WASHINGTON, November 28: The Supreme Court refused on Monday to shield The New York Times and two of its reporters from a prosecutor’s probe into who leaked word of planned raids on two Muslim charities five years ago, clearing the the way for federal prosecutors to review the phone records of the two reporters for several weeks in the fall of 2001. The prosecutor, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, says the records will help point to the source of the leak.
NYT maintains it has a First Amendment right to protect the confidentiality of its sources. Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for the paper, said, “There has been no claim of wrongdoing against the Times reporters. The only thing at issue here is a leak investigation in which the government seeks to obtain information on who spoke to the journalists.’’
Two years ago, lawyers for the newspaper went before a federal judge in New York and won an order that barred the prosecutor from examining the phone records. But in August, the US appeals court in Manhattan reversed that order in a 2-1 decision. The prosecutor has a “compelling interest’’ in learning who tipped off the reporters to the planned raids, thereby “endangering federal agents’’ and permitting the “targets to spirit away incriminating information,’’ Judge Ralph Winter said in the appeals court.
“We see no danger to the free press in so holding,’’ he added. “Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes or searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential, or even common, to journalism.’’
The Supreme Court never has squarely ruled that the news media have a First Amendment right to protect their confidential sources.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/17497.html---------------------------
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=industryNews&storyID=2006-11-28T110043Z_01_N28194224_RTRIDST_0_INDUSTRY-TIMES-SOURCES-DC.XML&WTmodLoc=EntNewsIndustry_C1_%5BFeed%5D-1.....In a one-sentence order, the Supreme Court rejected a request from the Times to stay a lower court's decision while the paper attempted to persuade the justices to review the case, the paper reported.
The grand jury, in Chicago, is looking into who told the reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in December 2001 against two Islamic charities in Illinois and Texas, the paper said.
The disclosures to reporters, government lawyers wrote on Friday, may have amounted to obstruction of justice, it said.
Yesterday's order effectively allows the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, to begin reviewing the records, which he has already obtained from phone companies, as early as this week, the Times reported.
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