THE former Danish Defense Minister Klaus Jört Frederiksen announced today that he was prosecution for leaking top secret, state secrets.

Earlier, the prosecutor’s office said it was prosecuting a person based on a rarely used article of the criminal code that provides for the Imprisonment of up to 12 years for leaking state secrets, while not announcing the name of the accused.

Frederiksen, who was minister from 2016 to 2019, he confirmed via Facebook that he is being prosecuted, but denied that he had done anything wrong. According to the prosecution, the defendant “in many cases he revealed or handed over state secrets”, important for national security.

After his preliminary indictment last year, Frederiksen told local media that the charges were based on statements he had made about a secret surveillance agreement between Denmark and the US National Security Agency (NSA). In September, the former head of Denmark’s foreign intelligence service was also accused, based on the same article, of leaking classified information. Frederiksen had parliamentary immunity until November, which was not renewed after he decided not to run again in the last parliamentary election.

In May 2021, a multi-media investigation revealed that the NSA used, at least until 2014, the Danish submarine cable network to monitor high-ranking officials of four countries (Germany, Sweden, Norway, France), among whom was then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few months later, he said in an interview with TV2 that the agreement on the use of submarine cables had been concluded in the late 1990s by then US President Bill Clinton and the former Prime Minister of Denmark Paul Nirup Rasmussen.

“I deny that I overstepped the bounds of freedom of expression (…) and did not reveal any alleged state secrets” he stressed in his post, noting that the indictment against him is confidential and that’s why he won’t make it public.

“It has been widely known since 2013 that this partnership existed. Who revealed it? The Americans themselves, because they were in the NSA documents released by (Edward) Snowden,” he said in a video posted on the BT newspaper website today.

A trial date has not been set at this time. The prosecution requested that it be held in camera because it involves classified information that should not be made public.