When Discussing Leaks, Freedom of the Press and The Obama Administration, Shameless Hypocrisy is Synonymous With Conservative Republican

When Discussing Leaks, Freedom of the Press and The Obama Administration, Shameless Hypocrisy is Synonymous With Conservative Republican.

On the heels of reports that the Justice Department had subpoenaed e-mails from a James Rosen, a reporter with Fox News, Rubio came out with a statement accusing the Obama administration of harassing journalists “they deem unfriendly” to the White House. Now, never mind that Rubio seems to be saying that Fox reports are unfriendly to Obama (that’s a no-no that contradicts the “Fair and Balanced” meme). The worst thing is pretending that this was a targeted attack on a reporter who had undertaken a mission against the White House. Rosen did his job and did it well; sweeping him up into partisan hackery is a disservice to his role as a journalist.

The real story is contained in the F.B.I.’s affidavit in support of the search warrant, filed in May 2010 at Federal Court for the District of Columbia. Reading the document makes clear that this was no targeting of a reporter who was after the administration but a legitimate national-security investigation.

I’ll get into the details in a minute. First, a side trip.

Yes, I think it’s wrong for the government to subpoena records from journalists involved in national-security reporting (particularly since I do it myself). I do believe it has a chilling effect on the ability to gather news about potential abuses masked by inappropriate classification. And most reporters don’t disclose things that should remain secret—like the names of undercover C.I.A. agents (see Bush administration: Valerie Plame), war plans, or locations of troops. And I know for a fact that if government officials ask that a story not run on national-security grounds, good news organizations always hear them out and sometimes agree.

And I was delighted to see that, finally, Republicans are starting to agree with me. Take Rubio’s own statement on the Fox controversy, where he states:

    National security leaks are criminal and put American lives on the line, and federal prosecutors should, of course, vigorously investigate. But we expect that they do so within the bounds of the law, and that the investigations focus on the leakers within the government—not on media organizations that have First Amendment protections and serve vital function in our democracy.

Thank you, Marco! And welcome to the side of the journalists! I promise, now that there is a high-level government official proclaiming that, yes, media organizations should not be the focus of such investigations because of Constitutional protections, Rubio’s statement is going to be used from now until forever in every case involving investigations of journalists that print leaked information.

Too bad that Republicans don’t sing the praises of the First Amendment when the White House is held by the G.O.P. In fact, they do the exact opposite. In fact, they did the exact opposite when the Republican administration does the exact same thing that is now at the center of the Obama scandal involving the Associated Press—that is, seizing phone records of reporters. (Please note: The issue here isn’t whether they are right or wrong. What I’m talking about is the utter hypocrisy of the G.O.P. on this matter.)

Let’s take the most important disclosure of a classified program that occurred in my lifetime: the 2005 article in The New York Times that revealed the existence of the program to allow the government to wiretap Americans and others in the United States without a warrant if it was part of a national-security investigation. Somehow, I don’t remember Republicans banging the First Amendment drum when that story came out— instead, they were calling for reporters to be charged with treason, which could have led to them being executed.

But let’s look in more detail at how the Bushies handled that situation by reviewing an affidavit filed in 2011 by James Risen, one of the two Times reporters who broke the warrantless-wiretapping story.

    The Bush Administration was embarrassed by the disclosures I made and eventually singled me out as a target for political harassment. That administration speculated publicly about prosecuting me under the Espionage Act . . . I was told by a reliable source that Vice President Dick Cheney pressured the Justice Department to personally target me because he was unhappy with my reporting and wanted to see me in jail. After he left office in 2009, Cheney publicly admitted that the fact that I won a Pulitzer Prize for the NSA story “always aggravated me.”

I take it now, with their new celebration of the First Amendment and their recognition of the importance of journalists in a democracy, conservatives like Rubio are outraged by what happened to Risen. But that wasn’t all. Right-wingers, now clamoring for impeachment because of the use of subpoenas on reporters by the Obama administration, back in the Bush days were joining in the calls for charges, Risen says in his sworn statement.

    . . . an organized campaign of hate mail from right wing groups with close ties to the White House was launched, inundating me with personal threats. Meanwhile, protesters supporting the Bush Administration picketed my office, calling for me to be prosecuted. Right wing pundits and bloggers supporting the Bush Administration took to television and the Internet to call for the White House and the Justice Department to prosecute me for espionage. Failing that, they called for the Justice Department to subpoena me in a leak investigation, which right wing pundits said would have the same effect as prosecution, since it could force me to go to jail if I refused to testify about the identity of my confidential source(s) . . . In mid-March, after Attorney General Gonzales raised publicly the possibility of prosecuting journalists, the Director of the CIA, Porter Goss, suggested that it was his “hope” and “aim” that the leak investigations would lead to subpoenas requiring me to testify about the identity of my confidential source(s). Only two months into the investigation, Goss explained: “It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information.”

