“...You ask what makes Sharyl tick: It’s that she’s highly skeptical of people in power, and right now the people in power are Democrats,” one source said. “I don’t see her as an agenda-driven reporter.”
“[Attkisson believes] that public officials and federal officials work for us, and that it’s gotten to the point where they don’t believe that they should be held accountable,” another source said. “That’s not partisan.”
“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,” Attkisson told Politico on Tuesday. “I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.”
In a separate interview with WPHT Philadelphia on Tuesday, Attkisson told Chris Stigall that something peculiar had been going on with her computers since Feb. 2011, coincidentally the same time she was reporting on the failed federal gun-walking operation known as Fast and Furious and the Obama administration’s green energy spending.
In an earlier interview with WPHT Philadelphia, Attkisson said that though she did not know the full details of the intrustion, "there could be some relationship between these things and what's happened to James [Rosen]," the Fox News reporter who became the subject of a Justice Dept. investigation after reporting on CIA intelligence about North Korea in 2009.
On the heels of news that the Obama administration Department of Justice was spying on reporters at the Associated Press, Monday brought the startling disclosure by the Washington Post that the DOJ had also targeted Fox reporter James Rosen for surveillance in an effort to plug up leaks.
Additionally, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza obtained the full application for a search warrant of Rosen’s personal email account, in which the DOJ accused him of being “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator.” As Lizza put it, “Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.”
These investigations are shocking when taken alone, but as as Reason’s J.D. Tuccille notes, it’s important to consider these events in their broader context of the Obama administration’s long-running war against the free press.
The investigation of Rosen was first reported Monday, after The Washington Post obtained court documents containing details of the case.
A federal judge had ordered the documents unsealed in November 2011, but they were kept sealed for 18 months and not posted on the court’s online docket until last week, after The Post inquired about them....
Rosen has not been prosecuted, but the Justice Department’s characterization of him in the search-warrant affidavit as a possible “co-conspirator” has alarmed civil libertarians as well as First Amendment watchdogs.
The Justice Department did more than seize a Fox News reporter's emails while suggesting he was a criminal "co-conspirator" in a leak case -- it did so under one of the most serious wartime laws in America, the Espionage Act.
It's the same law used by the Nixon administration to go after The New York Times and Daniel Ellsberg over the leak of the Pentagon Papers. It's the law used to charge the Rosenbergs, American communists, for allegedly passing secret information to the Soviet Union -- they were executed for the offense in 1953.
One Washington attorney, who represents two defendants recently charged under that World War I-era law, told FoxNews.com that the decision by the Justice Department to invoke it in the current case is "beyond chilling" -- and could set a dangerous precedent for going after reporters.
"This kind of puts us into the deep freeze," attorney Jesselyn Radack said. "I feel like we're back to the Dark Ages."
Previously: A recap of the posts on this site, each one chock full of links...
