The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Round Up the Usual Suspects 
When it rains, it pours. “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 Associated Press reports:
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
As a journalist who is often critical of the Obama administration, we’re not sure if we should feel fearful or left out. “The government would not say why it sought the records,” the AP adds, though the wire service speculates it was in connection with “a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.”
While the federal government recognizes no special legal privileges for reporters and news organizations that should shield them from such subpoenas, the Justice Department’s actions run counter to the tradition of freedom of the press:
The American Civil Liberties Union said the use of subpoenas for a broad swath of records has a chilling effect both on journalists and whistleblowers who want to reveal government wrongdoing. “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,” said Laura Murphy, the director of ACLU’s Washington legislative office.
Rules published by the Justice Department require that subpoenas of records of news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general, but it was not known if that happened in this case.
Attorney General Eric Holder said today that he had recused himself from the case, kicking the responsibility to his deputy, Fox News reports.
The AP sent Holder a “letter of protest,” which its news report quoted:
“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.”
That’s pretty strong, though one imagines it would be stronger if George W. Bush were president. Speaking of which, John Yoo, widely vilified for his work in the Bush Justice Department, weighs in at Ricochet.com:
I deplore the Obama administration’s assault on freedom of the press. But I have no sympathy for the AP or the mainstream media, because this is how you get treated when you are in a politician’s pocket. If the AP’s editors and reporters and their colleagues at other newspapers had been more adversarial toward this President, as they were with President Bush, they would [have] been treated with far more respect.
Perhaps the sudden deluge of scandal, and especially the invasion of the AP’s operations, will change the press’s attitude toward Obama. But it’s going to be a slow and painful process. Just ask National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who as an AP executive during the Bush years championed what he called “accountability journalism”: “Events of the past week likely will lead to one or more long-running scandals,” he writes, “which would be unfortunate for anybody, including me, who wants Obama to succeed.”
That yearning for Obama’s success has cost the press dearly. Yoo is right to think the press’s abject treatment of Obama has encouraged his administration’s disrespectful treatment of it.
Meanwhile, the Hill reports that Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said yesterday: “Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP.” The man in the White House seems remarkably ignorant–dare we say incurious–about what is going on not only at Justice but at the IRS and the State Department. Maybe the lesson is that the government has simply become too big to manage.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
