I recently published a column on how Barack Obama has publicly assumed many of the powers that were once cited as the basis for the investigation and attempted impeachment of Richard Nixon. One of those areas was the Obama Administration’s crackdown on journalists. This week Attorney General Eric Holder appears to have yet again added to this ignoble record. It appears that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press. This disclosure follows another recent disclosure that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted conservative groups associated with the Tea Party. Yet, once again, most Democrats remain silent in a type of cult of personality where principle is discarded in favor of loyalty to the President.
The spying on reporters by the Obama Administration included outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters. The seizure covered general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn. The Justice Department showed no restraint or concern, even including the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. It now appears that in a few years historians could well be saying the Nixon was perfectly Obamaesque in his abuses.
AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt has written a letter to Holder objecting to the spying, noting that “[t]here can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.” I would be equally upset with the mere fact of the spying as opposed to its breadth.
The spying may be part of a criminal investigation into a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. AP agreed to hold the story after an objection from the Administration but ultimately ran the story disclosing a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States. While working with the Administration in holding the story, the Administration apparently was moving to spy on five reporters and an editor who were involved in the story.
Holder would have to have personally approved the subpoenas under Justice Department regulations. However, it is not enough to again criticize Holder (who has assembled one of the most abusive records on civil liberties in our history). Obama is well aware of the objections by civil libertarians and personally approved such decisions as promising CIA officials that they would not be investigated for torture and the kill list policy.
What is most striking about this story is the sense of complete immunity and lack of concern shown by the Administration. That sense of impunity has developed over four years as Democrats have gone into radio silence over abuses by the Administration from Obama’s “kill list” policy to other rollbacks on civil liberties. There will come a day when this president is no longer in office and many Democrats and Liberals will be faced with the imperial presidency that he created in the hands of someone they do not revere. When that day comes, it will be hard to climb over the mountain of hypocrisy to find a principled ground for criticism.
Source: CNN
I am confused that Democrats are allegedly silent about the DOJ’s and Administration excesses. With the internet sites I visit, including this one, there is much disfavor and condemnation of any excess that has been taken. NAL brings up some good points.
AP,
You had me until you quote Carl Bernstein. He has sold out long ago to privacy. Until we get rid of the Patriot Act, this kind of abuse will never cease and every President and AG will go to the court and will receive their subpoena to spy on Americans.
I guess we should take comfort in the current authoritarian-lite policies currently being implemented. But I agree with the last statement and this is one that frightens me the most: “There will come a day when this president is no longer in office and many Democrats and Liberals will be faced with the imperial presidency that he created in the hands of someone they do not revere. When that day comes, it will be hard to climb over the mountain of hypocrisy to find a principled ground for criticism.”
I think we’ll rue the day and our current silence.
Alex D, Partisan politics are driving the attacks on Hillary because the republicans know that she can beat everyone of their candidates. Carl Rove is running ads against her. Meanwhile Rand Paul is courting evangelicals in Iowa.
I fixed that for you, bettykath. It was caught in the misbehaving spam filter.
Chicago politics. What more needs to be said. Chicago pols are used to operating w/ impunity because there is no other party even w/ one elected official. The only thing that abates the dirty tricks in Chicago is the DOJ. McCain was correct in 2008. Obama fooled me once, not twice. This IRS thing REALLY STINKS!
Swarthmore Mom you seem more interested in preserving the Democratic Party brand than you do justice.
Hillary? Please. She is as dirty as Obama, Bush, Cheney, Bush Sr etc. Shes a crook also.
Partisan politics is killing this country.
Just because I agree with the Republicans that he needs to be impeached doesnt mean I am endorsing their party!
IMPEACH OBAMA. He is a liar and a crook.
Just stop.. Stop defending him. Demand his resignation or impeachment. We can no longer tolerate this as a nation.
My posts seem to go into the ether. no moderation, no links, no bad language, just gone.
