Obama-Era Docs Shift Narrative on Who the True Enemy of Journalism Is
Mainstream media outlets and liberal talking heads are a duplicitous bunch.
For President Donald Trump, they’ve taken nearly every opportunity to make him appear maniacal in his treatment of the press.
Whether Trump calls off a briefing, refuses to take questions or attacks a reporter’s bias, the American public won’t hear the end of it from the Jim Acostas of the world.
For former President Barack Obama, the media simply looked the other way. As it turns out, the Obama administration may have known more about the journalists than vice versa.
According to The Epoch Times, the Obama-era Justice Department’s seizing of phone records was far more involved than initially reported.
“In 2013, The Associated Press raised the alarm after the Justice Department (DOJ) informed the news service that it had subpoenaed and obtained the records — not including content of the calls — of 21 mobile phones and land lines, including home numbers assigned to AP journalists, and their offices,” the Epoch Times reported.
“But the DOJ had, in fact, issued 30 subpoenas for records of 30 phone lines ‘it believed to be those of The Associated Press reporters and editors,’ according to a 2014 report by the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR),” the report stated.
In order to get the full — albeit heavily redacted — documents behind this controversial action, it took a Freedom of Information Act request by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
A Columbia Journalism Review report Thursday provided an “alarming picture” of the Obama DOJ’s actions, according to The Daily Wire.
The subpoenas came after classified documents were leaked to the Associated Press, detailing a CIA operation that prevented Yemen bad actors from planting a plane bomb.
AP President and Chief Executive Gary Pruitt refuted the DOJ and backed his journalists.
“The White House had said there was no credible threat to the American people in May of 2012. The AP story suggested otherwise, and we felt that was important information and the public deserved to know it,” Pruitt said in a statement from May 14, 2013.
Pruitt also stated in a letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder that this move was a massive overreach by the DOJ, saying that the subpoenaed records “potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news-gathering activities undertaken by the AP” between April 1, 2012, and May 10, 2012.
He continued, stating that the seized data could “provide a road map to AP’s news-gathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
A story of this magnitude — how the Obama-era DOJ was more intrusive than originally believed — should be on the front page of every mainstream news organization. But that likely won’t happen.
After all, media members think that President Trump “being mean” is far more detrimental than a direct breach of privacy of some of the most prestigious journalists in the nation.
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