Democraticcontrolled conspiracy that you get the sense they hope involves Hillary Clinton in a way that will make it hard for her to run for president. So, darrell issa, sitting in his chairman position at that hearing, he turned toward the democratic side of the room, the side of the room where the democrats sit, and he took this picture from his vantage point. And then he tweeted out that picture from his twitter account. And the caption, as you see here, says essentially, democrats have excused themselves from the testimony of the benghazi heroes family members. And that pgnet, im assuming those are trying to highlight it for conservative media, pgnet there. Look at outrage, right . Hes saying, that not all the democratic seats are filled at this hearing. It is very, very important. Dave weigel writing at slate. Com tested Darrell Issas outrage for accuracy and noted that, yes, while there were some empty chairs on the democratic side of the room for that committee hearing, there were also lots and lots of empty chairs on the republican side of the room for that committee hearing. Of the 23 republicans on that committee, judging by all the empty chairs, it looks like 17 of the 23 were absent. Which does not outrage darrell issa at all because theyre republicans who are absent. Hes only outraged by the missing democrats. And you know, maybe its just an honest mistake. Maybe he has a stiff neck or something. How do you bother to turn the other way. He might have been outraged by all of the missing people over there. But he only turned. He was only outraged by the democrats missing, not the republicans. The benghazi attack happened in 2011. Excuse me, happened about a year ago. But it was about four months ago, it was may of this year that republicans decided that they had a new partisan angle on it, that they were going to use Darrell Issas committee and use the house to make the benghazi conspiracy the most important issue in the country. And that month, back in may, the new republican outrage over benghazi was one of three scandals that the Obama Administration was sort of having to deal with all at once. Remember back in may it was scandal overdrive, right . You had headlines like this one from the ap obamas secondterm agenda waylaid by controversies. Do you remember this period in the spring, right . The early summer . Trio of controversies roiling washington, emboldening republicans, a establishment willing to second guess the white house. So, one of those was benghazi, which is still a tragedy and a terrible terrorist attack, but it has never really caught fire as a partisan scandal or as a democratic conspiracy in the way republicans really wanted it to. Hence, you get darrell issa and his half the room photo desperation tactic where he is only excited about missing democrats and not at all excited about missing republicans. So, that was one of the three scandals. The second one was the irs, where it initially appeared like the irs was singling out Tea Party Groups for special scrutiny on applications for taxexempt status. That one ended up falling apart as well, as the initial hyperbolic inspector generals report gave way to a wider investigation, which turned up plenty of evidence that Tea Party Groups were not, in fact, being singled out in the technical sense of the world singled, meaning they werent the only ones getting treated that way. It was pretty much any group that had a mission or had affiliations that seemed overtly political or that was closely tied to electoral politics. And so, yes, it was Tea Party Groups that got extra scrutiny, but it was also a bunch of liberal groups that got extra scrutiny, and actually, it was the liberal group that got denied taxexempt status while none of the Tea Party Groups ever did. So, that was the second one. That was another socalled scandal that was going to destroy the obama presidency, waylay his whole secondterm agenda, right . That kind of turned out to be, just didnt really happen. The widely vilified irs official at the center of that nonscandal, a career official named lois lerner today sort of put the period on the long petering out of this scandal when she announced today that she is retiring from the agency. So, there was supposed to be three scandals, right . There was benghazi. That didnt work out the way the republicans wanted it to. Irs, that did not work out the way republicans wanted it to. The third scandal that broke simultaneously, right . Theyre all happening, all bogging down the administration and dooming the obama second term starting in may of this year. The third one that broke at the same time was always a little harder for republicans to get partisan traction on, and it arguably was the only one that didnt seem like it was the product of an overtuned agro political narrative. It just seemed like something that the administration had actually done that they couldnt quite explain and that seemed out of keeping with not just precedent, but what they said they believed as an administration. It was the story about the Justice Department, right . The Justice Department, as the Justice Department related to a specific bomb plot, an al qaeda bomb plot in yemen last year that did not happen. Really interesting thing about it was that after the bomb plot did not happen, bizarrely, the United States ended up with the bomb in our possession so we could study it. By all accounts, this is a remarkable success for the intelligence agencies of the United States and its allies. And heres why. They managed to insert a critical informant into the very heart of the terror group thats considered the number one threat to the United States, al qaedas offshoot in