Good Riddance, Eric Holder

Eric Holder announced his resignation. Good riddance. Not since the Nixon years have Americans had an attorney general so aggressively hostile to the news media. 

Holder is no rogue in the Obama administration. The president is Nixonian in his distaste or contempt for reporters who seek more than crumbs from the presidential table. So far, the Obama/Holder axis has concentrated on trying to intimidate reporters by digging into phone and email accounts, demanding them to violate promises of confidentiality, etc.

Their strategy makes sense. It can muzzle potential sources and deter would-be investigative reporters (and their bosses). After all, it’s easier to jail reporters for contempt of court when they won’t name confidential sources than for what they wrote; the First Amendment still offers some protection. 

Moreover, the Supreme Court pulled the teeth from the Fourth Amendment’s ban on searches without warrants. That and judicial acquiescence to antiterrorism arguments make reporters’ phone and email records vulnerable to secret Department of Justice (DoJ) demands on email and telephone providers. Just the knowledge that feds can trace journalists’ sources through these records warns insiders that the DoJ’s full weight can fall on them if they talk to reporters. 

Which takes us back to the Nixon years when that president’s criminal attorney general, John Mitchell, had to be slapped down by federal judges Damon Keith and George Edwards, who blocked DoJ’s warrantless eavesdropping. 

Fans praise Holder’s efforts on civil rights. At the same time, he showed little interest in civil liberties. Holder already has prosecuted more leakers than all other attorneys general. 

Until recently is most notorious target was Bradley Manning, the enlisted man who released thousands of potentially compromising documents to WikiLeaks. He’s serving a 35-year sentence. 

Today, the most infamous is Edward Snowden, an NSA contract employee who revealed NSA spying on Americans and foreign leaders. A man without a passport or country, he isn’t likely to come home to prosecution. For the moment, he’s in Russia. And it’s unlikely that Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based American reporter at the center of Snowden’s initial revelations, will want to return to the United States. 

Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent accused of being a source for New York Times reporter James Risen’s book State of War, is charged with leaking restricted information. DoJ wants Risen to confirm that Sterling was his source. Risen faces prison for contempt of court if he continues to refuse to identify his source. 

Going a step further, DoJ criminalized journalism when it said James Rosen, a Fox News reporter, was a conspirator who aided and abetted a State Department contractor’s leak of classified information. DoJ used that allegation to seize Rosen’s emails and the records of many Fox News phones. The beauty of antiterrorism laws is that they allow DoJ to demand those records before the target can challenge the search in court. They never charged Rosen.

Publicity surrounding Rosen’s predicament forced Holder into an anodyne assurance: “The Department has not prosecuted, and as long as I have the privilege of serving as attorney general of the United States will not prosecute, any reporter for doing his or her job.”

Yeah, “job” as defined by Holder and Obama. Sort of like Wall Street moneylenders. Holder didn’t prosecute them for cheating investors on a previously unimaginable scale. It was only their “job.” 

Holder’s actions mock his assurances to the news media. He also promised that, “as long as he is in office, no journalist will be prosecuted or go to prison for performing ordinary news gathering activities.”

I’ve written about that before. Holder retains the power to define what’s “ordinary” in our trade. His assurance is as cynical and worthless as his conversations with news media representatives about DoJ rules governing the pursuit of journalists and their sources.  

There also was a secret seizure of two months of phone records of five AP reporters and one AP editor involved in an AP story about a foiled terrorist plot based in Yemen. AP said the records involved “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.” 

AP said DoJ 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.”

AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt told Holder that, “there can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. 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.” 

AP said DoJ “would not reveal why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.” AP said the FBI even asked CIA Director John Brennan whether he was AP’s source. He denied it.  

Other reporters’ sources prosecuted by Holder’s DoJ include: 

• Shamai Leibowitz, an FBI contract linguist who leaked information to a blogger from embassy wiretaps in 2010. He was sentenced to 20 months.  
• John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who passed classified information to a reporter in 2013. He was sentenced to 30 months.  
• Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a senior analyst at the Office of National Security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who was charged with disclosing national defense information to Fox reporter James Rosen in 2010. He served 13 months.  
• Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who received a year’s probation in 2010 for a reduced charge of willful retention of national defense information.  

Curmudgeon Notes 

Thebusinesswomanmedia.com headline read, “Internationally acclaimed barrister Amal Alamuddin marries an actor.” Here’s the whole story: “Amal Alamuddin, a 36-year-old London-based dual-qualified English barrister and New York litigation attorney who has long been a high-profile figure in international refugee and human rights law has gone against the trend for professional women in her field and married . . . an actor. 
“Amal is an educated and successful career woman we’ve long admired. The high-flying barrister has notched up many career highs, including representing the controversial WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange, and also has multilingual fluency in English, French and Arabic. 
“Amal attended St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, earning her BA/LLB and receiving the Exhibitioner, Shrigley Award. She also attended New York University School of Law earning her LLM and receiving the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award. “A true testament to her character is her decision to find time to serve on the expert panel of Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (formed by UK Foreign Secretary William Hague) to gather evidence of sexual crimes committed in conflict zones. “Singing her praises yet? Well you aren’t the only ones … 
“Julia Roberts called her ‘beautiful and smart.’ Translation: she is beautiful and smart. 
“Mark Stephens, the solicitor who hired Amal to represent Assange: ‘She is a fabulously bright woman, she’s independent, has a Rolls-Royce mind and intersocial skills to die for.’ Translation: she is awesome.”  
The website caption said, “Amal is also a style icon for corporate women across the globe, with her easy elegance set off with her love of quirky footwear — a nice touch to her personal brand.” 
And as the website said, “Now back to this marriage. 
“Little is known of Amal’s earlier relationships (we assume she was climbing that corporate ladder and smashing glass ceilings) but she’s tying the knot with an actor, whose name is George Clooney, we’re told. 
“He’s probably a nice man, but seems to be a bit clingy, as since she met him it’s hard to find a photo or footage of Amal without him hanging around in the background. 
“We only hope he doesn’t hold her back from conquering the world. We think this George Clooney fellow has scored big time. “He’s been quoted as saying he was ‘marrying up’… we agree.” 

