Eric Holder: Sure, I’m Cool With Snooping Around in James Rosen’s E-Mails

Remember how Attorney General Eric Holder recused himself from the decision to seize the phone records of more than 20 office, home and cell phone lines of Associated Press reporters? (Holder never wrote down his formal recusal, of course, so we have to take his word for it.) The recusal was because the Attorney General was conceivably a suspect of leaking the classified information and was at one point interviewed by the FBI.

His recusal also seemed to suggest he realized the Justice Department looking through reporters’ phone records represented a dramatic expansion of government investigation into how reporters do their work, and that maybe some political survival instinct wanted to keep that controversial move a degree separated from him.

Thursday we learned that Holder doesn’t really have any objection to the government looking around in a reporter’s phone records or e-mails.

Michael Isikoff: “Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a 'possible co-conspirator' in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday."

Lest you think this controversy just represents privileged members of the national news media thinking of themselves as special, a quick refresher: Of course it is often wrong to leak classified information. (I say “often” because our government considers a lot of information “classified,” and one way government officials can keep embarrassing information away from a public that has a right to know is to declare it classified.) But even going back to the Pentagon Papers, the crime was committed by the leaker, not by the reporter who received the information and published it. Judges have put injunctions on publishing information, but there has never been an implication that a reporter commits a crime by publishing classified information.

Until now, with Rosen. And while the DOJ hasn’t pursued charges yet, by naming James Rosen a co-conspirator in their affidavit, Eric Holder and company are leaving the door open to charge Rosen with conspiracy, a federal crime with a penalty of up to five years in jail and $250,000 fine. This is why it’s a big deal -- even if Rosen never faces charges, the door has now been opened for some future prosecutor to charge reporters with a fairly serious crime, just for reporting information to the public. This is why most journalists you know are freaking out.

Kristina Ribali: “Will Holder punish Holder with administrative leave?”

John Stanton, the DC bureau chief of BuzzFeed: “So Eric Holder, who signed off on spying on media outfits, is going to head up the Obama administration's review of its media spying rules.”

Earlier this week I completed an exhaustive review of open-source U.S. and foreign media reports going back to 2011, and was able to corroborate some elements of the diplomats' version of events, and contradict others.

#*# Some Libyan rebel leaders, including at least one who had spent time in a training camp in Afghanistan and who was in that country in September 2001, specifically asked Western countries to send Stinger missiles.

#*# Qaddafi’s intelligence services believed that the rebels were having the missiles smuggled in over the country’s southern border — but they believed the French were supplying the missiles.

#*# There is no evidence that the U.S. supplied the weapons, but it appears they gave their blessing to a secret Qatari effort to ship arms across Libya’s southern border in violation of a United Nations arms embargo.

#*# Anti-Qaddafi forces also obtained a significant number of anti-aircraft missiles from the regime’s bunkers early in the conflict.

#*# Enough Stinger missiles disappeared from regime stockpiles during the civil war to become a high priority and serious worry for the administration.

The U.S. is now covertly monitoring, and perhaps assisting, the transfer of arms from Libyans to rebel forces in Syria through Turkey.

A Delayed Reaction to Obama Scandals? Or No Reaction at All?

Will the scandals hurt President Obama’s approval rating? National Journal’s Michael Catalini looks at polling history and suggests we may see a delayed reaction within a few months:

A CNN/ORC poll showed that 53 percent of Americans approve of the job he's doing. That is about where he stood in April, when the same poll found he had a 51 percent approval rating. A Gallup poll showed 49 percent approved of the job he's doing, and a Washington Post/ABC survey had his approval rating at 51 percent, nearly the same as his 50 percent rating in April#...#

The break-in at the Watergate occurred in June 1972, five months before Nixon rode to a landslide reelection, but the scandal did not damage his approval ratings until after two aides were convicted of conspiracy in January 1973. Between January and August, his approval rating dropped from 67 percent to 31 percent after the resignation of his top staffers, attorney general and deputy attorney general#...#

Ronald Reagan's approval rating dipped from 63 percent in October of 1986 to 47 percent in December 1986, a month after Reagan organized the special commission to investigate whether arms were traded for hostages as part of the Iran-Contra affair.

