May 13, 2013

Scandals happening faster than they can be reported

While this week has been a bad week for the president, one has to wonder if the IRS scandal was deliberately released in order to distract attention from the Benghazi scandal.  It would seem, that either there has been a nefarious plot by the White House to flood the scandals from the Executive Branch across the land now in order to avoid political impacts in the 2014 and 2016 elections.  But if that's the case then we could be in for a bumpy ride, as yet another new scandal is hitting the media today.

This one should be big based on the target.  You know if this was a Bush initiative it would have been thermonuclear.  Let's see what happens.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive 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 personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, 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 exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.
By every logic this should be a big deal for the media.  They were the ones being looked at by the administration.  I'm doubtful it will be, but time will tell.

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