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posted by takyon on Friday June 15 2018, @06:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the same-game,-different-team dept.

Trump's targeting of a New York Times journalist, explained by experts

The Trump administration took its war with the media to the next level this week when federal authorities seized years of phone records from New York Times reporter Ali Watkins as part of a federal investigation into leaks of classified information.

Watkins, who previously worked for BuzzFeed News and Politico, had a three-year relationship with James Wolfe, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide who was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to federal agents investigating the classified leaks.

The seizure set off alarm bells about the relationship between the administration and the media. The Department of Justice under Obama took phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors, named a Fox News reporter an unindicted "co-conspirator" in a leak case, and prosecuted multiple cases involving whistleblowers and leakers. So is what Trump doing more of the same? Or is a president who routinely bashes the media and threatens to jail leakers finally turning his rhetoric into reality?

"It's deeply alarming that the Trump administration has decided to build off of the worst of the Obama legacy on leak investigations and reporter-source protection," said Alexandra Ellerbeck, the North America program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

See also: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual

Also at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Emptywheel, and Fox News.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by idiot_king on Friday June 15 2018, @07:51PM (2 children)

    by idiot_king (6587) on Friday June 15 2018, @07:51PM (#693674)

    There IS a difference, even if your rage prevents you from seeing it.

    Obama wasn't a threat to the average human being. That's the difference.

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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Sulla on Friday June 15 2018, @10:39PM

    by Sulla (5173) on Friday June 15 2018, @10:39PM (#693746) Journal

    Unless of course you lived in Syria or Yemen.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:24AM (#693848)

    The average human being? I'd say conducting unconstitutional mass surveillance on the populace (which started under Bush and continues to this day under Trump) made him a threat to the average human being, at least if you care about the Constitution and privacy.

    But being threatening to whistleblowers, activists, political opponents, journalists, and so on (since mass surveillance threatens all of those) is bad enough, since that threatens democracy itself. Obama was not a good person.