I’d note that I’m not sure we can or should compare the media environments of 1974 or 1986 to today. At first glance, you would point out that we’re no longer in an era where the Big Three evening newscasts and the Associated Press wire service dominate the news coverage. Newsweekies had much bigger influence; Newsweek isn’t even around today.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it took two months for Watergate or Iran-Contra to be “digested” by the electorate.

Now there are millions of outlets, ranging from 24-7 cable news channels to talk radio to a million sites and blogs on the Internet. This means that news events and developments are brought to the public’s attention faster, but those events also get overridden and overshadowed by new developments and other news quickly. (The Boston bombings were five weeks ago; doesn’t it feel like it was a long time ago?)

The news cycle moves so quickly, The Flash has trouble keeping up. The argument under the Faster-Feiler theory is that the public is getting better at processing the information quickly. But perhaps that assessment is mistaken. Perhaps the decline of the 1970s and 1980s-era dominant media institutions, and the explosion of other media, haven’t resulted in a uniformly better-informed public. We now seem to be in an era of at least three tiers of news consumption.

News junkies -- which probably includes you and me -- are aware of what Mickey Kaus called “undernews” -- stories that never quite break out of the blogs. John Edwards’ scandal was well-known to most in the political press, but a lot of mainstream media institutions averted their eyes for a long time from the evidence. (Working in the news-gathering profession does not necessarily expose one to undernews, as shown by the woman who didn’t understand why President Obama was joking about eating a dog in his 2012 White House Correspondent’s Dinner speech.)

Somewhere in the middle you’ve got the folks who follow the big headlines, but don’t search out alternative media to get this “undernews.” And then there’s the completely oblivious citizen, who follows no news at all, and ends up spectacularly uninformed, or ill-informed, about what’s going on in his country:

A new survey's findings show many of the people who say they haven't decided who to vote for in the race for president are either uninformed or uninterested.

A study by YouGov.com has found only 40 percent of undecided voters know that John Boehner is the Speaker of the House.

A whopping 31 percent don't know who Vice President Joe Biden is.

In one focus group, one undecided voter said he thought President Obama made a mistake not visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when in fact President George Bush was president at the time.

Good to know that every once in a while, the dolts end up preferring our guy, huh?

So the “undernews” crowd may use these recent scandals in deciding what they think of the president, but the other two groups may not be connecting these stories to the president yet.

When pollsters ask the “how closely are you following [X story]?” question, I find myself thinking of Jimmy Kimmel’s recurring feature when he gets people on the street to answer questions about news events that never occurred. (Admittedly, he’s asking people on Hollywood Boulevard.) His staff found people with strong views about who won the First Lady Debate between Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, people who claimed to have witnessed an asteroid that didn’t reach earth yet, and people giving their opinion on Obama’s decision to appoint Judge Judy to the Supreme Court. (All of those people are presumably eligible to vote.)

* The U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya, Gregory Hicks, says that he was told not to speak to a member of Congress about Benghazi without a State Department lawyer present, that he received a phone call from Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff disapproving of his discussion with Representative Jason Chaffetz, and that he was “effectively demoted” afterwards.

* The controversy over the editing of the “talking points” revolves around the steady deletion of factual information from the explanation to the American people, leading to the emphasis of a protest that the U.S. personnel on the ground did not report.

* In an effort to ferret out leaks, the Department of Justice secretly reviewed the phone records of at least 20 phone lines of Associated Press reporters -- their work, home, and cell-phone lines. The move is unprecedented and has journalists up in arms because it means that a journalist can no longer guarantee the confidentiality of any phone conversation with a source that wishes to not be publicly identified.

* The Department of Justice went before a judge and alleged that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a criminal “co-conspirator” in leaking classified information, in order to access his personal e-mail accounts. No reporter has ever been prosecuted as a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act; in all previous cases, it has been used to prosecute the leaker of classified information, not the recipient. The classified information in question was an analyst’s assessment that North Korea would respond to new U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test.

* In another bit of punishment for whistleblowers, the Department of Justice Inspector General determined that former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke leaked a document smearing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Dodson, an Operation Fast and Furious whistle-blower. The IG concluded that "his explanations for why he did not believe his actions were improper were not credible."

