Risen’s 2008 subpoena expired with the term of the grand jury. Media watchers and intelligence officials presumed that the Merlin investigation would go the way of most fruitless searches. But after reviewing leftover leak cases from the Bush administration, the Obama Justice Department decided to revive this one. In April of this year, Risen received another subpoena to appear before the grand jury in Alexandria. [...] According to one former official, the government believes it has already identified a suspect, which could make Risen’s testimony not only unnecessary but also a violation of the department’s own guidelines on media subpoenas.Personally, I'm not convinced that the Obama administration is being notably more aggressive than Bush. I think the conclusion of the article is a reasonable explanation for what's going on:
To view the administration’s aggressive pursuit of leakers and journalists as an artifact of the current presidency, or as some kind of extension of Obama’s innate intolerance for airing private disagreements, is to miss the greater influence that career government officials have over which cases to bring, and whom to subpoena.So this is a bigger trend that goes beyond just one administration. But at the end of the day, Obama bears responsibility for what his Justice Department does ... and his Justice Department is going after reporters in a way they wouldn't have ten years ago.
“So much of the decision-making is made by the middle layers of the bureaucracy,” Feldstein says. “They function on autopilot. The career prosecutors don’t change from year to year. Their recommendations are probably the same whether Eric Holder is attorney general or Alberto Gonzales.”
The Justice Department is taking advantage of President Obama’s disdain for leaks by flexing a muscle that it’s been building for almost ten years as the tide has shifted from a protected press establishment toward a stronger prosecutorial force.
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This isn't really accurate. The article talks about the increased number of prosecutions of people who leak information to the press. But given how small the number of such prosecutions was in the first place, I'm not sure the increase is really signifigant.
The Obama administration may be taking a harder line against journalist (in the effort to get them to reveal sources who leaked classified information), but a subpeona is not a prosecution. And furthermore, it's not clear that the Obama administration is "increasingly" doing anything, just that they are more aggressive at pursuing leak investigations than some in journalism or academia hoped or expected them to be.
posted by Jahaza at 3:02 PM on August 12, 2010