Breaking: Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Post reporters' phone records

[soothsayer]

Link to tweet

?s=21


Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
@ProfCiara
👀

Devlin Barrett
@DevlinBarrett
Breaking: Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Post reporters’ phone records https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html?

[spanone]

1. That's what dictatorships do.

[gratuitous]

2. And after all the Post did to normalize the former guy's administration

That's the thanks you get.

[malaise]

3. THIS

Truth will out - the fascists were in charge

[Nevilledog]

4. Unsurprising, but fucked

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Which USAG: Sessions or Barr, or both?

[soothsayer]

6. Well so far I only see this

Link to tweet

?s=21



Mrs Olson Says
@mrsolsonsays
"It is rare for the Justice Department to use subpoenas to get records of reporters in leak investigations, and such moves must be approved by the attorney general...“This culture of leaking must stop,” Sessions said.

[Bev54]

9. It was under Sessions for 3 1/2 months.

I would love to see the application to the courts on this, if they even had one.

[blogslug]

8. Kind of both but the reason for the seizure is tied to Sessions

In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, the Justice Department wrote they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.” The letters listed work, home or cellphone numbers covering that three-and-a-half-month period.

and

It is rare for the Justice Department to use subpoenas to get records of reporters in leak investigations, and such moves must be approved by the attorney general. The letters do not say when Justice Department leadership approved the decision to seek the reporters’ records, but a department spokesman said it happened in 2020, during the Trump administration. William P. Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general for nearly all of that year, before departing Dec. 23, declined to comment.

also

The letter does not state the purpose of the phone records seizure, but toward the end of the time period mentioned in the letters, those reporters wrote a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had discussed the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Justice Department officials would not say if that reporting was the reason for the search of journalists’ phone records. Sessions subsequently became President Donald Trump’s first attorney general and was at the Justice Department when the article appeared.

[Midnight Writer]

7. Oh, my! Hannity and his FOX cohorts will be frothing at the mouth at this Deep State invasion.

They get riled up over stuff like "unmasking" and government surveillance of traitors and 1st Amendment protections.