RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Saturday, I received an email from Stephen Fee, the Communications Director for PEN America, alerting me to a virtual gala celebration on December 8 to honor Barack Obama with its 2020 Voice of Influence Award.

Among other topics, Obama will share with the PEN audience how “disinformation — and media outlets willing to spread it — are an immediate threat to democracy.” PEN’s mission, so they tell us, is “to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”

Is this a hoax? Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than he deserves this award. A report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in October 2013 showed that only in Bizarro World would Obama merit such an honor.

In the way of background, a group of foreign journalists founded the CPJ in 1981 to protect their colleagues around the world from harassment by authoritarian governments. The CPJ is not exactly part of the much-bruited “right-wing noise machine.” Au contraire!

Over the years the CPJ board of directors has included any number of liberal luminaries, among them Christiane Amanpour, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Clarence Page, and even serious leftists like Victor Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation. The principal author of the report was Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post. In the opening paragraph of the report, Downie sliced right to the heart of the issue:

In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.

The chill from the White House took the media by surprise. Upon signing the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Law in May 2010, for instance, Obama felt free to denounce “those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.” Although true on its face, the remarks inched into the magical land of “lie” when one understood that Obama was excluding himself from the “those” cited above.

At the time, few in the media noted any irony deeper than the fact that Obama took no questions after the signing and had not staged a formal press conference in nearly a year. The National Press Club, for instance, headlined its summary of the event with the chirpy “Club Hails Signing of Press Freedom Law.”

America’s reporters and editors were not yet aware, or at least not yet willing to admit, that Obama as president represented the single greatest threat to press freedom in their professional lives. True to his reputation as messiah, Obama would soon make even the willfully blind see.

In May 2013, nearly three years to the day after Obama signed the Freedom of Press Law, the illusion of an unfettered press disappeared like a magician’s bunny. It was in this month that the Associated Press learned Obama’s Justice Department had quietly seized all of the relevant records for twenty AP telephone lines a year earlier. These included the personal and professional lines of several reporters.

The seizure had to do with AP reporting on a covert CIA operation in Yemen. Although only five reporters were involved in that story, more than one hundred reporters used the lines and switchboards whose records were seized. AP president Gary Pruitt wrote Attorney General Eric Holder that the “government has no conceivable right to know” the content of those records. On Face the Nation, Pruitt boldly assessed White House strategy, “I know what the message being sent is: If you talk to the press, we’re going after you.”

A coalition of some fifty news gathering organizations promptly came to the AP’s defense. In a barely polite letter to Holder, the coalition accused him of ignoring the Department of Justice’s decades-old guidelines governing subpoenas of journalists and news organizations.

The authors of the letter reminded Holder, “The approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public’s interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.” The DoJ did none of the above. Its attorneys went behind the AP’s back, failed to negotiate the scope of the subpoena with the AP, and refused to explain what threat to the integrity of the investigation made the subterfuge necessary.

An even more disturbing story broke a week later. It seemed that for the prior three years the DoJ had been secretly dipping into the personal and professional communications of Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen.

The case involved Rosen’s interactions with a State Department contractor monitoring North Korea’s nuclear program. What troubled the media community most about the DoJ response was the use of search warrants to investigate a reporter and the threat to prosecute him under the terms of Espionage Act as an “as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”

“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”

That is exactly the road Obama moseyed on down. Like England’s Henry II, who reportedly said of Thomas Becket, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest,” Obama seems to have led by way of suggestion. His henchmen and women did the dirty work.

They sent Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to prison for making a video. They had James O’Keefe and David Daleiden arrested for undercover reporting. They cyber-harassed reporter Sharyl Attkisson, and they punished whistleblowers, literally left and right. Before handing Obama his award, Stephen, you might want to talk to Edward Snowden.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available. See also www.cashill.com.

Image: PEN America