Keeping The War On The Media Secret

On Friday, Ryan Lizza posted an article in “The New Yorker” entitled,  “How Prosecutors Fought to Keep Rosen’s Warrant Secret.” In order to keep the warrant secret, they had to call Rosen a co-conspirator to the crime of espionage.

Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department adviser who allegedly leaked classified information to Rosen, wrote “some investigations are continued for many years because, while the evidence is not yet sufficient to bring charges, it is sufficient to have identified criminal subjects and/or criminal activity serious enough to justify continuation of the investigation.”

I am not a lawyer, but let me see if I understand this. There is not enough evidence to bring charges, so we will keep snooping through Rosen’s e-mail until we find something we can nail him with. With any luck at all, we might find an affair as we did with General Petraeus, and we can use that against him to get him under our control.

The article reports:

The new documents show that two judges separately declared that the Justice Department was required to notify Rosen of the search warrant, even if the notification came after a delay. Otherwise: “The subscriber therefore will never know, by being provided a copy of the warrant, for example, that the government secured a warrant and searched the contents of her e-mail account,” Judge John M. Facciola wrote in an opinion rejecting the Obama Administration’s argument.

Machen appealed that decision, and in September, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, granted Machen’s request to overturn the order of the two judges.

Rosen was not indicted in the case. Kim was indicted for making unauthorized disclosures of national defense information and for making false statements to F.B.I. agents about his contacts with Rosen.

The article in the New Yorker includes pictures of all the relevant court documents. Please follow the link above to follow the events.

Attorney General Holder has been asked by President Obama to review the Justice Department’s policies concerning investigations of the media. That is really interesting since Attorney General Holder was the one who personally approved the warrant to search James Rosen’s email. Obviously, the investigation will prove that everyone in the administration was totally blameless.

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