Biden Administration Is Now Defending Trump’s Journalist Phone Records Confiscation
Michael Cantrell
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The Biden administration is trying to defend the confiscation of phone records from journalists in order to find out who is responsible for leaking stories to the media, a practice that was widely used under President Donald Trump.
“While rare, the (Justice) Department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” Justice Department Spokesperson Marc Raimondi said during a conversation with the Examiner for the story that was published on May 13. “The targets of these investigations are not the news media recipients but rather those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”
A case that was disclosed last week revealed the department sent out letters to three national security reporters to inform them that the department was deploying its subpoena power in order to secretly obtain their phone records in 2020. They went on to notify the reporters that the suspected “leakers” were the actual target of the investigation and not the journalists themselves.
“(This) was worse than (President Richard) Nixon because Nixon never actually seized any records,” former White House Counsel John Dean said to journalists working at the Examiner. “This was because Nixon could develop ‘no real probable cause.’”
In 2014, President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuted nine cases, more than all the previous presidents combined, and justified the practice in the same way, saying “no reporter is going to go to jail for doing his or her job.”
According to the article, Trump escalated the practice, even criticizing the Attorney Jeff Sessions for having “taken a very weak position” on leakers.
The recent records seized, according to the Examiner’s story, covered phone calls made and received between April 15 to July 31, 2017 following the 2016 publication of stories that said Sessons, an Alabama senator at the time, had discussed the Trump presidential campaign with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“Whenever the government seeks to obtain records of journalists’ communications, it raises serious First Amendment concerns because it interferes with the free flow of information to the public. For exactly that reason, the Justice Department has guidelines in place that require, with only narrow exceptions, notification to an affected news organization before federal prosecutors can seize a journalist’s toll records,” Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Executive Director Bruce Brown said in a statement released to the Examiner. “It is imperative that the new justice department leadership explain exactly when prosecutors seized these records, why it is only now notifying the (paper), and on what basis the Justice Department decided to forgo the presumption of advance notification under its own guidelines when the investigation apparently involves reporting over three years in the past.”
It seems like there is just no end whatsoever to the constant corruption within both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party. There is no low they won’t stoop to in order to punish individuals who think and believe differently than they do.
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