Watergate Reporter: DOJ Phone Records Scandal a "Nuclear Event"......

Has the Obama administration managed to get on the wrong side of both iconic Washington Post reporters who brought down the Nixon White House in the 1970's? It seems so. Bob Woodward: Check. Reliable liberal Carl Bernstein? Check:

"It's outrageous. It's totally inexcusable...the object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters. There's no excuse for it whatsoever."

Host Joe Scarborough notes that this administration -- the most transparent of all time, in their own mythology -- has prosecuted double the number of leaks as all previous White Houses combined. Bernstein calls this a coordinated attempt to cow people into silence and freeze out a robust free press, using national security concerns as a catch-all justification. Again, Jay Carney insists the president didn't know about the DOJ/AP story until last night, and Obama himself told the American people that he only learned of the IRS abuses through news reports on Friday -- even though those practices were in place for years and the White House was notified weeks ago. Are these remotely credible claims? This rapidly-deteriorating season of scandal has also alienated a typically loyal Obama media ally in Andrea Mitchell, who says the IRS and DOJ revelations are some of "the most outrageous excesses" she's seen over her decades-long career:

National Journal's Ron Fournier, who's been a beacon of clarity on these stories from the get-go, intones that unless things turn around quickly, the IRS revelation in particular threatens to consume the remainder of Obama's presidency. I'll leave you with a quote from an anonymous Democrat strategist, who is severely alarmed by the swirling mess the administration has created for itself:

They have a small window- I'd say 2-5 days- to try and turn this around and hold on to a plausible veneer of not being a group of shadowy thugs. But given how tone def they've been in the past, my money is on this being the lens through which their next 3.5 years are viewed.....snip~

Watergate Reporter: DOJ Phone Records Scandal a "Nuclear Event" - Guy Benson

Did any on the Left still want to talk about how this Scandal doesn't mean anything? Bernstein is out slammin Obama Now. Did Team Obama Bite off more than they can chew? The IRS issue could consume the rest of his term. Now this issue over the AP is majorly serious.

Tapping the Phones In the House of Representative.....is a major no-no. Already 3 days and it doesn't look like Team Obama is being able to deflect this one. Won't be able to hide in a swirling mass of Confusion of Different rhetoric anymore. Even Andrea Mitchell an ObamaBot is appalled. What is the reality of the situation for Obama on the ground?

I am very interested to see how this AP thing unfolds. According to the DOJ's own binding regulations:

"no subpoena may be issued . . . for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General"

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http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title28-vol2/pdf/CFR-2010-title28-vol2-sec50-10.pdf

So why did AG Holder authorize this? And if he didn't authorize it, whose heads will roll for violating DOJ regulations?

Here is Bernstein Remarks.....and yes He is saying this is Nuclear for the Obama Administration. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

If sources and reporters never know whether either side is being bugged by the government there be a lot less communication between the two groups, then that is a Machiavellian way to stop leaks from the administration.

Obama better get his ass in gear on this, or he'll be remember as the anti-1st and 2nd Amendment president. Frankly I'm tired of the man's arrogance. He seems to really believe that messiah crap. "I won the election, do as I say", gun control, Obamacare, increased taxes.......this guy is becoming a jerk who thinks we work for him. He appears to think his social justice agenda is more important than the country. So if you disagree, he'll try to shut you up. The MSM should pummel his ass, but they won't.

American said:

Obama better get his ass in gear on this, or he'll be remember as the anti-1st and 2nd Amendment president. Frankly I'm tired of the man's arrogance. He seems to really believe that messiah crap. "I won the election, do as I say", gun control, Obamacare, increased taxes.......this guy is becoming a jerk who thinks we work for him. He appears to think his social justice agenda is more important than the country. So if you disagree, he'll try to shut you up. The MSM should pummel his ass, but they won't.

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That isn't how he is coming across to me with all these scandals that have been popping up. To me he comes across as a POTUS who is asleep at the wheel while his underlings (albeit very senior ones) are up to negligent and unlawful activities. We know Obama will have been sufficiently insulated from all this malfeasance to protect himself. The least he can do is clean house, beginning with getting a new AG.

Sarcogito said:

I am very interested to see how this AP thing unfolds. According to the DOJ's own binding regulations:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title28-vol2/pdf/CFR-2010-title28-vol2-sec50-10.pdf

So why did AG Holder authorize this? And if he didn't authorize it, whose heads will roll for violating DOJ regulations?

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This what Huff-Po had on it......they didn't say what they seized either. But over 20 Phone Lines worth. That Press gallery in the House is the Big Deal.....How does Obama stop that coming back to him. If the Leaks are out of the White House. Why would they need to tap the House's Phones for the AP?

