This time, it involves a Taiwanese spy named Isabelle Cheng, State Department Asia hand Donald Keyser, their not-so-secret secret love affair, espionage, and amazingly, it also involves John Negroponte. Why?
The new filing could also raise awkward questions for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte because Keyser's wife Margaret Lyons is a senior CIA official on loan in a sensitive post helping set up a new open-source unit of DNI. The prosecutors' filing says Lyons had known for about a year that Keyser had improperly kept classified documents at home. Worse, current and former U.S. government officials tell TIME, an FBI search of the couple's home found CIA documents that Lyons had there without authorization. In a Feb. 22 letter to the judge in Keyser's case, Lyons -- who hasn't been charged -- admitted she and Keyser had failed "to properly secure" her husband's secret material. Through a spokesman, Negroponte declined to discuss Lyons' DNI role or whether CIA material was compromised. A CIA spokeswoman said the agency "stands by the decision" not to revoke Lyons' security clearance.
Well, I guess as long as it doesn't involve her husband going public and announcing that there was no WMD-making material found in Iraq, then she's safe, huh?
And the hole that Negroponte is in gets deeper each day.
Secrecy News has the PDF of the Justice Department's filing detailing the whole thing.
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