JAMES ROSEN: Nothing Trump is Doing Even Comes Close to Obama's Criminal Persecution of the Press

By S. Noble

For all the rage exhibited by the media over Donald Trump’s tweet calling the press the enemy, which they are, President Obama is the one who persecuted the press. Obama is the one who called for control over the flow of free information. He is the one who tells the media what to print. Obama threatened reporters. James Rosen himself was spied on by the Obama administration.

James Rosen told Jesse Waters on his Fox show last night that nothing the President has done approaches what Obama did to the press.

“Certainly nothing that the Trump administration has done with or to the news media approaches in seriousness and nature the conduct of the Obama Administration towards the press.

And especially Fox News and me, but not just Fox News and me. There was also an issue with the Associated Press and others.

I think that what we are seeing here in all these clashes with President Trump and the news media that you were playing those clips of is a mix of things.

On the one hand you have a simple institutional biological reflective response on the part of an organism, the news media beltway journalism crowd against someone who made it a chief campaign platform to call them out for their dishonesty, so they are pushing back.

Part of it is kinds of a shock to the system for the news media that things are being done differently at all than the way they have always been done here in the news media. What, you are giving questions to a town hall at a press conference? It’s never been done.”

The case against James Rosen endangered our First Amendment right to freedom of the press. It risked criminalizing journalism and was led by Barack Obama.

Rosen finds sources to report what is happening in the government. He did that in 2009 when he reported leaked information on North Korea.

The “classified” information was a nothing sandwich. Rosen was accused of using charm and guile to entice the leaker to reveal secret information to him. (It would have been hard to get the information if he wasn’t charming). That of course is a distraction and has nothing to do with the core problem.

The White House went after the leaker – a government adviser – and the reporter – Mr. Rosen – but did not limit themselves to the usual telephone records search to find out who was responsible for the leaks, they went for James Rosen’s personal emails.

They traced the reporter’s security badge access records to trace Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department. They checked the timing of calls with a security adviser (who leaked the information) and then obtained a search warrant for his personal e-mails. Google turned them over.

They monitored James Rosen’s parents’ phone records.

Fox News obtained the court documents related to the James Rosen inquiry and found that the spying including Fox phones at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department in an absurd overreach.

The documents show the DOJ gathered phone lines that link to Fox News executives.

The government adviser who leaked the information in this case was Stephen Jin-Woo Kim and the reporter, James Rosen, is chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. It’s exactly what happened in the AP case.

Normally, reporters are not named in these cases. The leakers are the only ones named and indicted. Rosen was not charged, but he was named.

National security was used as the reason for the prosecution and the naming. But a line was crossed in this case and it was the Obama administration that did it.

Read more at Independent Sentinel.