Where Obama is dangerously wrong about journalism

Don’t miss this excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald, which ran recently in The Guardian. In it, Greenwald — a lawyer, journalist, and prize-winning author — carefully builds a case about what the Obama administration is doing. In short, he argues that the DoJ (with Obama’s certain knowledge) is taking steps to make it a crime to do many of the activities that constitute investigative journalism. The focus is the case involving Fox News’ James Rosen, but most of these thoughts apply to many other cases as well.

This is something that all journalists, all political progressives, and all Obama supporters need to grasp. The president is wrong on this, and his people are out of control.

The take-away:

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.”