Some on the right are calling for the impeachment of Obama while swiftboating Hillary at the same time. They think they will get two for one.There were definitely some wrong actions taken but will wait for the facts like Nal has brought forth.
excerpt from waynemadesenreport.com
[T]he Obama administration’s war against the press has been going on ever since he was sworn into office on January 20, 2009. This editor’s Arlington, Virginia apartment was searched based on a National Security Letter in November 2010 after my name appeared in a May 21, 2010 chat between FBI informant Adrian Lamo and Army Private First Class Bradley Manning. Manning stands accused of leaking classified information, including over a quarter million classified State Department cables to Wikileaks. Employees of Potomac Towers in Arlington, Virginia told me that the FBI entered my apartment while I was away in order to examine my laptop computer. Employees of the apartment were also told by the FBI that if anyone mentioned their presence in my apartment, they would be subject to prosecution under terms of the Patriot Act. The laptop that was subjected to the FBI inspection has remained inoperative since the FBI break-in.
Shortly after the FBI break-in, three stories I was pursuing dried up because the sources, all of whom contacted me first, went cold. They included individuals who came forward to describe Canadian government knowledge of the torture in Afghanistan of detainees by Canadian military personnel; the murder of U.S. Air Force Captain John Frueh in Washington state at the same time six nuclear weapons were unaccounted for during a flight from Minot Air Force base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana; and additional information on the USS Cole being subjected to a false flag terrorist attack in Aden harbor in October 2000. In the latter case, there is evidence that Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) personnel threatened the source with jail if he spoke about what he saw as a member of the crew of the USS Cole in the weeks preceding and during the time the ship was allegedly hit by a water-born bomb contained in a rubber dinghy.
In the case of the Justice Department’s surveillance of the AP, the Obama administration has taken upon itself the authority to determine what a news organization can and cannot report. The United States, contrary to the rhetoric of two successive presidents, is not at war. No state of war exists with any state entity as defined by the U.S. Constitution, Therefore, it is not the prerogative of the President to determine what a news organization can and cannot cover unless there is a declaration of war approved by Congress which conveys a variety of war powers upon the White House, including the right to censor news that could put U.S. military forces in jeopardy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/ap-phone-records-carl-bernstein-nixonian_n_3271542.html
Condemnation Of DOJ’s AP Probe Continues; Carl Bernstein Calls It ‘Inexcusable’ (VIDEO)
“This administration has been terrible on this issue from the beginning,” he said. “The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters … there’s no excuse for it whatsoever.” He added that it was “nonsense” to say that the White House would have been unaware of such a probe.
“This is a policy matter, and this does go to the president,” he said. “There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”
and people think we are against him because he is an African American? Nope, we just saw early on what you on the left are seeing for the first time. To paraphrase PG Wodehouse: “the scales have fallen from your eyes.”
Sometimes proximity breads blindness.
May 13, 2013 | By Cindy Cohn and Kurt Opsahl and Nate Cardozo
Justice Department Subpoena of AP Journalists Shows Need to Protect Calling Records
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/doj-subpoena-ap-journalists-shows-need-protect-calling-records
Excerpts:
Today the Associated Press reported that the Department of Justice has collected the telephone calling records of many of its reporters and editors. By obtaining these records, the DOJ has struck a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news. As James Madison understood, “a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both.” AP had it right when it told Attorney General Holder that it was “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
The DOJ’s decision to dive deep into these call records also shows the growing need to update our privacy laws to eliminate the outmoded Third Party Doctrine and to recognize that datamining has now reached the point where it no longer makes sense to treat calling records and other metadata related to our communications as if they aren’t fully protected by the Constitution.
…
Second, this incident underscores that government access to records—information about our communications and movements over time—does impact our privacy. AP President Pruitt noted: “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.” This sentiment was echoed by the Appellate Court in the Jones (then called U.S. v. Maynard) case in the context of GPS information: “A person who knows all of another travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
Overall, this revelation of government’s secret access to huge amounts of calling records as part of its leak investigation should not be such a surprise. The DOJ has long maintained that no one has any privacy interests in their call data records and has also engaged in unprecedented and aggressive prosecutions around government leaks.
