The government agency sends a clear warning to any employee who speaks to a journalist: Shut up

If you think investigations of media leaks are confined to issues of national security, think again.

Since 2008, one particular federal government agency has aggressively investigated leaks to the media, examining some one million emails sent by nearly 300 members of its staff, interviewing some 100 of its own employees and trolling the phone records of scores more.  It’s not the CIA, the Department of Justice or the National Security Agency. 

It’s the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Details of the SEC’s latest inquiry were recently revealed, when CNBC and Reuters reported that the agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) had examined the email and phone records of 39 SEC employees. The goal: To find out who had leaked to Reuters information on the commission’s settlement with JP Morgan over the “London Whale” trading charges.

The March 2014 OIG report, which itself was leaked to the press, said investigators had also interviewed 53 SEC employees, including the chair, Mary Jo White, and the four other commissioners. They also reviewed the building logs to find out when Reuters reporters visited the SEC headquarters.

All that effort was for naught. Despite the time and resources that have been poured into them, none of the SEC’s eight investigations in the past six years have uncovered the leakers. (See the details in the table here.) Five years ago, OIG investigators tried to find the sources of a Wall Street Journal story on a leaked SEC report

- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/sec_investigation_media_leaks_reuters.php#sthash.v7lMdvMy.dpuf

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