In an article in Moment magazine (February 1993), editor Hershel Shanks attempts to explain my grossly disproportionate sentence and states that one of the reasons that I received a life sentence is that I had disobeyed the judge by giving an interview to the press.
The fact of the matter is that neither Judge Robinson nor the Government barred me from talking to the press. If I wanted to meet with a reporter, all I had to do was obtain written permission from the Bureau of Prisons and restrict my comments to the Classification Guidelines established for such interviews. And this is exactly the procedure I followed for both of the discussions I had with Wolfe Blitzer prior to my sentencing.
The Government, however, did something highly suspicious on both of these occasions, namely, they "forgot" to send anyone to monitor these interviews. Later, at sentencing, the prosecutor successfully inflamed the judge against me by claiming that not only had the interviews been secretly arranged behind their backs, but that I'd also disclosed highly classified material to Blitzer, which compromised the Intelligence community's "sources and methods."
The prosecutors further held that my interviews constituted such a flagrant breach of the Plea Agreement that they were, in effect, an insult to the court's authority. In view of this, the prosecutors went on, the judge was urged to impose a sentence commensurate with my "treason, arrogance and continuing threat to national security."
Of course, the fact that I'd obtained permission to talk to Blitzer, that it was the Government's responsibility - not mine - to assure that somebody was present to monitor the interviews, and that I was never officially charged with having disclosed confidential information to Blitzer, all seems to have been lost on Judge Robinson, who subsequently handed me the harshest sentence he could - life.
Commenting on this turn of events several years later, Wolfe Blitzer stated that, as far as he was concerned, the go-ahead I'd been given to talk with him was part of a calculated scheme by the prosecutors designed to justify their planned violation of the Plea Agreement. Blitzer's take of this incident was eventually confirmed by none other than Joseph DiGenova who bragged to Robert Friedman of the Village Voice that he'd hoped the interviews would be the "rope" with which I'd hang myself.
What he conveniently failed to mention, of course, was that he'd placed the noose around my neck and kicked the chair out from under my feet. But then again, why should DiGenova have been expected to remember such minor details?