Journalist Tim Burke Indicted For Leaking Tucker Carlson Clips That Embarrassed Fox News

Tessa Stuart
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Tim Burke, a freelance journalist and media consultant, has been charged with 14 federal crimes, including conspiracy. Burke was arrested this morning, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Rolling Stone obtained a copy of the indictment, which accuses Burke of playing “multiple roles in the conspiracy, including utilizing compromised credentials to gain unauthorized access to protected computers, scouring those protected computers for electronic items and information, obtaining and stealing electronic items and information deemed desirable, organizing and exploiting some of those electronic items and information, and intercepting and disclosing contents of wire, oral and/or electronic video communications.”

Mark Rasch, Burke’s lawyer and an ex-federal prosecutor who pursued cases for the Department of Justice’s fraud unit, has maintained that the Fox News clips were obtained legally, and that Burke is a journalist whose activities are protected by the First Amendment.

Last May, Burke’s home in Tampa, Florida, was raided by the FBI as part of the bureau’s investigation into how unaired clips of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight were leaked to Vice and liberal watchdog Media Matters. The indictment does not name Fox News explicitly, but instead refers to Network #1 “a multinational media company headquartered in New York City, New York that produced and distributed content through multiple brands.”

The clips included video of Kanye West repeating antisemitic tropes, as well as embarrassing footage of Carlson making inappropriate comments to his make-up artist and talking about giving a deposition in the Dominion defamation case — an experience he said “triggered the shit out of me” — that was conducted by a lawyer whom Carlson referred to as a “slimy little motherfucker.” (Carlson was later dropped by the network.)

The leaks were deeply embarrassing for Fox News, whose executives, the The Daily Beast reported, “full-on freaked out” about the Kanye clip in particular. Fox News lawyers later sent a cease-and-desist letter to Media Matters warning them to stop publishing the clips. “Reporting on newsworthy leaked material is a cornerstone of journalism. For Fox to argue otherwise is absurd and further dispels any pretense that they’re a news operation,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone wrote in a statement at the time.

A number of Burke’s devices were seized — including his phone, computer, and hard drives — during the raid on his home last year, which reportedly began at dawn and lasted nearly 10 hours. At the time, the affidavit was not made public and Burke’s lawyers did not know what crimes their client was being accused of committing.

Burke, a former Deadspin reporter, earned distinction for uncovering the elaborate catfishing of Notre Dame football player Manti T’eo, and for discovering and stitching together footage of dozens of local Sinclair Broadcasting anchors reading the same script warning viewers of “one-sided news stories plaguing our country.” After Deadspin, he worked as director of video at The Daily Beast, before launching his own business sourcing video content for media clients.

Rasch, Burke’s lawyer, described the method Burke used to obtain the videos in an August interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. “Fox, like many other broadcasters, are livestreaming continuously to many different entities — to their affiliates, and so on — and these live feeds are in high definition and encrypted. But at the same time, they are also broadcasting low-definition, unencrypted feeds. They’re internet addressable, with no user ID and password required. All you need to know is the URL,” Rasch said.

The indictment alleges that Burke and an unnamed co-conspirator “did utilize the Internet to search protected computers and otherwise to secure credentials (usernames and passwords), which had been issued to other entities and individuals with whom [they] had no affiliation.”

In the Columbia Journalism Review interview, Rasch explained: “There are third-party sites that transmit these live feeds as a service. They have password-protected websites. And in this case, somebody on the internet provided Tim with the publicly posted user ID and password for a demo account on one of these services that are used by broadcasters. So Tim logs in to the site, and the site automatically downloads to his computer a list of all the livestreams on the site.”

He adds: “The important thing to note here is that those livestreams did not require a user ID and password to access them, just a URL.”

Rasch emphasized in that interview that Burke did not attempt to conceal his activities: “[E]ven a cursory glance tells you where the data came from, and it points right directly to Tim Burke’s IP address. Why? Because he wasn’t being secretive about this. He was going to public URLs from his own IP address. He didn’t try to conceal it. He didn’t circumvent anything. But Fox says it never authorized this, and the government went and ran with that theory.”

“Finding and reporting on newsworthy content is not a crime, no matter who is embarrassed by the reporting,” Burke said in a written statement to the Tampa Bay Times in July, his first public comments on the matter. A legal fund has been set up for Burke to fight the charges.

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