AP Condemns Unprecedented Intrusion By DOJ

“The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.”--William Colby

WASHINGTON (AP)—The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed 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, according to attorneys for the AP. 

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters. 

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies. 

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. 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," Pruitt said.

Derek Mead at Motherboard opines, “It's an almost unfathomably arrogant move. Right in the middle of a growing privacy shitstorm in Washington—which includes the IRS, NSA, and every other TLA you can imagine—the DoJ decided to notify one of the largest press agencies in the world that it had been spying on it.”

Ace asks, “But was this about national security—or was it about political embarrassment? Did the Administration take extraordinary steps to protect national security secrets, or to cover up yet another Benghazi-like massaging of talking points?”

One must assume the AP is sufficiently infuriated given the fact that they found out about the seizure on Friday but waited until Monday to release the story.  Can you say “maximum impact?”  Yep.  They.  Are.  Pissed.

Maybe now the MSM will finally decide the Obama administration is worth investigating.

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents, but to protect the government against the people.

Jay Carney says WH had no knowledge before today's press reports of Justice Dept attempt to obtain seek phone records of the AP reporters.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 13, 2013

DOJ secretly spying on AP? Gee, imagine what they do to journalist who don't regularly fellate them.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 13, 2013

Dukakis Redux?

"The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive. It's wrong," Obama said.

Democrats have long been seen as soft on national defense—at least since the Vietnam War.  In March of this year, the Leaker-in-Chief said that his administration’s foreign policy over the past three years effectively neutralized the notion that Democratic presidents are “weak on defense.”

In the 1988 presidential election, the Democratic Party nominee was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.  Within his party he was known as the “Massachusetts Miracle,” but the general public viewed him as weak on military matters.

The Dukakis campaign, taking a page from Margaret Thatcher’s playbook, decided that if the British Prime Minister could score a photographic coup that would ultimately help win her reelection, then “Duke” Dukakis would climb aboard an M1 Abrams tank outside a General Dynamics plant in front of reporters.

The move ended up being a massive public relations bungle that blew up in his face.  Dukakis was widely mocked for what was perceived as feckless warlike posturing.  After that blunder, whenever he appeared in public, someone would invariably ask him, “Did you get here in a tank?”

The Dukakis tank stunt was supposed to counter his rival, George H.W. Bush’s dashing military career as a highly decorated WWII fighter pilot.

The adoring throngs of followers of the errand boy sent by grocery clerks in 2008 are fewer now in 2012.   What has happened to their hero? 

The American economy is in the crapper, unemployment hovers above 8 percent with 22 million without jobs and another 48 million on welfare.  “Headwinds” are the cause of the calamitous economic outlook and the national security leaks that are springing out of his regime are red flags that his reelection is in peril.

The New York Post notes that “most casual observers have concluded by now that Team Obama has turned The New York Times’ front page into a national-security newsletter—spilling such top-secret nuggets as America’s role in creating the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear program, news of that al Qaeda bomb plot in Yemen last month, operational specifics of the SEAL raid that sent Osama bin Laden to his eternal reward—in such detail that future operations may have been precluded and Obama’s oversight of a ‘kill list’ of alleged terrorist targets for drone strikes.”

“Why else would they want to do this, except to enhance the image of the president six months before the election?” Sen. John McCain said in an interview with The Weekly Standard last week. “Why else reveal the name of this Pakistani doctor? You can only draw one conclusion. The purpose of all these leaks is to tell a story about a brave, lonely warrior with all this awesome responsibility.”

That brave, lonely warrior angle is the key, I think, to the leaks.  Neither Romney nor Obama have a record of military service.  Romney avoided military service at the height of the fighting in the Vietnam War after high school by seeking and receiving four draft deferments, according to Selective Service records.

Obama, as we all know, did not serve in the military either. He was a child during the Vietnam conflict and did not enlist when he was older.

So, there you have it.  The errand boy sent by grocery clerks believes if he politicizes intelligence he can burnish his résumé and win back the hearts of the moonbats who are peeling away from him in droves.