* Despite all these ruthless efforts to stop leaks elsewhere in government, the Cincinnati office of the IRS leaked unapproved applications for nine conservative groups to the media web site ProPublica. The IRS separately released confidential information about the National Organization for Marriage. The IRS asserted, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded, the releases were “inadvertent.” The problem with the “inadvertent” explanation is that the Human Rights Campaign said they were sent the private IRS filing from NOM via a “whistleblower.”

* The Environmental Protection Agency waived their fees for Freedom of Information Act requests from “green” or environmental groups while keeping them in place for conservative groups.

All of these actions involve an effort to control information.

Some parts of this administration focus on preventing information that is contrary to the administration’s agenda from getting out, or hindering its distribution, and making sure that the only information that goes out supports the perspective of the administration. Other parts leak confidential information designed to attack the reputations of those holding perspectives the administration opposes (NOM, the nine conservative groups) or other whistleblowers (ATF agent Dodson).

This administration prefers to keep the inconvenient parts of the story obscured in darkness.

The intriguing thing about Weiner's video announcing his mayoral candidacy is that if it weren't from Anthony Weiner, almost everyone would concur with his assessment of what ails the city: a cost of living that crushes the middle class, "regulations that nickel and dime small businesses to death," schools that can't provide a good education for every child, "the people who put everything they had into this city are getting priced right out of it." But voters -- and certainly the media -- may not hear any of that; they've got a mental picture in their heads that just won't go away.

It will be interesting if we see a similar dynamic as in Mark Sanford's recent successful comeback bid in South Carolina: Everyone outside of the locality knows the politician for his scandal and finds his return to office unthinkable, while those within the locality have known the politician since the beginning of his career -- and evaluate him on more than the scandal.

a close reading of recently released government e-mails that were sent during the editing process, and interviews with senior officials from several government agencies, reveal [then–CIA Director David] Petraeus’ early role and ambitions in going well beyond the [House Intelligence] Committee’s request, apparently to produce a set of talking points favorable to his image and agency.

The story certainly reads like a hit on Petraeus -- who, of course, did not respond to the Post's requests for comment.

A funny, widely overlooked point, though: If you look at the first version of the talking points offered by the CIA Office of Public Affairs, you will see that the summary never actually refers to a protest or demonstration outside the annex or diplomatic facility in Benghazi:

We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.

The “attacks” were inspired by the Cairo protests, and “evolved” into a direct assault. But what did the attacks "evolve" from? The noun “protest” is never used in reference to Benghazi, nor “demonstration.” There is a reference to a “crowd.”

By the time U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, she’s declaring that a “spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi.”

Benghazi: The Story the Obama Administration Would Prefer We Forgot About

Sorry, families of Benghazi victims. We know who killed your loved ones, but we just don’t have enough to prosecute yet:

The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn't enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.

The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya's post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country's cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

Hey, you know what else harmed fledgling relations with Libya? Susan Rice going on the Sunday shows and contradicting the other big guest on the shows that week, Libyan president Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf, who was telling anyone who would listen that weekend he had “no doubt” the attack was pre-planned by individuals from outside Libya. You’ll recall Gregory Hicks’s testimony that Rice’s contradiction of their president infuriated the Libyan government and impeded further cooperation on the investigation for more than two weeks.

Hey, President El-Magariaf, sorry about that.

Anyway#...#now Obama gets gun-shy on droning bad guys who kill Americans? Now?

The Heritage Foundation has a good Ben Howe-produced video that points out how Obama’s claim that “we have been very clear about, throughout, that immediately after this event happened, we were not clear who exactly had it carried out, how had been, how it had occurred, and what the motivations were” just doesn’t match the facts at all.

For perspective, in Pakistan and Yemen alone, experts estimate that the U.S. launched about 450 drone strikes, killing 2,300 to 3,700 militants and hundreds of others, some determined to be civilians, others whose combatant status is unclear.

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt begins#...#

Hey, I’m Just the President, Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything Around Here.

Let me get this straight: To hear Jay Carney tell it, the president is pleased that no one in his senior staff told him that the IRS was targeting his political enemies?

Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday.

