Editorial
Spying on The Associated Press
By
THE EDITORIAL BOARD Published: May 14, 2013
The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating
leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible
justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.
On Friday, Justice Department officials revealed that they had been
going through The A.P.’s records for months. The dragnet covered work,
home and cellphone records used by almost 100 people at one of the
oldest and most reputable news organizations. James Cole, a deputy
attorney general, offered no further explanation on Tuesday, saying only
that it was part of a “criminal investigation involving highly
classified material” from early 2012.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said he could not comment on the
details of the phone records seizure, which he said was an open
investigation — although he was happy to comment on the open
investigation into the tax audits of conservative groups, which he said
might have been criminal and were “certainly outrageous and
unacceptable.”
Both Mr. Holder and Mr. Cole declared their commitment — and that of
President Obama — to press freedoms. Mr. Cole said the administration
does not “take lightly” such secretive trolling through media records.
We are not convinced. For more than 30 years, the news media and the
government have used a well-honed system to balance the government’s
need to pursue criminals or national security breaches with the media’s
constitutional right to inform the public. This action against The A.P.,
as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press outlined in a
letter to Mr. Holder, “calls into question the very integrity” of the
administration’s policy toward the press.
The records covered 20 phone lines, including main office phones in New
York City, Washington, Hartford, and the Congressional press gallery.
The guidelines for such subpoenas, first enacted in 1972, require that
requests for media information be narrow. The reporters’ committee said
this action is so broad that it allowed prosecutors to “plunder two
months of news-gathering materials to seek information that might
interest them.” (Continues)
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