The AP reported that the DOJ obtained lists of "incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery." The Justice Department seized records for more than 20 telephone lines from April and May 2012.

Though DOJ did not give the AP a specific reason for the seizure, the dates of the phone calls it targeted offered a clear tell. On May 7, 2012, AP reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, citing anonymous sources, reported that the CIA had thwarted a plot by an al-Qaeda affiliate to "destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden."

The media's purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance," Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement. "The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department's actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again."

Monday's report only fanned the flames, with Democrats and Republicans alike criticizing the Department of Justice. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he was "very troubled by these allegations" and wanted to hear the government’s explanation. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said that Holder needed to be "held accountable for what I think is wrong" if, indeed, the authorization for the subpoena reached his desk.

The AP on Monday revealed that the DOJ obtained phone numbers from five reporters and an editor involved in the May 7, 2012 story: Apuzzo, Goldman, Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan, Alan Fram and Ted Bridis. Apuzzo worked in the AP's Hartford office several years ago and Goldman previously worked out of New York, two of the cities targeted by the Justice Department in addition to Washington, where the reporters are currently based. Apuzzo and Goldman were part of the AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered the NYPD's secret Muslim spying program and are highly regarded investigative journalists.

"From what we know, this collection was in clear violation of the law," said Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization that seeks to protect individual rights in the digital world. "The DOJ's regulations prohibit subpoenas of this breadth and require that notice be given to the affected people within 90 days at the absolute outside."

Several prominent journalists have expressed concerns over the Obama administration's aggressive means of investigating unsanctioned leaks to reporters.

Jonathan Landay, a national security reporter with McClatchy newspapers, told HuffPost last month that "people who normally would meet with me, sort of in a more relaxed atmosphere, are on pins and needles" because of the crackdown on leakers. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer said at the time that "part of the problem" with regards to the government's ongoing leaks crackdown "stems from the technology revolution.".....snip~

AP Phone Records Seized By Justice Department As War On Leaks Continues

Sarcogito said:

I am very interested to see how this AP thing unfolds. According to the DOJ's own binding regulations:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title28-vol2/pdf/CFR-2010-title28-vol2-sec50-10.pdf

So why did AG Holder authorize this? And if he didn't authorize it, whose heads will roll for violating DOJ regulations?

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What a missed opportunity for Obama. With that regulation on the books, Obama could have easily justified asking Holder to resign within 24 hours of this being released. He would have looked Presidential doing so too.

Ofcourse that would require putting leadership above politics, something this crew severely lacks.

Sarcogito said:

That isn't how he is coming across to me with all these scandals that have been popping up. To me he comes across as a POTUS who is asleep at the wheel while his underlings (albeit very senior ones) are up to negligent and unlawful activities. We know Obama will have been sufficiently insulated from all this malfeasance to protect himself. The least he can do is clean house, beginning with getting a new AG.

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The people you hire and the actions they do are your responsibility because you have authority over them and their actions. The buck is supposed to stop at the President....it was set up that way.

American said:

Obama better get his ass in gear on this, or he'll be remember as the anti-1st and 2nd Amendment president. Frankly I'm tired of the man's arrogance. He seems to really believe that messiah crap. "I won the election, do as I say", gun control, Obamacare, increased taxes.......this guy is becoming a jerk who thinks we work for him. He appears to think his social justice agenda is more important than the country. So if you disagree, he'll try to shut you up. The MSM should pummel his ass, but they won't.

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Anti -1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th, 9th, 10th, give him time, he'll fill in the blanks...

OpportunityCost said:

The people you hire and the actions they do are your responsibility because you have authority over them and their actions. The buck is supposed to stop at the President....it was set up that way.

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Sure, but there are millions of people in the executive branch. I guarantee you every single day of every single administration there are unlawful things happening. You can't really hold a POTUS responsible for every instance. You have to draw a line somewhere. Though I am comfortable holding a President responsible for the actions of his Cabinet officials. But LEGALLY it is tough unless you can prove direct knowledge.

It is curious that the administration would anger the very press that has been their friend and ally for 4 1/2 years. Perhaps it was done legally. I don't know. But I do know that it was a bad political move. It would be refreshing to have a genuinely transparent administration at some point, wouldn't it? I guess that's tough when the federal government is more corrupt than it wants people to know.

It appears Holder may have a way out.....but not around the House's Phones.

What the AP Subpoena Scandal Means for Your Electronic Privacy......



