DOJ Seizes Associated Press' Phone Records; No Time For Freedom Of The Press

And you don't bring me flowers anymore. To put it mildly the press and the Obama administration are going through a nasty separation. The Obama Justice Dept has leveled its sights on it old friends at Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The government did not say why it need the records and the scope of the seizure as the AP says was massive and unprecedented, just the sort of violation of liberty we were told we could expect from a Romney administration. Evidently the DOJ violated its own guidelines for obtaining records from a news outlet which state;
A subpoena can only be considered after "all reasonable attempts" have been made to get the same information from other sources, the rules say. It was unclear what other steps, in total, the Justice Department has taken to get information in the case.
A subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period," according to the rules.
The reason for these constraints, the department says, is to avoid actions that "might impair the news gathering function" because the government recognizes that "freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news."
I suspect the AP will soon find more sympathy for the Tea Party.