(FoxNews.com) The review ordered by President Obama into the Justice Department’s policies on pursuing reporters’ records could have Attorney General Eric Holder effectively reviewing his own actions.
Under Justice Department guidelines, the attorney general would most likely have had to sign off on the controversial search warrant that allowed federal authorities to seize the private emails of a Fox News reporter.
This, and another case involving the Associated Press, prompted Obama on Thursday to announce that Holder had agreed to conduct a review of DOJ policies on investigations that involve reporters.
(Newsmax.com) The New York Times has blasted the Obama White House’s move to label a Fox News reporter a possible “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation of a news leak about North Korea’s nuclear missile program.
The administration has “moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news,” the newspaper said in an editorial on Wednesday.
The incident involves James Rosen, chief Washington correspondent for Fox News.
After Rosen reported in 2009 that Pyongyang planned to launch a missile in response to United Nations condemnation of its nuclear tests, the Justice Department investigated the article’s source and indicted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department security adviser, on charges of leaking classified information.
That was not the end of the investigation, however. Federal prosecutors also asked a federal judge for permission to troll through Rosen’s personal e-mails, arguing that “there is probable cause to believe” he is “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the leak,” according to the Times.
(FoxNews-AP) WASHINGTON – A top White House adviser staked out a defiant defense Sunday on a series of scandals that have hit the Obama administration, going so far as to say it was an “irrelevant fact” where the president was the night of the Benghazi terror attacks and saying the Obama administration wouldn’t cooperate in “partisan fishing expeditions” over IRS officials targeting Tea Party groups.
Dan Pfeiffer went on five Sunday talk shows where he tried to reverse the damage done to the Obama administration this week by a series of scandals. On “Fox News Sunday” he tried to hammer home that the president only heard that the IRS unfairly targeted Tea Party groups “when it came out in the news.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who also appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” suggested there was a written policy to target political groups opposing the president but when pressed for proof by Wallace, he was unable to provide details.
(TheBlaze.com) TheBlaze’s S.E. Cupp battled liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on the gun issue Friday, arguing against gun restrictions and schooling him on basic statistics on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Cupp, contending with boos from the “Real Time” audience, said the problem with a gun registry is that “it treats law-abiding citizens as if they are guilty until proven innocent.”
She went on, “The problem with background checks, five-day waiting periods, they assume that I have criminal intent to use my gun to pursue my Second Amendment rights…I go to get a background check, ‘Prove to me you’re not a criminal.’ I go to get a gun, ‘Prove to me you don’t want to use it in the heat of passion right now, wait five days, you need to cool off.’ That’s not fair — the government is not in the business of intimidating me away from my Second Amendment rights. It’s an abuse of power, and it seeps into the culture — it’s why newspapers think they can publish gun owners’ addresses, as if they are pariahs. It’s not appropriate.”
(DailyCaller.com) The Department of Homeland Security, which under Secretary Janet Napolitano has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.
In a checklist obtained by The Daily Caller entitled “Countering Violent Extremism Dos and Don’ts” the DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties notifies local and national law enforcement officials that it is Obama administration policy to consider specifically Islamic criticism of the American system of government legitimate.
This policy stands in stark contrast to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis’ 2009 memo “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” [pdf], which warned of the dangers posed by pro-life advocates, critics of same-sex marriage and groups concerned with abiding by the U.S. Constitution, among others. (Read more…)