The acknowledgement is the White House’s latest disclosure in a piecemeal, sometimes confusing release of details concerning the extent to which White House officials knew of the IG’s findings that IRS officials engaged in the “inappropriate” targeting of conservative non-profits for heightened scrutiny. Previously, the White House said counsel Kathryn Ruemmler did not learn about the final results of the investigation until the week of April 22nd, and had not disclosed that McDonough and other aides had also been told about the investigation. On Monday, White House Spokesman Jay Carney said a member of Ruemmler’s staff learned of the probe the week of April 16; Ruemmler learned of the investigation on April 24th; and after that point she informed the chief of staff and other aides about the probe’s findings.

The White House has said President Obama did not learn of the IRS’s actions until he saw news reports on the matter earlier this month.

Carney’s spiel included the explanation, “No one in this building intervened in an ongoing independent investigation or did anything that could be seen as intervening.” But a desire to not interfere with the investigation doesn’t quite explain why no one thought that the president ought to be informed about a major scandal of the IRS targeting his political enemies.

Doesn’t it bother Obama to learn about these things from the press? Doesn’t he chew anybody out?

Gabe Malor: “I want to know the names of the folks who get to decide what Obama doesn't need to know. What are their credentials? Who elected them?”

We’ve seen the “senior administrative staff never mentions major, controversial problem to man in charge of the organization until it blows up on the front pages” playbook before. This is precisely the explanation that we were handed for “Fast and Furious” and how Eric Holder never learned about what was going on until Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry was murdered with a weapon from that program.

Time and again, information and warnings about the operation's enormous risks flow from Arizona to Washington#...#and suddenly, mysteriously, stop just short of Holder.

The inspector general's report concludes that they can find no evidence Holder knew about Fast and Furious until well after Terry's death, but#...#well, the circumstances of Holder being so out of the loop, so in the dark about a major operation certainly appear unusual, perhaps to the point of straining credulity. The report states:

"We found it troubling that a case of this magnitude and that affected Mexico so significantly was not directly briefed to the Attorney General. We would usually expect such information to come to the Attorney General through the Office of the Deputy Attorney General#...#[Holder] was not told in December 2010 about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of the shooting and Operation Fast and Furious. Both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were aware of this significant and troubling information by December 17, 2010, but did not believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding this development."

Not "sufficiently important"? Baffling. Maddening. Some might even say, "implausible"#...#

The report continues:

"We found it troubling that a case of this magnitude and that affected Mexico so significantly was not directly briefed to the Attorney General. We would usually expect such information to come to the Attorney General through the Office of the Deputy Attorney General#...#[Holder] was not told in December 2010 about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of the shooting and Operation Fast and Furious. Both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were aware of this significant and troubling information by December 17, 2010, but did not believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding this development."

Perhaps “Preserve the boss’s plausible deniability” is stitched on the throw pillows on the Oval Office couches.

Obama didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservatives until he read it in the papers. He didn’t know about “Fast and Furious” until he read it in the papers, too. He has “complete confidence” in Holder, and didn’t know about the decision to collect the phone records of reporters.  He didn’t know about the investigation into CIA director David Petraeus’s affair.  He told Letterman during the election he didn’t know what the national debt was. He didn’t know about the AIG bonuses in the TARP legislation. He said he didn’t know how bad the economic crisis was when he took office.

That “empty chair” metaphor from the Republican Convention was so out of line, huh?

I just picture a phone ringing here, going unanswered…

UPDATE: Sunshine State Sarah Rumpf looks at the rules of the District of Columbia Bar and concludes the White House Counsel's office likely violated ethics by not promptly informing the president of the IRS abuses.

Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year.

But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama’s political standing.

But buried in the Post's survey is a look at whether the American people feel the sequester is affecting them. They asked, "Have you personally felt any negative impact of these [Sequester] budget cuts, or not? Has it been a major effect or minor?"

The survey found 37 percent said they had felt its effects; 18 percent said major, and 19 percent said minor. The majority, 61 percent, said they felt no effects.

Two other numbers worth keeping an eye on: approval of how Hillary Clinton handled her Secretary of State duties is down from 68 percent in December to 62 percent today. The survey found 38 percent say the federal government is doing more to protect the rights of average Americans, while 54 percent think it's doing more to threaten those rights.