yemen. Administration and intelligence Officials Say by the time this most recent plot was in its final planning stages, the u. S. And its allies were able to follow it in detail. What the terrorists in yemen did not know at the time, these Officials Say, is that the person they chose to be the suicide bomber was actually an informant, someone who had agreed to cooperate with an allied intelligence service. Members of congress declined to be specific but praised the cia and its overseas counterparts. This was incredibly good intelligence work. I mean, this is intelligence at its best. Reporter after the al qaeda operatives turned over the finished bomb, the informant then drove it safely out of yemen, where it was eventually turned over to the United States. Just an incredibly dramatic story, right . The bomb plot is going to happen, the bomb plot gets foiled, the United States ends up getting the bomb once the plot is foiled and brings it here safely to the United States where it can be studied. So, that was may of last year. And while it is great news any time a bomb attack gets foiled, what was truly remarkable news was this conclusion that the United States must have infiltrated al qaeda in order to foil that particular bomb plot. And you know what . That is something that we were apparently never supposed to know. And while we, the public, may be impressed or even comforted to know that the u. S. And its allies have a mole deep inside al qaeda in yemen who is a trusted enough member of that organization to be tapped as a suicide bomber and then only at the last minute that person turns the device over and sends it to quantico and the bomb doesnt go off, while that may be very exciting to learn in a spy movie kind of way, it may be impressive that that has been done, but the fact that it was publicly disclosed obviously ends that very valuable intelligence situation for the United States forever. Whatever happened to that person inside al qaeda in yemen who was thus outed as a western intelligence mole, i dont know what happened to them. I dont particularly want to imagine it, but you can bet they are not still in al qaeda. And so, the u. S. And western intelligence agencies no longer have that amazing asset of somebody in a trusted position inside al qaeda. And the Justice Department investigation into who leaked that detail, who leaked to the press that there was an informant inside al qaeda, that investigation, while obviously vital for intelligence reasons, for the fight against al qaeda, it also became a scandal, because the way the Justice Department decided to investigate that leak was by secretly and without notice obtaining the phone records for the main phone numbers for the Associated Press bureau in new york city and in washington, d. C. , and in hartford, connecticut, and in congress at the house of representatives, the ap bureau there. Additionally, the Justice Department got the phone records from the work phone numbers and the personal phone numbers for five different ap reporters and their editor. Why it was important to investigate this leak is obvious once you understand what the leak is. Wow that was never supposed to be made public, that absolutely screwed up a great intelligence asset that we had. Why it needed to be investigated is understandable. But the way they went after the Associated Press with this essentially a blanket dragnet on all east coast newsgathering operations for the biggest Newswire Service in the United States . That was a scandal, in part because the Justice Department has guidelines for itself on how to deal with journalists and their sources turning up in criminal and counterterrorism investigations. And this, what they did in response to this leak just completely blew their own internal guidelines out of the water. The white house denied any knowledge of what the Justice Department had done. The Justice Department initiated a review of its own actions. The attorney general established yet new guidelines to further protect reporters from this kind of intrusion. But on the way, it turns out, apparently, they got what they wanted. They figured out who the leaker was. They figured out who leaked that detail, who leaked the story of the secret Al Qaeda Informant to the press. And that news is the news that broke today. We learned today that the source of the leak of that highly classified information is a former fbi agent, a former bomb technician for the fbi named donald saktlaben. Hes agreed to serve 45 years in prison now for the leaking charge. Also, this news about him today, this news solving the mystery that sparked that unprecedented Justice Department spying on reporters, that news came with a bizarre and unsettling twist. The same man who has pled guilty to being the leaker, the exfbi agent who apparently outed to the press that the u. S. Or western intelligence agencies had a mole inside al qaeda, this same guy was also, it turns out, the subject of a totally separate fbi investigation into distribution of child pornography. He pled guilty to the leak charge. He has also pled guilty to the child pornography charges. He will serve a total of 140 months in prison for the leaking charge and the child porn charges combined. This is a very, very strange story and a very weird end to that trio of supposed scandals. Joining us now is nbc news justice correspondent pete williams. Pete, thank you for being here. Sure. Do we have any indication of a motive or a goal in why this information was leaked . No, i think it was the reason that a lot of people pass along information. They want to tell reporters about things that they know. The Court Documents say that the reporters from the