Media Crackdown: Government Obtains the Associated Press' Phone Records

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press in which AP President a CEO Gary Pruitt called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personalphone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, attorneys for the AP said.

The government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The AP said that more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, which dealt with stories about government and other matters.

"There can be no possible justification for such an over-broad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

The government would  not say why the records were sought. U.S. officials previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation in who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, the AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the U.S.

The May 7, 2012, AP story that disclosed details of the CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot occurred around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.

Tags

Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Associated Press, Media Crackdown

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