WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – The Associated Press said yesterday the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.
AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency’s website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the news agency and its reporters.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt said in the letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.
An AP story on the records seizure said the government would not say why it sought them.
But it noted that U.S. officials have previously said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane headed for the United States.
Five reporters and an editor involved in that story were among those whose phone numbers were obtained by the government, the AP said.
The disclosure threatened to set off a confrontation between free press advocates and the Obama administration, which has aggressively pursued national security leaks.
“It’s alarming given the scale of it,” said David Schulz, an attorney with Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz who is representing the AP. “This is a massive intrusion into the news gathering operation of one of the largest news organizations in the U.S. People should be concerned.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, which notified the AP of the seizure, issued a statement on Monday saying it was “careful and deliberative” when dealing with issues around freedom of the press.
“We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,” the office said.
A Justice Department spokesman referred inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The White House was not involved in the decision to seize the AP records, Press Secretary Jay Carney said.
“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP,” Carney said. “We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations, as those matters are handled independently by the Justice Department.”