ap had actually struck up something of an email relationship with this fbi agent three years before, and working on some other unrelated stories. In april of last year, another News Organization just sort of coincidentally did a story about how al qaeda was planning to hide bombs inside peoples bodies. Now, the bomb that this whole plot is about, that youve talked about, did not involve that kind of device, but the ap reporter saw that and sent an email to the agent and said, hey, whats up with that . And then according to the Court Documents, a couple of days later, the agent goes to quantico where the bomb was sent at the fbi bomb lab there, and according to the Court Documents, he called the ap reporter and told him a few things about it. The ap starts asking questions and five days later, the story appears. In terms of cracking this case and following that trail that you just laid out, how important were those controversial, secret subpoenas by the Justice Department of ap calling records in terms of figuring out who this guy was . Well, the Justice Department says they were essential, that they were getting nowhere, that they got these phone records and they began to line up who knew about the bomb with who the ap was calling, and thats what broke the case. They said they interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, didnt get anywhere, and they claim that the case wasnt broken until they got the aps phone records, that that was the key to the whole thing. Strangely enough, as you noted, this guy was already under investigation by the fbi for completely separate reasons. The fbi and many Law Enforcement organizations to try to combat child pornography has people who normally look at known sites where pedophiles trade pornographic images, and they say that he popped up on that site and they began to search his they got search warrants, searched his house, took a lot of his computers, his phone and other material, storage media. Then, when they figure out he shows up on the ap call records and they do some other searches, they figure out, hey, weve already got his computer, lets look in there some more. They get another search warrant and they say that further developed the case. That seems impossible. I mean, i really i mean, logically, it makes sense, but it seems impossible that these are totally unrelated investigations that they had the computer anyway, and then presumably had to get a new level of permission to go back and look for something that would be part of a totally separate investigation. They maintain that these things had nothing to do with each other . Well, and the child Pornography Case was well along, even before they were starting to figure out that he was the leaker. And what the Justice Department basically says here, if they hadnt gotten the phone records, he would simply have been prosecuted for the child Pornography Case and that would have been that. Now, an interesting thing here, you had some graphics and you read these numbers, but i think its worth looking at these again. So, the sentence, or now, remember, he hasnt plead ad guilty. Hes agreed to plead guilty, so he hasnt been sentenced yet. A judge has to agree to this, but he has agreed to serve for the leak 3 years and 7 months. If thats the sentence, by the way, that would be the longest sentence ever for a leak. The child Pornography Case is 8 years, 1 month. And the Justice Department wants these served one after the other, so itd be a total sentence of 11 years, 8 months. But thats just interesting. It tells you a lot about the severity in the law of leaking information that the u. S. Has damaged National Security. Pete on that issue of it being the most severe sentence ever for the leak, if the judge agrees to this 3 years and 7 months on that part of what hes charged with, do you have reason to believe, or i guess should we infer that the severity of that sentence has something to do with his intention or the level of his known recklessness in letting this information out . I mean, why would you get a more severe sentence for this kind of leak than previous leaks . Well, it just says, number one, that this is so seldom prosecuted, successfully prosecuted, anyway, where they actually get a conviction. And number two, the statute just doesnt call for that severe a sentence. So, thats but in terms of the knowing part, i mean, thats a key part of the law, that you cant be convicted of something unless you knowingly did it. And here, the government says, you know, he had all these topsecret security clearances, he knew he wasnt supposed to release this stuff and he did anyway. So, theyve got him dead to rights there, and of course, he has confessed. In essence. Hes agreed to plead. He says in a statement through his lawyer that he never intended to do any harm to the National Security and hes greatly regrets this. Nbc news justice correspondent pete williams. This is fascinating and totally unforeseen end to this. Thanks, pete. Thanks for helping us figure it out. Okay. Thanks. All right, the terrorist attack on a mall in nairobi, kenya, this past weekend and continuing today is apparently over as of tonight, maybe. Its fuzzy at this point. But who did it and why they did it and what the worlds response is likely to be is part of whats coming up. Stay with us. As a working mom of two young boys life could be hectic. Angies list saves me a lot of time. After reading all the reviews i know im making the right choice. Online or on the phone, we help you hire right the first time. With honest reviews on over 720 local services. Keeping up with these two is more than a full time job, and i dont have time for unreliable companies.