Report: Obama Administration’s Actions Against Press Worse Than Previously Known

by Casey | May 24, 2019 | Blog, Conspiracy, Media Bias

The lapdog MSM has continued to give Obama a pass on most of his assault on the press. If they’d shown anywhere near the outrage they show now towards President Trump’s words for Obama’s actions, maybe they could be taken seriously.

On Thursday, the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the Obama Justice Department’s attempts to crack down on leaks to reporters which reveal that the Obama administration’s actions against the press “were broader than previously known.”

CJR’s report, authored by Ramya Krishnan and Trevor Timm, is based on a highly redacted 59-page report ​by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility completed Dec. 9, 2014 and obtained via FOIA request by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (where Krishnan and Timm work, respectively).

“In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom, issuing sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of the Associated Press and several of its reporters and editors as part of a leak investigation,” the authors report. While those subpoenas have long been understood as “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations,” they note, the recently unearthed 2014 report reveals that the subpoenas targeting AP “told only part of the story.”

The Office of Professional Responsibility’s report on the Obama Justice Department’s subpoenas of AP phone records reveals that “the DOJ’s actions against the AP were broader than previously known, and that the DOJ considered subpoenaing the phone records of other news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News,” the authors explain. The report also reveals “how narrowly the DOJ interprets the Media Guidelines, the agency’s internal rules for obtaining reporters’ data.”

Source: Report: Obama Administration’s Actions Against Press Worse Than Previously Known