The Justice Department’s snooping on journalists working for the Associated Press is an abuse of power in the broadest sense. But one reason the whole episode is controversial at all is because the Obama administration technically broke no rules.

By law, companies that cooperate with government investigations—such as the telecom operators the AP concludes gave up its phone logs—are protected from lawsuits. The immunity is built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—which President Obama, then a senator, opposed before backtracking and endorsing it.

“I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program,” Obama said shortly after the legislative update passed the House.

The flip-flop enraged civil libertarians at the time, but Monday's revelation from DOJ reveals how far the government has come since the days when going after journalists meant subpoenaing them head-on and causing a public spectacle in the process.

But now it seems as though the Justice Department is trying a different strategy. Rather than haul a resistant reporter before the court, it’s instead circumventing that circus altogether by going straight to the phone companies. That the telcos are able to deflect lawsuits under FISA only inflates the incentive to ask for their data. As Edward Wasserman, dean of the journalism school at UC-Berkeley, wrote in The Miami Herald last May:

... prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.
So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”

The government’s supposed to make a reasonable effort to get the forensic information it’s looking for without resorting to press-related subpoenas. Whether those reasonable efforts were made this time is going to be an important question moving forward. But even more important is whether they’ll make the efforts next time. Whatever you believe about the morality of prosecuting leakers—and even if the Obama administration really did exhaust its other options before turning to the telecom operators—the temptation to seize phone logs as a first resort rather than the last is only growing in proportion to the amount of data that carriers are collecting and storing on us all.

It’s not just journalists and their sources who stand to suffer from an erosion of the legal barriers between government and businesses. Here’s a short list of your personal information companies can hand over to the feds without repercussion, and on little more than a subpoena: geolocation data, the PCs you’ve accessed, emails you’ve sent and text messages and content you’ve placed on cloud services like Dropbox.

Some companies have taken steps to counteract this trend. Dropbox, Twitter and LinkedIn have all promised to tell you when the government asks for data about you. Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation grades major tech firms along these lines.

Now it’s fallen to the nation’s least-functioning body to address the problem. The Senate’s working on a bill that would require at least a warrant for some types of electronic data and would close a loophole that currently lets law enforcement access your emails if they’re more than 180 days old. It might pass, and it might not. But you can expect the Obama administration to drag its feet the whole way.....snip~

What the AP Subpoena Scandal Means for Your Electronic Privacy - NationalJournal.com

Looks Like the DOJ will have to try and find an excuse thru telcos. New Bills that were passed Either way when it is all done and over with Obama loses credability either way. A lot of it too. Thoughts?

Sarcogito said:

Sure, but there are millions of people in the executive branch. I guarantee you every single day of every single administration there are unlawful things happening. You can't really hold a POTUS responsible for every instance. You have to draw a line somewhere. Though I am comfortable holding a President responsible for the actions of his Cabinet officials. But LEGALLY it is tough unless you can prove direct knowledge.

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I agree with you. But it is fair to say that the chief executive sets the tone for the organization. If Obama wanted real transparency, he would have made it clear to everyone in the administration in no uncertain terms. It appears that the tone is one of keeping things under wraps. He probably didn't know this happened until later, but it might not have happened if he had set the tone differently. We all make mistakes. I've never understood why people - particularly politicians - have such a tough time acknowledging them and fixing them. When I make a mistake, my company suffers. I have no choice but to understand and acknowledge the mistake and fix it.

The issue of classified information is difficult. If something is truly a threat to national security, then it should be classified. My guess is that the majority of classified information is not classified because it is a threat but because the government doesn't want people to know about it. It is convenient to hide things simply by classifying them. Perhaps this issue was truly a national security threat. I don't know. If it was, then the phone record browsing was done surreptitiously. If it wasn't then it was politically stupid. Either way, it happened to some degree because the chief executive set the tone.

This is going to be very difficult for Obama to control and avoid being held responsible for pretty serious crimes or ethical violations. But if anyone can do it, Obama can. He makes Slick Willie look like a piker.

fmw said:

My guess is that the majority of classified information is not classified because it is a threat but because the government doesn't want people to know about it.

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As someone who has spent a career working with classified information, I can assure you that is the case.

Sarcogito said:

Sure, but there are millions of people in the executive branch. I guarantee you every single day of every single administration there are unlawful things happening. You can't really hold a POTUS responsible for every instance. You have to draw a line somewhere. Though I am comfortable holding a President responsible for the actions of his Cabinet officials. But LEGALLY it is tough unless you can prove direct knowledge.

