By Andrew P. Napolitano
The president's men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America.
A Florida man, who was fatally shot Wednesday by an FBI agent after he reportedly attacked the agent with a knife during questioning about the Boston Marathon bombing, implicated himself and bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 Massachusetts triple murder, law enforcement authorities said.
The FBI says a 37-year-old man has been arrested following last week's discovery in Washington state of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin.
An FBI agent shot and killed an Orlando, Fla., man with possible ties to the April 15 Boston bombing.
A civil liberties group filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of an ex-Marine who was detained in a psychiatric facility after posting anti-government messages on Facebook, using the case to criticize a program that looks for veterans who may have become extremists.
U.S. officials say they have identified five men they believe might be behind the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
Across the table at one of Washington's classic power restaurants, my source sat smiling. We hadn't seen each other for more than six years. After the usual opening small talk and pleasantries, I posed the question I had come to dinner to ask.
Two FBI agents were killed while taking part in a training exercise near Virginia Beach, the bureau said in a statement.
Maybe most surprising in the Justice Department's subpoenas of phone records from The Associated Press was how wide the Obama administration cast its net: 20 phone lines, used by up to 100 reporters.
A Texas group dedicated to combatting voter fraud applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and has suffered three years of delays, been through four different IRS agents, undergone six FBI inquiries and submitted thousands of pages of documentation — and it still hasn't been approved.
Across the table at one of Washington’s classic power restaurants, my source sat smiling. We hadn’t seen each other for more than six years. After the usual opening small talk and pleasantries, I had just posed the question I had come to dinner to ask.“I’m curious. Why did you go cold on me all these years?” I inquired.“You were too hot,” the source shot back wryly, playing off my own words. “Honestly, we were concerned that after your phone records and mail was seized that you were still being monitored.”The source paused.“It’s too bad. There were a lot of great stories I wanted to give you.”That conversation from late 2007 still resonates in my memory, a vivid reminder of what can happen when the government exercises its awesome powers to try to secretly unmask reporters’ confidential sources.More than a decade before the Justice Department secretly collected the phone records of four of my former colleagues at The Associated Press, I was one of the first reporters to have both his home phone records and personal mail gathered by the Justice Department and FBI. It was a futile effort to find the sources of stories I had written.In the summer of 2001, the Bush Justice Department authorized a subpoena for my home phone records in an effort to locate confidential sources who had helped me put together a series of stories about what prosecutors knew about possible wrongdoing between then-Sen. Robert Torricelli and a major political donor before the case was dismissed.At the time, I was the AP’s lead investigative reporter and an assistant chief of bureau in its Washington bureau. The U.S. attorney manual’s rules required the Justice Department to notify AP in advance of taking a reporter’s phone records and to negotiate a possible solution.That did not happen. The Justice Department decided instead to subpoena and review my records and then notify me afterwards. I got the notification in the mail in late August 2001, months after prosecutors already had gone through my home phone records.The news media was outraged by the intrusion and for days after the revelation, there was a campaign by the media to demand answers and an end to such tactics, which fly in the face of the press freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment.But the story quickly faded on Sept. 11, 2001, when the country's attention was riveted to the arrival of large-scale international terrorism on U.S. shores. Gone was the momentum to pressure the government to answer some important questions about its assault on the First Amendment.I went back to reporting immediately, trying to tell the stories of what the government knew about threats of possible terror attacks in the days and weeks before 9/11. I managed to break some big stories, the infamous Phoenix memo warning of Arab pilots training at U.S. flight schools among them.But I noticed a marked difference in the way my long-time sources treated me. Most refused to talk on the phone for any length of time, and they almost never emailed me anymore.Anything sensitive had to be done by meeting in person. One source went as far as to require me to sit on a bench in a city park, where I could retrieve leaked documents hidden inside a folded newspaper. It was painfully obvious that the government’s intrusion had affected my ability to report hidden truths to the American people.
Authorities in hazardous-materials suits searched a downtown Spokane apartment Saturday, investigating the recent discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin.
News organizations are convinced that the Obama administration trampled on freedom of the press when the Justice Department seized Associated Press phone records in pursuit of a government source who leaked details of a thwarted terrorist plot last year.
If you're a president under fire, it's convenient to fire someone who's about to leave anyway. The president on Wednesday threw acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller under the hot dog wagon, or whatever convenient cliche was waiting at the curb.
President Obama's election was a hopeful moment for civil rights advocates who thought he would usher in a golden era of government openness and respect for civil liberties, but some of the president's most enthusiastic supporters have expressed the harshest condemnation this week as revelations of multiple controversies involving intrusive government overreach have exploded onto the national stage.
