The Justice Department obtained two months of telephone records from a group of reporters and editors at the Associated Press in a secret probe, the AP itself reports. The news agency was notified Friday about the seizure of the phone records, which was conducted through subpoenas filed by Ron Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Machen’s subpoenas targeted phone records for AP employees in bureaus in Washington, New York, and Hartford, Conn., as well as its correspondents in the House of Representatives. The AP does not know how many of its staff were targeted in the probe, but collectively those offices employ more than 100 people.
Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Machen as one of two special prosecutors last May to investigate disclosures to reporters of national security information. The Associated Press reports that its phone records for April and May 2012 were targeted in Machen’s probe. Around that time, the AP reported about the CIA’s foiling of a terror plot in Yemen:
The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.
In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP’s source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”
In response to the Justice Department’s notification last Friday, Gary Pruitt, the AP’s president and chief executive, fired off a letter to Holder demanding prosecutors return the phone records to the wire service and destroy any copies.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone
communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt writes. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
The AP is not commenting beyond the content of Pruitt’s letter, Erin Madigan, a spokeswoman for the news agency, tells DCist.
The Justice Department’s internal rules firmly state that subpoenas for records of members of news media are held to far higher scrutiny, and require the approval of the attorney general when the targeted material has not been published. “Before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media, or for telephone toll records of a member of the news media, department attorneys should take all reasonable steps to attempt to obtain the information through alternative sources or means,” the guidelines state. They also specify that any subpoenas be “fashioned as narrowly as possible,” and only after direct negotiations with the targeted media professionals are attempted.
“We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,” Machen’s office says in an official statement. “Those regulations require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media. We must notify the media organization in advance unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.”
In his letter, Pruitt writes that the AP was never told in advance that its phone records were being investigated, and that it only learned about the probe on Friday.
