The Leaks Scandals: Questions for Obama

The issue of just how far the Obama Administration is willing to go to pursue leakers gets murkier and murkier.

Two weeks ago, we learned that a federal prosecutor trying to find the source of a story about the C.I.A. and a plot in Yemen to bomb an American airliner (it involved a double agent) secretly subpoenaed records from more than twenty phone lines used by more than a dozen editors and reporters at the Associated Press. Then came the revelation, in Sunday’s Washington Post, that, in an earlier case concerning a 2009 Fox News story about North Korea’s nuclear intentions, the same prosecutor seized e-mails from the reporter responsible for the story, Fox’s chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, and described him in a court filing seeking access to the e-mails as “an aider, and abettor, and/or co-conspirator” in an alleged violation of the Espionage Act. Thanks to some digging by my colleague Ryan Lizza, we now know that in the Rosen case the Justice Department also seized the records of phone numbers associated with Fox News and others.

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