SBR Top-Rated Sportsbooks
DOJ seized Fox News phone records as well!
DOJ seized Fox News phone records as well!
Federal investigators apparently accessed records of calls to and from a phone number at Fox News Channel in their leak investigation of a former State Department contractor, according to a court document.
News of the government's search of Fox News phone records comes after controversy broke out last week over a separate leak investigation in which prosecutors seized the call details of roughly 20 phone numbers of reporters and editors at the Associated Press.
Former government contractor Stephen Kim has been charged in federal court with leaking an intelligence report about North Korea in 2009 to Fox News reporter James Rosen. Mr. Kim has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
In a filing describing evidence gathered in the prosecution of Mr. Kim, prosecutors listed a series of phone numbers for which they seized phone call logs-the calls placed to and from a number, as well as the duration of the calls. One of the phone numbers has the same three-digit exchange as Fox News' Washington bureau, according to the court document, which was earlier reported by the New Yorker's website. It wasn't clear how many other customers have that three-digit exchange.
The filing also listed two numbers in the 456 exchange, which is used by the White House. In those cases, the government sought to identify only users of the numbers.
A government official said investigators didn't pull the call logs of any White House employees. The last four digits of all of the numbers in the filing were redacted, meaning that it was impossible to tell which specific phones investigators were trying to identify.
The government's tactics in the Kim case gained attention when the Washington Post reported Sunday night that prosecutors sought and received a judge's approval to obtain the Fox News reporter's private emails in a Gmail account. Fox News said it learned about the email seizure from the news report.
Michael Clemente, Fox News' executive vice president, said Tuesday he was "outraged" by the seizure of the reporter's emails. "We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press," said Mr. Clemente.
The newly revealed court document, which dates from 2011, suggests that the government's search for information about Fox News' activities went beyond the reporter's personal email account and may have extended to communications using the company's equipment. It wasn't immediately clear how many Fox News journalists might have been affected.
In the AP case, the government notified the news agency only after the phone records were already taken. The Justice Department obtained records affecting about 100 employees, according to the AP.
The AP records covered about four weeks over a two-month period when the news agency was preparing an article about an alleged conspiracy to detonate an underwear bomb aboard a U.S.-bound airliner.
Past leak probes, including a case involving the New York Times during the Bush administration, indicate the law generally supports the government's right to obtain such records. WSJ
FACTS & FIGURES
Tensions between the Obama administration and the press were strained further Monday by news that the Justice Department had targeted a Fox News reporter as a criminal co-conspirator over national security leaks.
The scope of the Fox News subpoenas does not appear to have been as large as that of the DOJ's pursuit of the Associated Press. There, records for at least 20 phone lines were seized. Huffington Post
The president and CEO of The Associated Press said Sunday that the government's seizure of AP journalists' phone records was "unconstitutional" and already has had a chilling effect on newsgathering. AP
Gary Pruitt says the Justice Department's secret subpoena of reporters' phone records has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists. AP
The Associated Press doesn't question the Justice Department's right to have seized two months' worth of its phone records, the organization's president and CEO Gary Pruitt said Sunday on "Face the Nation." It was the methodology - "so sweeping, so secretively, so abusively and harassingly overbroad," he said - that breached the Constitution. CBS News
AHT/ARA
Press TV
Reply With Quote
