Justice Department obtains AP phone records

In the next breaking scandal, the Justice Department seized phone records from nearly 20 reporters at the Associated Press.

Here are some of the details from National Public Radio:

The Associated Press is protesting what it calls a massive and unprecedented intrusion into its gathering of news. The target of that wrath is the U.S. Justice Department, which secretly collected phone records for several AP reporters last year. The AP says it’s caught in the middle of a Justice Department leak investigation.

The scope of the Justice Department subpoenas is what gives David Schultz, a lawyer for AP, pause.

“It was a very large number of records that were obtained, including phone records from Hartford, New York, Washington, from the U.S. House of Representatives and elsewhere where AP has bureaus. It included home and cellphone numbers from a number of AP reporters,” Schulz says.

It’s not clear what the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., is investigating. But the AP thinks it might be related to its story from May 2012 that described the CIA stopping a terrorist plot to plant a bomb on an airplane with a sophisticated new kind of device.

How that story came to be is the subject of a criminal leak investigation. But the AP says the Justice Department might now be flouting the First Amendment to try to build a case.

According to Politico, reporters inside the AP are (rightly so) outraged over the revelation:

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 AP employees interviewed by POLITICO did not want to be identified because, according to several sources, at least some journalists have been asked not to speak to the news media.

The Daily News points out that information about why the AP records were monitored is still scant and not forth coming, even from Attorney General Eric Holder:

Holder was pressed repeatedly about the secret and extensive seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors. He underscored that he had recused himself from the investigation early on for various reasons and left subsequent key decisions to top aides, whose actions he backed.

The wire service has protested a “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news” after disclosure that the government obtained phone records for more than 20 lines.

The reason for the seizure remains somewhat unclear. One suspicion is that it involved an ongoing investigation into leaks of information regarding the CIA’s breaking up a terrorist plot based in Yemen to blow up an airliner.

On May 7, 2012, the AP broke the story of the plot that was uncovered by the CIA. That followed its agreement to hold on to the information for several days at the behest of the White House.

Holder did not confirm or deny that the subpoenas for records followed that specific story. But he said, “This was a very serious leak. A very, very serious leak.”

“I have been a prosecutor since 1976,” he said, “and this is within the top two or three most serious leaks I have seen. It put the American people at risk. That is not hyperbole. Trying to determine who was responsible required very aggressive action.”

David Carr points out that snooping goes both ways in his latest New York Times column:

Word on Monday that the Justice Department had obtained the records of more than 20 phone lines at The Associated Press sent the Fourth Estate into a frenzy. Big Government, Big Data, Big Brother, all the golems of an increasing surveillance-driven age were invoked.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, wrote in a letter of protest to Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general.

Given that the government has brought six cases against people suspected of leaking classified information, under an administration that has set a record for the use of the Espionage Act, the Associated Press story adds to a growing atmosphere in which working reporters always need to worry that someone is looking over their shoulder while they type. As Scott Shane wrote in The New York Times in 2012, the investigative aggression creates “a distinct chill over press coverage of national security issues as agencies decline routine interview requests and refuse to provide background briefings.”

In the instance of The Associated Press, its leaders, who were notified of the investigation last Friday, worried that the information obtained would “provide a road map to A.P.’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations.”

All journalists should be worried.