RW Boston Herald DEMANDED broad powers for investigation into leaks last summer.

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Last edited Wed May 15, 2013, 06:44 PM - Edit history (1)

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/editorials/2012/06/time_plug_leaks

Time to plug the leaks

Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Boston Herald editorial staff

The director of national intelligence has decided basically to lock the barn after a host of national security leaks, but it’s just not enough for some Republican senators — and they are oh so right.

Yesterday Sen. John McCain was joined by a number of his colleagues in calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate recent leaks of highly sensitive information such as the use of a computer virus to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and the president’s role in ordering drone strikes on certain terrorist targets.
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“The numerous national security leaks reportedly originating out of the executive branch in recent months have been stunning,” said a letter to Holder, signed by more than 30 GOP senators. “If there were ever a case requiring an outside special counsel with bipartisan acceptance and widespread public trust, this is it.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced Monday that investigators from any intelligence agency will have the authority to administer lie detector tests to suspected leakers who would be subject to firing or reprimand even if the disclosure did not rise to the level of criminal conduct. A new inspector general will be given broader powers to conduct such investigations. All of which is perfectly fine and long overdue.
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Predictably - they are now pretending they are outraged over the investigation.

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1. Fast forward to today's Boston Herald editorial. Pure hypocrisy.

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/editorials/2013/05/editorial_justice_targets_press

Editorial: Justice targets press


Wednesday, May 15, 2013
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Monday the Associated Press broke the story of what its own chief executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” in the cooperative’s news gathering operation by the Justice Department.

Justice secretly seized telephone records of calls from 20 separate phone lines used by AP reporters and editors during April and May of 2012. Those lines included the main number for its reporters in the press gallery of the U.S. House — something that might give members of Congress pause. The lines — including those in AP offices in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn. — are used by some 100 reporters and editors.

After the seizure was disclosed last Friday, AP President Gary Pruitt lodged an official protest with Attorney General Eric Holder and demanded the return of the records and the destruction of all copies. He wrote that the intrusion could potentially reveal confidential sources and “disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The phone records search is likely an effort by an increasingly paranoid Obama administration to track down the leak behind a May 7, 2012, AP story on a foiled al-Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on a U.S.-bound airplane. The story included some details about the CIA’s operation in Yemen and the nature of the explosive device that was to be used. Holder insisted yesterday the leak that formed the basis of the AP story “was a very serious leak, a very grave leak” that “put the American people at risk.”
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Now in post-election revenge mode, Justice is pulling out all the stops to find the leaker and trampling all over the First Amendment in its effort to do just that.



Hypocrisy - It's the Republican Way.