Wonkette: Billy Barr Has Found The Wire Tappers, And They Were Him

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.wonkette.com/billy-barr-has-found-the-wire-tappers-and-they-were-him


In the latest revelation of an agency gone totally off the rails during the last year of Trump's disastrous presidency, the Justice Department just copped to secretly obtaining phone and email records for CNN reporter Barbara Starr. Remember when Trump spent years whining that Obama tapped his wires? Yeah, it's always, always, always projection with these people.

CNN reported last night that it received a letter from the DOJ on May 13 disclosing that the government sought and obtained a warrant for the veteran military reporter's phone and email logs for June and July of 2017. At some unspecified point during 2020, the government says it accessed "non content material," that is records of whom she spoke and corresponded with and when, but not the communications themselves. In light of the Trump administration's obsession with catching leakers and its admission that she was not the target of the investigation, we can safely read this as an effort to discover the identity of a government source for Starr's reporting. During the period in question, Starr published stories on North Korea, Syria, and Afghanistan.

File this one under "legal but highly irregular." (Before Bill Barr, President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder also went after national security leaks, as well as the reporters they were in contact with.) Clearly there are major First Amendment implications here, which is why the DOJ Attorney's Manual characterizes media warrants as "extraordinary measures, not standard investigatory practices," requiring sign-off by the attorney general himself and eventual disclosure to the affected journalists. And yet this is the fourth reporter this month to receive such a letter.

On May 3, Washington Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller and former Post reporter Adam Entous were informed that the government had intercepted their communications records between April and July of 2017, a period when they were reporting on then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions's communications with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. As with Starr, those searches took place sometime during 2020, presumably under the tenure of Bill Barr. (Barr resigned December 15, but the procedure for obtaining these warrants is supposed to take 30 days, so it's highly unlikely that his successor, acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, made it happen in the last two weeks of the year.)

*snip*

[sop]

1. Didn't Trump say Obama should be jailed for (non-existent) wiretapping?