NY Times and Morning Joe Scarborough accuse Obama Administration of trying to chill whistleblowers and other confidential sources of leaks with announcement of DOJ subpoenas on the AP --- David Axelrod says it's for "National Security"
Citing an editorial in Wednesday’s New York Times (See “EDITORIAL – Spying on The Associated Press”
by the Editorial Board of the NY Times, 5/14/13 [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/opinion/spying-on-the-associated-press.html?_r=0]), Joe Scarborough challenged one of Barack Obama’s top political advisers that the real purpose of the recently served DOJ subpoenas was to suppress whistleblowers and other confidential witnesses who leaked embarrassing information about the Obama Administration.
In its report on the MSNBC interview, Daily Caller boiled it down to this: “Axelrod said the DOJ’s seizure of months of phone records from hundreds of AP journalists was just an investigation gone overboard as Justice tried to determine who was behind two national security leaks — a failed al Qaeda plot from last year and the Stuxnet computer worm. *** Scarborough, however, suggested another possibility — that the phone snooping was not meant to determine leaks but to intimidate sources.”
Things got really testy when Axlrod said, “Joe, last summer, I appeared with you and you challenged me with the same tone, actually, on these leaks and said, ‘When is the president going to send a strong signal to people that leaking classified information won’t be tolerated? When is he going to make people accountable for these leaks?’... That’s what Sen. McCain and others said. The attorney general empanelled these two U.S. attorneys. They apparently interviewed 550 people and went to court and got a subpoena to do what they did. In order to do what you and others said should be done. Do I agree with that?”
Scarborough snapped back, “I’ve heard the president’s defenders try to say this and I congratulate you guys for going off into a room and calling each other for coming up with this bogus argument.... But never did I suggest that 100 AP reporters have all their phone records seized, their private cell numbers seized, their home phone numbers seized. So please save that for somebody else that’s going to buy into that. Don’t shift this to me. Answer me this question: Will sources — confidential sources inside the federal government be intimidated because of what this administration, according to The New York Times, has been doing from the very beginning?”
Neither the NY Times nor Morning Joe made a specific connection between the chilling effect of the DOJ’s Associated Press subpoenas on confidential sources and whisleblowers and the recent appearance of the three State Department whistleblowers before Darrrell Issa’s Congressional Oversight Committee. Nonetheless, the timing of the DOJ’s hasty subpoena announcement in its longstanding investigation of leaks in other matters is awfully suspicious. And the question needs to be asked whether the breaking of this scandal at this specific moment was intended to cause a freeze of future whisleblower witnesses and other “national security” leaks of matters involved with the Benghazi fiasco.
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UPDATE: The AP scandal persists and the MSM is not being calmed quickly
The upset in the MSM concerning the DOJ’s AP subpoenas, went into another day of reporting and opinion pieces. Even while giving the POTUS a personal pass, for now, the government as a whole and the DOJ is being eyed suspiciously and in ominous tones, like this: “... I know it’s true that no matter what a reporter is willing to do, if a government is willing to subpoena her [/his] phone records, then sources are going to be less willing to talk—it’s the chilling effect, a cliché but a truth, too. And it’s an effect that can take hold deeply and perniciously in an atmosphere of national threat. We can’t let it, because this particular threat—terrorism—and the war on it are open-ended. We could be suspending our civil liberties forever.” (See “OBAMA VS. THE PRESS” by Margaret Talbot, 5/17/13, The New Yorker [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/how-obama-harms-the-press.htm]).
And, of course there are contrary voices like this one, “It is, of course, possible that the Department of Justice did not comply with its own regulations in the AP investigations. Perhaps the subpoena could have been more narrowly drawn. Perhaps the Department should have negotiated with the AP before issuing the subpoena. I do not have sufficient information to speculate about these issues, but nor do the media. What is clear, though, is that the overblown claims that this investigation is some huge "scandal" that threatens the very foundations of our free society are nothing short of absurd.” (See “The AP 'Scandal': The Straight Scoop” by Geoffrey R. Stone, 5/16/2013, Huffington Post/ The Blog [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/the-ap-scandal-the-straig_b_3289973.html]).
Here is a brief report of the President’s remarks yesterday and other matters concerning the AP subpoenas; it speaks for itself:
“WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Thursday a ‘balance’ should be struck between national security interests and freedom of the press [in response to a question about the DOJ’s subpoena of the AP phone records].... [with Obama declining to comment on the pending case said] ‘Leaks related to national security can put people at risk, they can put men and women in uniform that I've sent into the battlefield at risk.... U.S. national security is dependent upon those folks being able to operate with confidence that folks back home have their backs, so they're not just left out there high and dry.’ *** Obama said he made "no apologies" for being concerned about national security but that the free flow of information was important to him as well. *** Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that his second-in-command, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, had signed off on the AP subpoenas. Obama said Thursday he had "complete confidence" in Holder. *** [ Sluffing-off a comparison between him and former President Richard Nixon, Obama said] "I'll let you guys engage in those comparisons," Obama said. "You can read the history and draw your own conclusions." (See “Obama Speaks About AP Scandal (VIDEO)” by Ryan J. Reilly, updated 5/17/13, Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/16/obama-ap-scandal_n_3287165.html]).
Dud we are at war and in my mind it is World War III.
The morons and idiots terrorists can come from anywhere and some are home grown and in reality it is happening all over the world bombings and killing of innocent civilians.
National security is the key for keeping us all safe here in the United States and I find it hard to believe that people that have any type of schooling especially college behind them can't see this and are these liberals for real and blind? DUD
The guys who flew planes into the World Trade and elsewhere knew exactly what they were doing and it was like the Japanese Zero's who went into our ships in World War II only than we knew exactly who the enemy was the Emperor of Japan who was God or so he thought and we lost at that time 188 U.S. aircraft destroyed; 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 wounded.
The 9/11 attacks was a sneak attack by idiots and morons who have no country just a belief in their twisted minds they are fighting the evil Satan America and close to 3500 people died.
The the Japanese Admiral who said we woke up the sleeping giant was correct and than we went back to sleep after the war.
The terrorists on 9/11 awaking the sleeping giant once again and this time the sleeping giant is on guard forever.
The Emperor of Japan and the Terrorists all they had and have to do is to look on our money and that tells all
IN GOD WE TRUST.
On the Sunday morning panel shows the AP Scandal continues to be "pressed" by press people as a major active scandal.
More to come...
UPDATE: The DOJ/AP phone records scandal remained a key topic of heated discussion on all the Sunday network news panel shows. Perhaps, the most significant discussion of that issue came on the CBS program “Face the Nation” where the Associated Press indicated that it didn’t question the Justice Department's right to have seized two months' worth of its phone records. However; however, the organization's president and CEO Gary Pruitt did say that, “It was the methodology - ‘so sweeping, so secretively, so abusively and harassingly overbroad’... [that] it breached the Constitution” (See “AP president blasts "unconstitutional" phone records probe” 5/19/13, CBS News/Face the Nation [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57585213/ap-president-blasts-unconstitutional-phone-records-probe/]).
Pruitt also noted that the underlying investigation involved a leak that was not a threat to national security. On the contrary, what was being investigated was an AP report based upon a leak which revealed that the administration’s Department of Homeland Security had been misleading during its account of an earlier thwarted terror attack. Prior to the reported leak, the Department of Homeland Security had erroneously maintained the thwarted attack was unrelated to an anniversary of 9/11.
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