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Reporters across The Associated Press are outraged over the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of staff phone records — and they say such an intrusion could chill their relationships with confidential sources.
In conversations with POLITICO on Tuesday, several AP staffers in Washington, D.C., described feelings of anger and frustration with the DOJ and with the Obama administration in general.
“People are pretty mad — mad that government has not taken what we do seriously,” one reporter said on Tuesday. “When the news broke yesterday … people were outraged and disgusted. No one was yelling and screaming, but it was like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’”
“People are ticked,” said another. “Everyone supports the reporters involved.”
The behind-the-scenes anger — and heads-down determination of the AP staff members to keep doing their jobs amid the extraordinary public flap — comes as top executives from the wire service have mounted an aggressive public pushback against DOJ, calling its snooping a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” in a letter fired off to Attorney General Eric Holder. And yet something of a bunkerlike atmosphere has taken hold at the AP in Washington with no bureau-wide meetings or announcements about the DOJ’s action, AP sources told POLITICO.
The chief concern about the government probe, according to many of those journalists, is that the DOJ’s intrusion will compromise their relationships with confidential sources, some of whom now fear that their private correspondence could be obtained by the federal government.
“It’s chilling, and they owe us an explanation,” NBC News Political Director and White House correspondent Chuck Todd said on Tuesday. “This is intimidation and that’s what it feels and looks like and unless they have a different explanation, there is no other conclusion to draw than a way to intimidate whistleblowers.”
“It is outrageous, totally inexcusable,” Carl Bernstein, the investigative reporter, said on MSNBC. “This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning. The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters. This was an accident waiting to become a nuclear event and now it’s happened. There’s no excuse for it whatsoever. There’s no reason for this investigation, especially on this scale.”
Inside the AP: Fear, determination - Dylan Byers and Katie Glueck - POLITICO.com
the 54 member media coalition's 4 page letter to ag holder and deputy cole, the body of which lays out point by point the doj's violations of its own manual for collecting phone records
The nation’s news media were stunned to learn yesterday of the Departmentof Justice’s broad subpoena of telephone records belonging to The Associated Press. In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governingits subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularlywithout notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicialreview. The scope of this action calls into question the very integrity of Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, onits own, its police powers against the First Amendment rights of the newsmedia and the public’s interest in reporting on all manner of governmentconduct, including matters touching on national security which lie at the heart of this case.
And finally, the Department should announce whether it has served any other pendingnews media-related subpoenas that have not yet been disclosed.
Media coalition letter of protest to Attorney General Eric Holder - The Washington Post