Tag Archives: Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

A Short Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by

The mainstream media has its panties in a wad for two reasons today. They are totally upset about President Trump’s characterizing them as enemies of the people. They may not be enemies of the people, but they are definitely enemies of fair reporting. In response, many newspapers across the country have organized a coordinated attack on President Trump on their editorial pages today. How does that in any way help their case? It seems to me that their actions are a perfect illustration of the fact that they have lost their objectivity and traded it for political activism. That’s fine–just don’t claim to be impartial while you are being a political activist.

The second horrendous recent action the media has gone ballistic about is the revoking of the security clearance of John Brennan. Why would he still have a security clearance? I seriously doubt that anyone in the White House would be sincerely interested in his advice on foreign affairs.

I would like to share a bit of history about both of these crises of the day.

First of all, the press is convinced that President Trump has declared war on the press. Well, let’s take a minute to remember what war on the press looks like. On May 21, 2013, The Guardian (not one of my usual sources!) posted an article with the following headline, “James Rosen: Fox News reporter targeted as ‘co- conspirator’ in spying case.” The case had to do with a State Department leak.

The article reports:

The FBI sought and obtained a warrant to seize all of Rosen’s correspondence with Kim (State Department security adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim), and an additional two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal email, the Post reported. The bureau also obtained Rosen’s phone records and used security badge records to track his movements to and from the State Department.

…Rosen has not been charged with a crime in the case. Kim was indicted in August 2010 on charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, one of a batch of six cases in which the Obama administration began to use the first world war-era spying law to prosecute suspected government whistleblowers.

…Instead of relying on the threat of a contempt charge to get journalists to divulge their sources, the Obama administration has used warrantless wiretapping and dragnet records seizures to identify who is talking to whom.

Last week it emerged that the Department of Justice had seized phone records for more than 20 lines used by the Associated Press, in possible violation of regulations governing such seizures. There have been no reports of the government accusing journalists of criminal activity in that case.

That’s what a war on the press looks like.

Now to John Brennan. On March 21, 2018, The American Thinker posted an article with the following headline, “John Brennan: Deep State Political Hack.”

The article includes the following:

Brennan was asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers “to thwart an investigation by the committee into” the agency’s past interrogation techniques.  The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.” Brennan answered:

As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth.  I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s – that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. …

And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

…CIA Director John O. Brennan has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after an agency investigation determined that its employees improperly searched computers used by committee staff to review classified files on interrogations of prisoners. …

A statement released by the CIA on Tuesday acknowledged that agency employees had searched areas of that computer network that were supposed to be accessible only to committee investigators.  Agency employees were attempting to discover how congressional aides had obtained a secret CIA internal report on the interrogation program.

John Brennan should have been fired by the Obama Administration for spying on Congress, but since he was an ally of the deep state, he was not.

Now you know the rest of the story!

Keeping The War On The Media Secret

Posted on by

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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

The Consequences Of Reporting The News–Not The Spin

Posted on by

Breitbart.com is reporting today that the Obama Administration took actions to intimidate the press long before they got to the Associated Press.

The article reports:

Rosen (James Rosen of Fox News) wrote on his blog that U.S. intelligence officials felt that North Korea would respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. That information was apparently given him by Kim (Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department arms expert).

Even though it has not been proven to this day that it’s illegal for a reporter to solicit information, because of the First Amendment’s protection of the press, the Obama Administration went to work. The Justice Department not only grabbed Rosen’s telephone records, they used security badge access records to track the Rosen’s visits to the State Department, traced the timing of his calls with Kim, and obtained a search warrant for Rosen’s e-mails.

First of all, James Rosen is a good reporter–he has been doing this for a while. The statement that North Korea would respond to sanctions with more nuclear tests was not earthshaking. Second of all, the Justice Department’s investigation is clearly overreach.

The article concludes:

First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin said, “Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public. That’s a very dangerous road to go down.” Attorney Abbe Lowell, who is defending Kim, asserted,  “The latest events show an expansion of this law enforcement technique. Individual reporters or small time periods have turned into 20 [telephone] lines and months of records with no obvious attempt to be targeted or narrow.”

FBI agent Reginald Reyes wrote in an affidavit that Rosen had broken the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” But that statement may well conflict with First Amendment rights.

I understand that most of the mainstream media is philosophically aligned with President Obama, but keeping that is mind, there are two aspects of this story that I find interesting. First of all, do members of the press care when one of their own is subject to extreme scrutiny by the Justice Department? Second, is it easier to go along with the Obama Administration’s taking points than to take a chance on being investigated for reporting the truth?

The story of the investigation of James Rosen along with the excessive investigation of Associated Press reporters should give all Americans reason to question everything they read from the mainstream media. We are reaching a point where reporters will be afraid to report the truth for fear of retribution.

Enhanced by Zemanta