But it should sound a wake-up call for the rest of us, including members of Congress and the courts. Government datamining of Americans’ calling records and other metadata held by phone companies and ISPs should require more than a mere subpoena and should be protected by more than a hortatory regulation, whether the target is the news media or an ordinary citizen. Whether we get there by legislation or by updating our understanding of the Constitution to reflect the power of datamining to reveal the content of our “papers,” we need to get there soon. Because it’s clear that the DOJ remains firmly headed in the opposite direction.
End of excerpts
I’ve been saying Holder needed to go for some time now as have others. His willing participation in the willful aiding and abetting of war crimes and treason by the previous administration was proof of that. His continued war against medical marijuana and perpetuation of demonstrably failed drug policies is proof of that. This is just more proof he’s a political hack who has no intention of protecting the Constitution or indeed covering anything but his and his master’s ass. He is, as is his boss, an embarrassment to the bar and a threat to the Constitution. And while we may be stuck with his boss until the next election, Holder should be cleared out of his office by the end of the day.
Orin Kerr:
The Non-Story of the AP Phone Records, At Least So Far
DOJ opened an investigation into the leak to the AP, and pursuant to its published special rules on investigations involving the media investigations, issued subpoenas to find out what numbers were dialed from the relevant AP reporters during the months of April and May 2012. Presumably the thinking is that AP reporters called their sources, and the investigators want to trace the phone numbers to see who the sources might be. As far as I can tell, the information collected by the subpoena concerned the work and personal phone numbers of the five reporters and their editor, as well as the general AP office numbers where the reporters were located and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. The AP knows about this because pursuant to DOJ’s policies found in 28 C.F.R. 50.10, the government was required to give the AP notice that the records were obtained. The AP received that notice in a letter on Friday, and then today (Monday) it released its AP story expressing AP’s outrage. That’s pretty much all we know so far.
…
I get that many people will want to use this story as a generic “DOJ abuse” story and not look too closely at it. And I also understand that those who think leaks are good things will see investigations of leaks as inherently bad. But at least based on what we know so far, I don’t yet see a strong case that collecting these records was an abuse of the investigative process.
Justice Department targets AP phone logs
And why was the Justice Department doing this? In part because congressional Republicans demanded a full-scale leak investigation and DOJ officials took the request very seriously.
Phone Records of Journalists Seized by U.S.
Republicans accused the administration of deliberately leaking classified information, jeopardizing national security in an effort to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year — a charge the White House rejected. But some Democrats, too, said the leaking of sensitive information had gotten out of control.
Mr. Holder’s move at the time was sharply criticized by Republicans as not going far enough. They wanted him to appoint an outside special counsel, and a Senate resolution calling for a special counsel was co-sponsored by 29 Republican senators.
I’ve had more than I can stand from first Bush and now Obama who has taken the abuses of Bush and built upon them and expanded them even further. It’s time for Congress to re-assert its authority. Impeachment? Dunno, but if that’s what it takes to rein in the imperial “unitary executive” expansion of presidential authority and lawlessness that has been undertaken with the excuse of “national security” by both the last administration and the “hope and change” which replaced it, I will shed no tears and rend no garments over it.
ERIC HOLDER MUST GO
At the least, this was a counter-terrorism operation. (Why else would Brennan have been questioned already?). Which puts the whole business inside the White House. And you’d have to be a toddler or a fool to believe that Eric Holder could go off on his own and take as politically volatile a step as this. But, let us take the White House at its word. Eric Holder did this by himself. He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic.
“What is most striking about this story is the sense of complete immunity and lack of concern shown by the Administration.”
I am stuck by the same appearance of absolutely casual disregard for civil liberties and campaign promises. And, Obama was supposed to have taught “Constitutional Law” !?! What Constitution?
Holder has to go.