A defense attorney in the BALCO steroid scandal has admitted that he revealed secret grand jury testimony from Major League Baseball players to two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, ending a constitutional standoff between federal prosecutors and the press, and eliminating the threat of prison for the journalists.
Troy Ellerman, 44, who represented the vice president of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, agreed to plead guilty to two counts of contempt of court, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of filing a false declaration with a federal court, according to an 18-page plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Once he enters his plea, the U.S. Justice Department intends to withdraw the grand jury subpoenas issued to reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who had been sentenced to prison on contempt charges for refusing to comply with the subpoenas, a government spokesman said. Fainaru-Wada, 41, and Williams, 57, had remained free while appealing the sentence.
"The government believes that Ellerman's guilty pleas will alleviate the need for the reporters to testify before the grand jury," Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, which investigated the leak, said in a news release.
Williams, reached by phone, said Wednesday's news caught him and Fainaru-Wada by surprise. He declined to confirm that Ellerman was their confidential source.
"The whole point of our situation is that we're not going to give our sources to anyone as long as we have a confidentiality agreement in place, and we do," Williams added.
At the same time, Williams said if the prospect of prison is removed, "Of course, that's great."
The case was seen as a tipping point in a series of court battles between journalists and federal prosecutors seeking to unmask their sources. This week, a procession of reporters has filed into a Washington courtroom to testify about who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Media advocates, however, contended that unlike the Plame matter, the BALCO case did not involve sensitive security issues and the reporters performed an important public service by exposing drug abuse in national sports.
Attorneys for the Chronicle argued before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White that forcing journalists to disclose their sources would undercut the 1st Amendment and ability of the media to gather news.
