AP: Obama Administration Secretly Obtained Journalists’ Phone Records

It appears the Obama Administration is dealing with yet another scandal on their hands. The Associated Press is reporting that the Department of Justice secretly obtained widespread telephone records of their journalists.

“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.”

Even worse, per the AP, Attorney General Eric Holder must sign off on all subpoenas for news organizations records. The AP’s statement says these records could also alert the government to possible sources and stories, thus hindering the news organization’s ability to do its job.

This blanket seizure of records further damages the credibility of the Obama Administration and Justice Department.

The last week has brought scandal after scandal for the White House. First, it was reported that the White House and State Department edited the talking points on Benghazi 12 times—scrubbing any references to terrorism and contradicting months of administration denials. Today, it was reported that senior IRS officials knew in 2011 that the agency was unfairly targeting conservative groups.

The “most transparent administration in history” has covered-up the circumstances around a terrorist attack, targeted groups because of their conservative beliefs, and now has secretly obtained widespread records of journalists’ telephone calls. This behavior is abhorrent and is an affront of the values on which this country was founded.