Hale pleaded guilty in March 2021 to one count of violating the Espionage Act for transmitting classified information about the U.S. drone-strike program to a journalist. He was sentenced to 45 months in July 2021. He has now spent more than three years in federal custody for telling the public, in essence, what the public has the right to know about how the United States kills people abroad with no due process.
What he leaked
The Drone Papers — published by The Intercept in October 2015 — were the first comprehensive look at the U.S. signature-strike program from inside the apparatus. The documents Hale provided showed, among other things, that in some operational windows nearly 90% of those killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. They showed the kill-chain bureaucracy. They showed the legal cover. They showed the difference between what the U.S. government tells Americans about the drone program and what the drone program actually is. They are the reason a public conversation about U.S. signature-strike warfare existed at all in the late 2010s.
The prosecution
Hale was charged in 2019 under the Espionage Act of 1917 — the law the U.S. government has now used against essentially every modern national-security whistleblower. The Espionage Act famously does not permit a "public interest" defense; a jury cannot consider why the defendant disclosed the documents, only whether the disclosure happened. Hale pleaded guilty in March 2021 rather than face the alternative. At sentencing, before Judge Liam O'Grady in the Eastern District of Virginia, he read a statement explaining that the killings he had documented gave him no other choice. He was sentenced to 45 months. He has been at FCI Marianna in Florida since.
The clemency campaign
Through 2024, PEN America, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Government Accountability Project, Reporters Without Borders, the Knight First Amendment Institute, and a broad coalition of press-freedom and human-rights organizations pressed the Biden administration for clemency. Twenty members of Congress, including Senators Wyden and Markey and Representatives Pressley, Bowman, Omar, Bush, and Khanna, signed letters supporting his release. Dozens of former senior intelligence officials — including former CIA officer John Kiriakou (himself a federal-prison alumnus over a torture-program disclosure) — added their names. Biden left office in January 2025 without acting on Hale's clemency petition.
What this is, plainly
Daniel Hale is in U.S. federal prison for an act of journalism. He provided documents to a reporter. The documents proved that what the U.S. government told the public about the drone program was not true. The public, in receipt of that information, was able to make better-informed judgments about U.S. foreign policy. There is no version of that sequence in which the United States is the side punishing the right person. His scheduled release date is in July 2026. The federal conviction will stand. The Espionage Act precedent it built is still the law.
NPPC lists Hale on the U.S. political-prisoner roster and will continue to publish updates on his case until he is home.
