On ABC News’ blog “The Blotter” this morning, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported that a “senior federal law enforcement official” had passed word to them that “the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.”
What’s more, “other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.”
It’s not exactly surprising that in a program as legally dubious as warrantless telephone surveillance, some NSA or other agency snoop would come up with the bright idea of checking out both the phone records of their own employees and those of journalists to ferret out those who leaked information about the program to the press.
What is somewhat surprising is that everyone is so shocked about this latest revelation.
As CJR Daily has been reporting since January, the latest twist has been hinted at before — and downright alleged in two lawsuits against the Bush administration — but memories have proved exceedingly short.
Back in January, we noted a strange exchange between NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell and New York Times reporter and author of the book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration James Risen. (Risen, of course, is also the guy who, with Eric Lichtblau, broke the domestic spying story in the Times in December 2005.)
Mitchell seemed to have some inside dirt that she wanted Risen to confirm, without spelling it out herself. In talking about the government’s warrantless wiretapping program, she asked:
Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the questions we’ll have to look into [in] the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don’t know the answer to that.
Mitchell: You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
Risen: No, no I hadn’t heard that.
About two weeks after this exchange, we also noticed a piece in the Times about a group of journalists, defense lawyers, academics, political activists and others who filed two lawsuits against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program alleging that they had suspicions that they had been targeted under the program.
No lesser lights than Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq and noted journalist Christopher Hitchens were named as plaintiffs in the cases. Since January however, we’ve haven’t heard a peep about the cases, or about Mitchell’s question to Risen about Amanpour.
Maybe it’s time for reporters to start looking at stories that they have had on the back burner for four months. Before today, we had only that odd question dropped by Andrea Mitchell about a CNN journalist being eavesdropped upon, and two lawsuits that seemingly provided no evidence of the plaintiffs’ suspicions.
But now we have a source out-and-out telling two reporters that their communications are being tracked.
Will this latest revelation fall down the same black hole as the previous two? Or have the steady stream of revelations about the Bush administration’s surveillance activities finally turned the political balance enough to allow stories like this to get the hearing they deserve?
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.