Holder defends AP subpoena

Attorney General Eric Holder this week defended the Justice Department’s secret subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press, saying the action was part of an investigation into a “very serious” leak that had “put the American people at risk.” The AP revealed that the government had earlier this year obtained at least two months of call records for over 20 office, home, and cellphone numbers used by its journalists.

The subpoena is reportedly linked to the search for an anonymous source behind a May 2012 AP report, which said that a CIA operation had thwarted a terrorist plot in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner. The AP initially held the story at the White House’s request, but published it a day before it was due to be made public. Holder said he had recused himself from the case after being interviewed by the FBI about the leak.

Were Americans really at risk from this leak? said Conor Frieders-dorf in TheAtlantic.com. “I am deeply skeptical.” The AP withheld the story until “national security concerns had passed,” and CIA Director John Brennan has said that the plot posed no threat to Americans. Months later, Holder is still “vague and noncommittal” about exactly what this “serious” threat was, though some have suggested that the AP story signaled to al Qaida in Yemen that it had a spy in its midst. If the AP story really threatened national security, “why not tell us the particulars?”

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Holder doesn’t have to, said Paul Campos in Time.com. Since the early days of the Bush administration, Congress and the courts have given the government “nearly unlimited power” to spy on and bully the Fourth Estate. Given what we know about this case, the Justice Department’s “fishing expedition” is something current law “allows the government to do.”

The AP called this an “unprecedented” act, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. “Sadly, that’s not true.” In fact, “retaliatory leak investigations and unjustified, open-ended searches” are a way of life for this White House, which has indicted more government officials for leaking information than all previous administrations combined. This dragnet mentality threatens the kind of “aggressive reporting that holds government to account.” Surely that’s the greater risk to American citizens.