More than six months after the collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people, there are still plenty of questions about how a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger jet collided. Just last week, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general launched a fresh audit of how the Federal Aviation Administration manages the airspace around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

But a different investigation into the catastrophe moved at a much quicker pace. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority scrambled to figure out who had leaked video of the incident to the news media, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a public records request.

The reports offer a panoramic view of how the leak investigation unfolded, the squishy statute the cops used to investigate and charge CNN’s source with a crime, and how the network’s failure to crop the leaked footage inadvertently aided the investigation.

On January 31, two days after the crash, CNN published two videos showing “previously unseen angles of the collision.”

“The videos, both shot on cell phones, show video replays of surveillance cameras capturing the crash between the passenger flight and the military helicopter,” CNN reported.

It didn’t take long for the MWAA police to determine the provenance of the source material.

Patrick Silsbee, a detective with the agency, recognized the shots as coming from airport security cameras and set about trying to smoke out the leaker. “The video shows camera angles and views that can only be found on the Metropolitan Washington Airport’s Authority CCTV video,” Silsbee wrote in a January 31 report, noting the location of landmarks in the videos, including a boathouse near the airfield.

The locations of the MWAA security cameras are redacted in the reports provided to The Intercept, ostensibly “to prevent the disclosure of law enforcement and security techniques and procedures not generally known outside the law enforcement community,” according to an accompanying letter from MWAA.

However, in one of the videos published online by CNN, the following text appears to be briefly visible in a corner of the clip, The Intercept found: “Terminal 2 FAA Tower South View,” seemingly corresponding to the security camera feed from which it was recorded. This material was cropped from the clip in CNN’s initial broadcast segment about the videos. The MWAA reports do not note this detail about the online version of the video.

CNN........

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