Court Says Congressman Must Pay Damages

COURT SAYS CONGRESSMAN MUST PAY DAMAGES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Adam Liptak]
No, this isn't a "Ten Years Ago" feature... A federal appeals court in Washington ruled Tuesday that Rep Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, must pay damages to another congressman for giving reporters a tape of an illegally intercepted telephone call. The case was brought by Rep John A. Boehner of Ohio, now the House Republican leader. It arose from a conference call in 1996 in which Newt Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House, discussed how to deal with a finding against him by the House ethics committee. Mr. Boehner participated by cellphone. A Florida couple, Alice and John Martin, recorded the call using a radio scanner. They delivered the tape to Rep McDermott, then the ranking Democrat on the ethics committee, who passed it along to The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Martins pleaded guilty to intercepting the call and were fined $500 each for violating the federal wiretapping law. That law also forbids the dissemination of information obtained through illegal interception. But a 2001 decision of the United States Supreme Court, Bartnicki v. Vopper, ruled that the part of the law concerning disclosure violates the First Amendment, at least when the person doing the disclosing was not involved in the eavesdropping and the information was of public importance. Earlier decisions in the Boehner case had rejected arguments from Rep McDermott based on Bartnicki and the First Amendment. Yesterday’s decision, from the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was much narrower, turning on an ethics committee confidentiality rule.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02court.html
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