• London’s Daily Mail couldn’t tell Nick Clooney and his famous thatch of white hair from some balding old guy who was identified in one image as George’s father in the wedding party shots.   
• Speaking of editing gaffs, Gannett fired a bunch of people from its USA Today newsroom recently. Maybe the editor responsible for matching text to photos was among the victims. On the morning of the historic vote on whether Scotland would leave the United Kingdom, USA Today’s section in the Enquirer had a multicolumn photo showing “No” vote signs and the familiar Union Jack flag (crosses of St. George and St. Andrew). However, USA Today’s caption said it showed the Scots’ white and blue saltire/cross of St. Andrew, and “Yes” voters.  
• Don’t think it’s going to get better? Gannett has pledged to reduce the number of journalists across the chain devoted to mere “production” in newsrooms and regional design centers. In Gannett-speak, production includes getting the correct photos, captions and cutlines together.  
• Then there was the editor who didn’t catch the clanger in USA Today’s On Polling column after Scots voted against independence. Most polls said the vote would be too close to call. The column tried to explain why polls missed the 10-percent difference that decided the referendum. USA Today said the error might have reflected the “tendency of Tory voters in England to be less enthusiastic about their votes. …” Actually, the voters who mattered were in Scotland, not England.  
• And we could ask USA Today, “What happened to the 300,000 marchers in Manhattan?” Demonstrators from the People’s Climate March on Sunday, Sept. 21, wanted to draw attention to climate change and any role humans play in global warming in advance of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Sept. 23. Regardless of whether editors accept the evidence of climate change, that’s a big crowd — the largest climate march in history, according to Time magazine. They obviously didn’t draw the attention of USA Today editors, reporters, photographers and page designers who produce the supplement for the Enquirer. Not a word the next day. Nor did Enquirer editors take the initiative and include it in sections they produce. Maybe climate change is like evolution, a cause that dare not speak its name at 312 Elm St. 
• Occasionally, the green Sunrock Farm banner visible from I-471 included the culturally unpopular word, “evolution.” Even owner Frank Traina’s recent obit missed his role in promoting an appreciation of science and evolution in the face of religious hostility. It didn’t help that the Enquirer ignored that aspect of Traina’s work in the seemingly nonstop, sympathetic coverage of the anti-evolution Creation Museum.  
• If the Sunday story about the anti-Semite running for U.S. Senate in Kentucky was the Enquirer’s first coverage of this guy, it’s late. I hate to think editors knew about him but flinched out of political correctness. He’s been around for weeks with his sign, “With Jews We Lose.” I asked Enquirer reporters about it this summer after seeing him on a corner in Covington, Ky. If they did a story, I missed it, but then, so did the Enquirer editors who ran the Courier-Journal story on Sunday as if it were new. If, however, this is Courier-Journal enterprise in the Enquirer’s back yard, it’s happened before. The Louisville paper won the 1978 Pulitzer for its coverage of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, Ky., and the 1989 Pulitzer for covering the Carrollton church bus incineration, both stories that could have been Enquirer prize winners.  
• A female fighter pilot led United Arab Emirate’s team in the attacks on ISIL. That was too much for Fox News. Co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Eric Bolling belittled Major Mariam al-Mansouri. Gutfeld said, “Problem is, after she bombed it, she couldn’t park it.” Not to be outdone, Bolling added, “Would that be considered boobs on the ground?” 
• National news media have a new MWW to agonize over. Yes, she’s an attractive University of Virginia coed, white, blonde, and as of this writing, missing; hence Missing White Woman. Developing coverage focused on an African-American man believed to be the last to see her. Don’t ask about missing young women who aren’t cute, blonde and white. They’re not news. 
• CNN refused to show the ISIS/ISIL video of British journalist James Cantlie pleading for his life. Instead, CNN carried the story with a still from the video. CNN said the video contained no new information and was clear evidence of torture. Tony Maddox, executive VP and managing director of CNN International, said, “This man is really trying to perform to save his life. Why would we showcase that?” CNN also refused to show earlier stills or ISIS/ISIL video of American journalist James Foley execution.  
• You can sense the impact of Amazon’s founder as the new owner of the Washington Post. First, I was offered a $29/year online subscription. I didn’t bite. A couple days later, I accepted the $19/year online sub. Amazon knows marketing. 
• Meanwhile, New York Times embarrassed itself by publishing a catty profile of Washington Post’s new publisher, Frederick J. Ryan Jr. It went on forever even though Ryan didn’t talk to the reporter about anything, including his lack of experience in the news business. That didn’t stop the reporter from telling us about Ryan’s clothing style, juggling black tie invitations, cultural involvement, etc. However, the absence of substance freed the reporter to impress us with her knowledge of chic watering holes while owner Jeff Bezos “would most likely not know the difference between . . . Minibar and the Monocle.” I guess that’s a not-so-subtle put down of Seattle-based Bezos by the Post’s archrival in New York. Maybe the Times is still embarrassed by Post suburban reporters who scooped it on the Watergate break-in. It’s what I’ll call Gotham Alzheimer’s; they can forget anything but a grudge.  

 CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com

This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2014.