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Holder is Obama'a AG. He hired him. You cant tell me bugging and requesting information from private phone conversations by the Associated Press organization is something Obama wouldn't have to green light---unless it was set up to never tell him about it and give him plausible deniability. Which, in a way, is far worse.

OpportunityCost said:

Holder is Obama'a AG. He hired him. You cant tell me bugging and requesting information from private phone conversations by the Associated Press organization is something Obama wouldn't have to green light---unless it was set up to never tell him about it and give him plausible deniability. Which, in a way, is far worse.

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According to the DOj's own regs it is the AG who must green light such things. So the AG could do it without Obama's permission. And it is entirely possible he did just that so Obama would have plausible deniability. And you are right, in many ways that is worse. But it has been the practice of numerous Administrations, not that it excuses it in any way.

National Journal said:

The Justice Department’s snooping on journalists working for the Associated Press is an abuse of power in the broadest sense. But one reason the whole episode is controversial at all is because the Obama administration technically broke no rules.

By law, companies that cooperate with government investigations—such as the telecom operators the AP concludes gave up its phone logs—are protected from lawsuits. The immunity is built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—which President Obama, then a senator, opposed before backtracking and endorsing it.

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I don't see their logic here. While it may (or may not) be the case that what the DOJ did "technically broke no rules" - the fact that companies that cooperate with government investigations are protected from lawsuits has nothing to do with whether or not the request made of them was in fact legal. Just because a company can't be sued doesn't mean the government is free to do what it wants.

If this was what Holder says it was, a way to find who was leaking highly classified information that would be detrimental to the security of our nation, then you check the phone records of the limited number of people who knew about it. You don't intimidate the AP and reveal all of their confidential sources. I don't think the American people really understand what's being done here.

This action has effectively chilled those who would contact reporters with inside information...secret or otherwise.

If our press gets intimidated and controlled by the government, we're screwed.

When Bush was pres the libs said he set the tone and that's why things like abu ghrabi happened. That was in no way Bush's fault but these recent scandals that involve the IRS and spying on the media are definitely on obama's door step.

Sarcogito said:

Sure, but there are millions of people in the executive branch. I guarantee you every single day of every single administration there are unlawful things happening. You can't really hold a POTUS responsible for every instance. You have to draw a line somewhere. Though I am comfortable holding a President responsible for the actions of his Cabinet officials. But LEGALLY it is tough unless you can prove direct knowledge.

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You seem to be forgetting the standard set by Harry Truman. The buck stops there, in the oval office.

MaggieD said:

If this was what Holder says it was, a way to find who was leaking highly classified information that would be detrimental to the security of our nation, then you check the phone records of the limited number of people who knew about it. You don't intimidate the AP and reveal all of their confidential sources. I don't think the American people really understand what's being done here.

This action has effectively chilled those who would contact reporters with inside information...secret or otherwise.

If our press gets intimidated and controlled by the government, we're screwed.

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Hiya Maggie :2wave: ......you hit the nail on the Head. Plus I think someone needs to hit Team Obama up on tapping the Houses Phones. I doubt the leak was coming from the House when they know it is coming out of the WH.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday he did not make the controversial decision to secretly seize telephone records of the Associated Press but defended his department's actions in the investigation of what he called a "very, very serious leak."

The decision to seek phone records of one of the world's largest news-gathering organizations was made by Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole, Holder said.

Holder, speaking at a press conference, said he recused himself from the matter to avoid a potential conflict of interest because he was interviewed by the FBI as part of the same leak investigation that targeted the AP records.

That seizure, denounced by critics as a gross intrusion into freedom of the press, has created an uproar in Washington and led to questions over how the Obama administration is balancing the need for national security with privacy rights.

Combined with a separate furor over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative political groups for extra scrutiny, it also is stoking fears of excessive government intrusion under President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration has been aggressive in combating national security leaks, conducting at least a half-dozen prosecutions - more than under all other previous presidents combined, according to tallies by multiple news organizations.

"But I think people believed that Obama was more committed to civil liberties so it's actually more shocking that he did it rather that someone like (George W.) Bush and (Richard) Nixon because people had higher expectations of him," he said.....snip~

http://news.yahoo.com/associated-press-says-u-government-seized-journalists-phone-001433899.html

Note: Had higher expectations. Now the Rinse cycle has begun.

Henry David said:

You seem to be forgetting the standard set by Harry Truman. The buck stops there, in the oval office.

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It is a catchy saying, but in practice it rarely seems to play out that way.

Sarcogito said:

It is a catchy saying, but in practice it rarely seems to play out that way.

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Sadly, too true! The US has not had a quality leader in the WH since....?