The press and blogosphere has been alive with been alive with scandal these past weeks, all pointing toward a serious problem for the Obama Administration. Starting with Benghazi, then the IRS scandal, then the subpoena of AP phone records and the subpoena of a Fox News journalists email in which the DOJ referred to the journalist as a co-conspirator or aider and abettor to the crime in which it was investigating, the alleged leak of classified information on North Korea by a State Department official.
While any one of these issues would be considered serious, it is only the escalating attack on journalists that really has any potential to be seriously harmful to the administration. However, you would not know this by following the news or listening to Republican leaders.
In a week that revealed serious infringement of First and Fourth Amendment by the same Administration that at its outset promised to be "the most transparent administration in history," the leaders of the President's opposition were screaming about "Benghazi" and believe it or not, whether or not the President should have held his own umbrella at a joint appearance with the Prime Minister of Turkey. Seriously.
Ever since President Obama took office, the Republican party has made its mission to obstruct, embarrass, and harass the President at every opportunity. They have done this generally by simply ignoring reality and creating a President who doesn't actually exist. This foreign born, Marxist, Socialist, Muslim, terrorist President I refer to as Fauxbama. Although attacking Fauxbama did gain the GOP the House of Representatives in 2010, it has generally failed to do any serious harm to the administration because the attacks are so far from reality that they allow the administration to discard any attack from the opposition, whether it be legitimate or not, as a tin-foil hat, black helicopter, conspiracy theory.
Because of their inability or unwillingness to make serious arguments against the Obama administration, the GOP has abdicated its responsibility to act as a check on the growing and disturbing expansion of executive power, begun under the previous administration, on which the Obama administration has embarked. This was seen in stark terms this past week.
When it was learned that DOJ seized two months worth of phone records of the AP and its journalists as part of a leak investigation supposedly concerning an article the AP had published about a failed Al Qaeda bomb plot against the United States, most civil libertarians hit the roof. For some time, based on the prosecutions of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, the prosecution of Army Private Bradley Manning, and the investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the civil liberties community had been warning about this administration's disregard for privacy and press freedom for some time. However, the mainstream press and both sides of the political aisle had more or less ignored the issue. Now, that one of the largest mainstream news organizations had been targeted in an investigation which appears from all indications to have overstepped even the DOJ's own policies regarding obtaining press records, it appeared that we now had a scandal which had some legitimacy to it.
This week, close on the heels of the AP subpoena, it was uncovered that the DOJ had obtained e-mails of a Fox News reporter who had gathered information from a State Department official on North Korea. In the subpoena, which was issued nearly three years ago, the reporter, James Rosen is referred to as a co-conspirator or aider and abettor of the subject of the investigation by soliciting the disclosure of classified material. In essence, the DOJ is saying that Rosen committed espionage by simply acting as a journalist. This kind of attack on the press is almost without precedent (the Nixon administration after failing to prosecute whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg or prevent the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, tried to prosecute the reporter who published the story, Neil Sheehan to no avail).
However, as has been par for the course for the GOP, instead of going after the Obama Administration for something that clearly appears to be an inexcusable and unwarranted expansion of executive power, the Republicans instead focused on their old standbyes, the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya in which the U.S. Ambassador to Libya was killed, and what appears to be a troubling, but minor scandal involving increased scrutiny given to Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status as 501(c)(4) organizations.
The problem with these is that there appears to be very little to either of these "scandals". There has been no incident that has been investigated more by the Republicans than the Benghazi attack. Yet, all that they seem to have come up with so far is that the talking points given to U.N. Secretary Susan Rice were incorrect and either intentionally or incompetently misleading, and that the President described the incident as an "act of terror" rather than a "terrorist attack."
There appeared late last week to be some momentum to this story after ABC News White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl reported that he had obtained White House e-mails that showed that the talking points were changed in order to protect the State Department. However, what appeared to be a major scoop and perhaps a "smoking gun" was quickly dashed when it was reported (embarrassingly by Jake Tapper at CNN, the reporter whom Karl replaced at ABC) that the e-mails in fact said nothing of the sort, a fact which was confirmed when the White House released the actual e-mails. Karl was forced to admit that in fact he had not seen the e-mails but a "source" had read him a summary of the e-mails, a summary which turned out in fact to be fabricated. Inexplicably, Karl is still standing by his story, but that is an issue for another post.
The IRS scandal has a little bit more legitimacy to it. It is certainly improper for any administrative agency to use political beliefs to target certain groups, and that appears to be, at least in part, what the IRS did to Tea Party groups. However, there is some legitimacy to doing this in this circumstance, based on both the proliferation of 501(c)(4) groups following the Supreme Court's
Citizens' United decision, as well as the quick expansion of Tea Party groups following the 2008 election. Inquiring whether or not these groups were legitimate non profits seems to be something we would want the IRS to do. Now, if only right wing political groups were targeted, or if these groups disproportionately had their applications denied on strictly partisan grounds, this is something that is very troubling indeed and needs to be investigated and prosecuted. However, there is no evidence that either of these things are the case now.
So, why has the GOP focused on these, rather than the AP scandal, and ongoing increasing scrutiny of journalists? There are probably a number of reasons. First among these is that it is quite possible that the GOP leadership agrees with Administration policy on these issues. In fact, this weekend, Senate Majority Leader
said so on Sunday's Meet the Press, while again focusing on the IRS and Benghazi issues. Second, is that the AP and Fox News scandals, and the ongoing war on whistleblowers and journalists is not a simple issue. It involves very complicated issues of national security, the classification of information, Constitutional protections, and the reasons for the Administration taking the position they have on prosecuting leaks with such zealousness.
However, the more that is brought out about both the AP and Fox News stories, the more it appears that this is a scandal which could end up doing serious damage to this Administration. For the most in depth investigations into the AP scandal I have seen, please read the work that has been done by Marcy Wheeler. You can find her very good Salon.com article
here, and can read her continuing investigations into the AP story at
www.emptywheel.net or follow her on Twitter @emptywheel. From reading her work, and other articles about the AP investigation, appears that there is more than simply a leak investigation going on here. At the very least, it appears that the administration may be trying to hide either internal leaks that were authorized and had much more serious implications for our security and the security of our agents than the AP story, or that there is a cover up of administration politicizing threats to the U.S. surrounding the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden's death, when in fact no such threats actually existed.
In any event, outside of the political implications of such a scandal, what the most serious implication of both the AP and Fox News scandals is that the Obama Administration is trying to curtail the last, most effective check on executive power that we have in a free society -- a free and unhindered press. They are doing this by freezing out any and all sources of information that do not comport with official administration views. With the Democrats showing repeated unwillingness to stand up to anything this President does, no matter how wrong or inconsistent with previously stated policies, and the Republicans unwillingness to seriously hold the administration responsible for its repeated misdeeds, the press is our only hope to uncover the truth and hold our government accountable.
If we fail to protect our press and hold the Obama Administration accountable for its attacks on press freedom and privacy, we will have nobody left to defend us at all.
