Obama could put every AP employee in prison and they would still adore him. None of this matters.
5/20/13, "Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes," UK Guardian, Glenn Greenwald
"It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters
illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also
targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the
newsgathering process in general.
New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage"....
But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in
order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also
Rosen - the journalist - committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically
argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information
- something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself
broke the law."...via Free Republic
.
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