by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
President Barack Obama’s second term in office is off to a bad start. You might say “disastrous start.” While he and his Veep have been expending so much political capital trying to push a package of anti-gun proposals, most of which will do absolutely nothing to prevent future gunrelated violence—plus immigration reform—big cracks are opening up all over the more secure White House walls.
Forget about the Benghazi cover-up issue for the moment. The latest storm clouds are almost Nixonian. In fact, at least one reporter, Carl Bernstein of Washington Post and Watergate fame, has actually used that term.
Bernstein went even further and called the scandal involving the Department of Justice securing telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors a “nuclear event.” It certainly is “nuclear” for a president who has enjoyed such warm relations with most of the establishment news media.
But what makes this political story even worse is that news of the DoJ’s surveillance of reporters’ records, phone interviews and source contacts comes right on the heels of alarming revelations that the Internal Revenue Service was giving special scrutiny to the structure, finances and donors of conservative nonprofits that might be classified as political opponents of the president and his left-wing cronies during the 2010 election cycle—and afterwards.
Cleta Mitchell, one of Washington’s most respected elections attorneys, told Newsmax.com she has tangible proof that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were fully aware of the agency’s campaign to target conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, despite their denials.
And she thinks the president knew about the practice, too. If proven, she said, it could be an impeachable offense. And she’s not the only one raising the specter of impeachment.
Mitchell, in an interview with Newsmax TV on May 14, said she was told by a Cincinnati IRS agent that applications by two of her conservative clients were being processed by—and would ultimately be approved or denied in—Washington.
She said she also is aware of nearly 100 other conservative groups that were being targeted by the IRS in Washington.
Now comes news that the FBI will be investigating the IRS’ hanky-panky over conservative not-for-profit organizations.
Bear in mind, the FBI is part of the Justice Department under the thumb of Attorney General Eric Holder.
And the Justice Department includes the same guys and gals still dodging questions about the Fast and Furious fiasco, not to mention that the same FBI is improperly or illegally digging into privileged media sources.
But the media will end up focusing on the story that affects them the most and threatens to degrade the First Amendment: the Justice Department’s intrusion into the workings of the news media.
For all of his first term and two presidential election campaigns the media has treated the Obama gang with kid gloves. It’s been one long honeymoon for a leftist media and a leftist press.
But now the media ox is being gored.
“This is outrageous,” Bernstein said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It is totally inexcusable. This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning.
“The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters,” he said.
“This was an accident waiting to become a nuclear event, and now it’s happened.” The Associated Press reported late on the afternoon of May 13 that the “Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.” The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggest they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the CIA’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner, The New York Times reported.
The development represents the latest collision of news organizations and federal investigators over government efforts to prevent the disclosure of national security information, and it comes against a backdrop of an aggressive policy by the Obama administration to rein in leaks, according to The Times.
Under President Barack Obama, six current and former government officials have been indicted in leak related cases, twice the number brought under all previous administrations combined.
“The numerical thing doesn’t matter,” said Bernstein. “What matters is, this is a matter of policy. It is known to the president of the United States that this is the policy. To say that there was no knowledge, in quotes, specifically about this in the White House is nonsense.” That the Justice Department sought records of phone calls made over congressional phone lines could also raise a separation of powers issue between the administration and Congress.
The White House is in damage control mode, but so far it hasn’t offered much information.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, himself once a journalist, has avoided answering hard questions and has suggested that he can’t comment about ongoing “investigations.” Of course that is an old dodge. Hard questions deserve straight answers, but this White House is dodging the hard questions in ways that can only be characterized as evasive.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason,” House Speaker John Boehner spokesman Michael Steel told Newsmax.
“If the Obama administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation.” Congress was not told conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted by the IRS, even after acting agency Chief Steven Miller had been briefed on the matter. Apparently Congress was not told that the administration’s efforts to deal with terrorism included secretly probing reporters’ notebooks and phone records.
This is the same media that gave little credence or coverage to the Fast and Furious cover-up by the Obama administration, even as Congress tried to get information and was stonewalled to the point of suing the attorney general. This is the same media that has tried to blame the Republicans for continuing to probe the Benghazi incident.
Now it will be fascinating to see if the major news outlets will deal in the same way with the improper IRS handling of suspected political opponents of this president and the alleged link of journalists to the nation’s concerns about security breaches that might threaten the US.
The previously Obama-friendly news media has been handed a monumental challenge to their code of professional ethics. Will they do their job, or will they flub the ball again on a major political and constitutional crisis? Stay tuned!
