Suddenly, the Obamedia is incensed by, yes, leaking.
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/08/what-upsets-the-obamedia-about-fast-furious-is-the-leaking/?singlepage=true
This is the same legacy press that was delighted by Justice Department and White House leaks when it came to driving Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales out of town; the same media currently ignoring a tsunami of leaks of classified national defense information by the Obama White House — leaks designed solely to make the president look good for campaign purposes. Yet, in order to change the subject from the Justice Department’s oversight of the lamebrain Fast and Furious investigation — in which arsenals of weapons were allowed to be transferred to violent Mexican drug cartels, and as a result of which a U.S. Border Patrol agent has been murdered — the Obama campaign’s media wing is now focused on whether Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has a “mole” inside DOJ who is giving him information that proves Attorney General Eric Holder & Co. have been misleading the House Judiciary Committee and the public.
The leaked information involves wiretap affidavits. Fast and Furious used electronic surveillance as an investigative tactic. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, this is bound to leave an inconvenient paper trail for DOJ. Federal wiretap law requires the attorney general or his designee (a high-ranking DOJ official) to approve wiretap applications before they can be submitted to a judge. One of the things the law requires the application to contain (and thus requires the Justice Department to approve) is an assessment of what investigative techniques other than wiretapping have been (or could be) used to obtain evidence. Consequently, the wiretap applications — which Holder refuses to release, despite Committee demands and subpoenas — must have described the fateful “gunwalking” tactic. Therefore, their public release would almost certainly show that top Justice Department officials knew about it — if not, then those officials were indefensibly reckless in approving the wiretap applications, which would also be scandalous.
“What did they know and when did they know it?” has been the media’s rally cry for 40 years. Leaking, moreover, is the press’s stock in trade. Never does the press get exercised over it, and always does the press defend the honor of “whistleblowers” … except when the leaking hurts Democrats or helps Republicans, in which case it becomes a hanging offense — think Valerie Plame, think Linda Tripp, etc. So, in darkly reporting that Rep. Issa has a DOJ “mole” helping him combat Holder’s stonewalling, The Hill dutifully found two “former prosecutors” who told the paper that, oh yes, the leaks of sealed wiretap information from DOJ to Congress could endanger hard won convictions by giving defense lawyers “justif[ication]” for “seeking a mistrial.”