It was bad enough that this administration sought secret subpoenas for AP reporters' phone records, under completely false pretenses. Now it is actually trying to make reporting a crime when the reporter is from a network you don't like and his reporting can make you look bad.
This is, as Washington Post columnist
Dana Milbank (typically an Obama sycophant), "an administration that has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined."
A leaker, in Washington parlance, passes information to reporters to advance an agenda. A whistleblower, does the same thing, only the names are changed depending on whose ox gets gored. The Obama administration deliberately leaked the bin Laden raid to reporters, which advanced the Obama agenda even though it revealed the participation of the SEALs team. It greatly enhanced Obama's prestige, and earned him glowing media coverage. But Bradley Manning, the Marine Pfc. behind Wikileaks, goes on trial next month,
one of an unprecedented number of whistleblowers being prosecuted by this administration under the Espionage Act, which dates to World War I.
In the James Rosen case, the whistleblower told him that North Korea might test another nuclear missile in response to possible UN Security condemnations of such tests. The FBI got warrants for Rosen's email accounts on the grounds that "there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter has committed or is committing a violation" of the Espionage Act of 1917 "as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." Not only has Rosen not been charged with receiving classified information from the whistleblower, a State Department contractor named Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, it would be practically impossible for him to know if were classified. And even if he could know, it is not a crime in the US to publish classified information.
All this, combined with CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson's announcement that her
personal and work computers had been "compromised" for an extended period, presumably in retaliation for her reporting on Benghazi and "Fast and Furious", gives us an increasingly clear picture of an administration with utter contempt for press freedom, and it sends a clear message to other journalists: be a lapdog, not a bulldog, or we will put you down.
What a stupid ploy. The press, with few exceptions, have
been lapdogs, until now. Only by taking away their bones, muzzling them, or beating them, have they forgotten their obedience training and begun to bark. Whether they will actually bite, as they did 40 years ago, remains to be seen, but I doubt that these are the only instances of press intimidation, harrassment and bullying to occur.