Administration. Umm . . . huh. Can’t hear that Right Wing First Amendment Marching Band that seems to be out in force now that Obama is using subpoenas against reporters. But you know, at least Bush wasn’t doing what just happened—that is, getting hold of phone records of reporters to see who they were calling and who was calling them, which is the current Obama scandal involving the Justice Department and the Associated Press. Oh, wait . . . just read more of the Risen affidavit:

    Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News reported on May 15, 2006, that senior federal law enforcement officials had informed them that the government was tracking the phone numbers of journalists without the journalists’ knowledge as part of an effort to root out the journalists’ confidential sources . . . the journalists’ phones were not being “tapped,” but the government was tracking the in-coming and outgoing numbers called and received on the journalists’ phones. The story stated that the government was examining the phone calls and contacts of journalists from ABC News, The New York Times, and the Washington Post (as) part of a “widespread CIA leak investigation.” . . . I have learned from an individual who testified before a grand jury in this District that was examining my reporting about the domestic wiretapping program that the Government had shown this individual copies of telephone records relating to calls made to and from me.

Where were the G.O.P. legislators and right-wing punditocracy when Bush was doing the same thing as Obama? Why, they were cheering! The hypocrisy is astonishing. How do they justify being in favor of the government obtaining the phone records of reporters during the Bush administration, while calling it a scandal under Obama? I don’t know . . . maybe they think the First Amendment applies only to the Associated Press and Fox News or something.

Which brings us back to the Fox situation and to Rubio’s claim that this was targeting enemies of the White House. The similarities with the reactions to the warrantless-wiretapping case are astonishing (even the reporters’ names are off by just one letter: James Risen at the Times, James Rosen at Fox).

The Fox case involved a report by Rosen in June 2009 that American intelligence officials had issued warnings that, should the United Nations adopt sanctions that were under consideration, North Korea would begin conducting new nuclear tests. According to the F.B.I. affidavit in the case, the information was top secret and was contained in an intelligence document disseminated to a small number of government officials that same morning. The report was marked top secret.

One of the people who accessed the report that morning was Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a man of Korean descent who is a naturalized citizen (just mentioning that to say, hmm . . . where are the G.O.P. conspiracy theories about that?) and a nuclear specialist who was detailed at the time to the State Department. Kim worked in the same building where Rosen maintained a desk in a section for reporters. According to the affidavit, between the time the intelligence analysis was issued and the report on Fox News, the electronic user identification and password for Kim were used to access the classified document three times. And Kim’s phone records show that he called Rosen several times that morning. Moreover, about the same time that Kim’s user profile was viewing the classified document, two calls were place from his desk phone to Rosen. From there, the F.B.I. obtained security-badge access records that the F.B.I. says shows the two men left the building at the same time; the affidavit suggests that this involved a meeting between the two men. Within an hour, Fox News made its report.

An analysis of Kim’s desk and mobile phones showed dozens of calls between him and Rosen. During a September interview with the F.B.I., Kim told the agents that the best e-mail to use to reach him was a Yahoo! account. The next day, he called and said he was getting rid of the Yahoo! account and the F.B.I. should instead use a Google account he had set up. A forensic analysis of Kim’s hard drive, the affidavit says, found an e-mail from Rosen; the affidavit suggests that the e-mail had been deleted. Moreover, electronic records showed that after his interview with the F.B.I., Kim’s user profile accessed his Yahoo! account—which he told the F.B.I. he was getting rid of the next day—and viewed e-mails that had been sent from Rosen’s account.

At that point, the F.B.I. obtains subpoenas for the Yahoo! accounts of both Kim and Rosen. There, they find communications between the two of them in which they are using aliases—Kim is “Leo” and Rosen is “Alex.”

So, here is the scenario: Kim is one of a few officials who sees classified information about possible nuclear tests by North Korea. He speaks to Rosen of Fox. And shortly thereafter, Fox runs the story about the classified information. The F.B.I. questions Kim and then comes to believe that he is deleting information from his computer. So, knowing already that Kim is in communication with Rosen, it subpoenas both Kim’s and Rosen’s e-mail accounts.

Again, I don’t like this, but I also know it is the risk reporters take when they are covering national-security issues. But what I do find appalling is that the G.O.P.-ers who would never stand for this if the leaks came out of the Bush administration think it’s all hunky dory if classified information goes out from the Obama administration.

So Fox News reveals national security information to the world, including North Korea. Conservatives leap to the defense of Fox News, because if Fox News blew snot on their food, conservatives will always eat it and say thank you very much. There is a vital difference between the press leaks during the BushCo years and now. The leaks during the Bush years showed that Bush-Cheney-Rice et al, were breaking the law. Now it appears that if Fox News James Rosen maliciously compromised national security as a pure act of spite against the Obama administration. That Rosen acted in the interest of North Korea instead of being a patriot is no surprise, just look who he works for, anti-American Fox News. The home of perverts, weirdos, nationalistic ideologues, homophobes, overpaid millionaires with bad haircuts, sleazy pundits and conspiracy theorists. Those that do not like what the Obama administration did, well that fine. But they got subpenas from the courts and did not break the law. So until we change the laws, there is no scandal.