indictment was written while Watkins worked at BuzzFeed in early 2017. “A former campaign adviser for Donald Trump met with and passed documents to a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013,” the story began. The indictment of Wolfe noted that the investigation sought to learn how Watkins had learnt that Russian spies had tried to recruit the former adviser, Carter Page.

The indictment notes the relationship between Wolfe and Watkins between 2014 and 2017 involved the exchange of “tens of thousands of electronic communications, often including daily texts and phone calls, and they frequently met in person at a variety of locations including Hart Senate Office Building stairwells, restaurants, and [the reporter’s] apartment.”

Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed News, praised Watkins as a reporter. “The way the indictment is written is clearly aimed at launching a disgusting smear of a reporter, and it has had that effect,” he said.

Smith also tweeted his concern about the Justice Department’s investigation: “We are deeply troubled by what looks like a case of law enforcement interfering with a reporter’s constitutional right to gather information about her own government,” he wrote.

Watkins has had a stunning rise through the ranks of Washington news organisations and developed a track record of breaking stories. Even before her graduation from Temple in 2014, she was involved in McClatchy’s reporting on the intelligence committee.

A spokesman for Politico, which Watkins joined in May of last year and left in December, said she didn’t disclose her relationship when she was hired. Upon learning of the relationship a month into her tenure, she was “managed accordingly,” the spokesman said, meaning she was kept from reporting any stories involving the committee.

Watkins covered national security and law enforcement for Politico, including topics relating to China, international espionage and Cuba.

On December 14, days before she began working at The Times, Watkins was approached by FBI agents, who asked about her contact with Wolfe; she said she did not answer their questions at the time.

She was also approached last June, shortly after she was hired at Politico, by a man who identified himself as a government agent and brought up Wolfe, according to several people familiar with her description of the interaction, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The man contacted Watkins and offered to meet as a potential source for her reporting, these people said. During a meeting in Washington, he told Watkins that he was aware of her personal relationship with Wolfe and knew about their travel abroad together. He asked if she would assist him in ferreting out government leakers and the journalists they worked with.

It is unclear whether he was working alone or as part of a larger effort.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the man who had approached Watkins was Jeffrey Rambo, whom the paper identified as a Customs and Border Protection agent. In a statement, the agency said that its Office of Professional Responsibility would review the matter.

“CBP takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously,” the statement read. “The allegation has been immediately referred to CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.”

Watkins declined to comment on Tuesday. Her lawyer, Mark MacDougall, also declined to comment.

The DOJ, under its own guidelines, is to exhaust all other means of obtaining information before seizing a reporter’s phone and email records. “It’s hard to imagine that the Justice Department did that in this case,” said Matthew Miller, the former chief spokesman for the Department of Justice.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement: “Government surveillance of a reporter’s communications would be concerning under any circumstances, but it is especially so here. It is unclear whether the government exhausted other options before seizing Watkins’ phone and email records. It’s also not apparent why it was necessary to collect years’ worth of sensitive information. Finally, there is a question whether Watkins was notified in a timely way of the surveillance. It is thus unclear whether the search complied even with the Justice Department’s own guidelines relating to surveillance of the media.”

Watkins received a letter in February from the Justice Department informing her it had obtained her records. She consulted her lawyer about the letter at the time and on his advice did not tell The Times about it until late last week.

Watkins is set to go on leave on a previously planned holiday, said Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman.

Washington Post, New York Times, Fairfax Media