Attkisson:“Chillingeffect”fromObamaadministrationonjournalists

Attkisson: “Chilling effect” from Obama administration on journalists

posted at 8:41 am on April 14, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Howard Kurtz interviewed recently-departed CBS News reporter, and asked her why she gave up on a 20-year career at one of the premier broadcast networks. Attkisson told Kurtz that political considerations were at play, but the bigger issue is the “chilling effect” of the Obama administration on journalists, but also “corporate interest” pressure as well, which don’t tend to balance themselves out but add together. Kurtz wondered aloud whether her growing reputation as a “conservative” journalist wasn’t an attempt to discredit Attkisson, and she agrees. When she went after the Bush administration, Attkisson noted, no one was calling her a “progressive” journalist — and her CBS bosses were delighted to run those stories (transcript via Newsbusters):

ATTKISSON: I didn’t run into that same kind of sentiment [at CBS] as I did in the Obama administration when I covered the Bush administration very aggressively, on its secrecy and lack of Freedom of Information responses, and its poor management of the Food and Drug Administration and the national laboratories, the Halliburton-Iraq questions of fraud. I mean, there was one thing after another. The bait-and-switch of TARP, the bank bailout program. All of those stories under Bush were met with a good reception. There were different managers as well, but no one accused me of being a mouthpiece for the liberals at that time.

Attkisson told Kurtz that the White House would pressure her to change or drop her reporting, and when that didn’t work, they worked her bosses instead. Kurtz asked how this differed from the “working the refs” actions that go on all the time in Washington, and Attkisson says that it went too far. “It’s just a lot of obfuscation, accusations, saying things are ‘phony scandals,’ ‘bogus,’ ‘not real,’ giving misinformation and false information. I mean, that’s provably true in some cases.”

Mediaite grabs another portion of the interview to capture Attkisson’s complaint about broadcast journalism in the age of Obama:

Now there’ve always been tensions, there have always been calls from the White House under any administration I assume, when they don’t like a particular story. But it is particularly aggressive under the Obama administration and I think it’s a campaign that’s very well organized, that’s designed to have sort of a chilling effect and to some degree has been somewhat successful in getting broadcast producers who don’t really want to deal with the headache of it — why put on these controversial stories that we’re going to have to fight people on, when we can fill the broadcast with other perfectly decent stories that don’t ruffle the same feathers?

If it’s just the “headache of it,” one would have expected that this would have also been true during the Bush administration. As Attkisson’s experience and our own shows, that’s just not the case. Perhaps the Obama administration exerts more pressure and plays Chicago sur le Potomac more than the Bush administration did — or perhaps the mandarins of journalism these days just see the Obama administration a lot more sympathetically.

By the way, Kurtz will have more from Attkisson next week, and NYU’s Jay Rosen will want to stay tuned:

Liberal bias? @HowardKurtz asked @SharylAttkisson about that. Unsolved mystery of who broke into her computer? Nope. http://t.co/zayBxK0A92

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 13, 2014

@jayrosen_nyu I did ask her about it. We are running that next week. There are time constraints with such a long interview

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) April 13, 2014

Jay RT’d Howard’s response, to his credit. And yes, that will be a very interesting topic as well.

Tags: Benghazi, CBS News, Howard Kurtz, media bias, Operation Fast and Furious, Sharyl Attkisson

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Attkisson:Iwascalledatroublemakerforpursuing

Attkisson: I was called a troublemaker for pursuing Obama administration scandals

posted at 9:21 am on April 11, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

It’s been a month since Sharyl Attkisson left CBS News, a departure which many assumed related to editorial interference with her reporting on stories that focused on Obama administration scandals. Attkisson appeared last night on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor and confirmed those assumptions. Attkisson tells Bill O’Reilly that CBS News labeled her a “troublemaker” for her insistence on sticking with stories such as the Fast & Furious scandal. CBS wanted her to drop the Fast & Furious story over “a lack of interest,” and Attkisson says that the “interest” issue was editorial rather than audience related.

Newsbusters has the full transcript:

ATTKISSON: It just came to be that, I don’t think on the viewer’s part, but on the people that decide what stories go into the broadcast and what there’s room for, they felt fairly early on that this story was over when I felt as though we had barely begun to scratch the surface. They didn’t ask me what was left to report, they just decided on their own that this story was –

O’REILLY: So they pulled the rug from you. And I worked at CBS News. I know how it goes. You can’t investigate a story unless you get a budget to do so, and approval of the higher ups, okay, you are going to do assignment O’Reilly or Attkisson. And this assignment will go to this show. That’s how the structure works. They didn’t want any part of it over there.

Okay. How about Benghazi, what did you find out about that?

ATTKISSON: Benghazi I was assigned to look into about three weeks after the attacks happened by management, and pursue that aggressively. And as I felt we were beginning to scratch beneath the surface on that scandal as well, which I think had many legitimate questions yet to be asked and answered, interest was largely lost in that story as well on the part of the people that are responsible for deciding what goes on the news.

O’REILLY: So did they tell you, look, we don’t want you to spend any more time on this? Was it that direct?

ATTKISSON: No. It’s more as though there is no time in the broadcast. They really, really liked the story but you start to hear from, you know, other routes that why don’t you just leave it alone, and you know, you are kind of a trouble maker because you are still pursuing it. It kind of goes from hot to cold in one day, sometimes. Where they are asking you to pursue something heavily and then it’s almost as if a light switch goes off and they look at you all of a sudden as if, why are you bringing us this story?

CBS News also lost interest in ObamaCare despite all of the security issues that would have made for a huge story had it taken place in the private sector:

ATTKISSON: I was asked by CBS to look into ObamaCare and it had a similar trajectory whereby we broke some interesting stories that I felt like we were uncovering some good information and making headway, but we and I feel like a lot of the media after several weeks of this kind of fell off the radar on the story to a large degree, on the critical looks that we were taking. It’s security issues, the lack of transparency, the lack of providing of figures and information that I think belonged in the public domain, belonged to us, that were being withheld. While being provided in some cases to corporate partners of the government, being withheld from us though.

O’REILLY: When you say security, you mean people’s health records and things like that and that they’re not secure?

ATTKISSON: Right. Just before Christmas came word that the top security official, the computer security person who still works there at HHS had refused to sign off and recommended, in fact, that this web site not go live because of all the security issues. And that was not considered a big enough story, I suppose, is the way to put it by those who decide what goes on the air. But I thought it was hugely important, because this is an insider, someone who works in the Obama administration who had made this assessment. And if you look at having had something like that occur with a private corporation that proceeded to go online with all of these alleged security risks, I think the government would be very upset by that if the tables were turned. But here was the United States government doing it.

And for some reason, the editors at CBS News found that … uninteresting. Those who wanted to cover it were troublemakers. Granted, this is only Attkisson’s side of the story, but their coverage on all of these scandals without Attkisson speaks for itself, as does her departure from the network after providing the coverage she gave these scandals.

Tags: Benghazi, CBS News, media bias, ObamaCare, Operation Fast and Furious, Sharyl Attkisson

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Holder:Maybelawfulgunownersshouldhaveto

Holder: Maybe lawful gun owners should have to wear electronic bracelets to use them

posted at 8:41 am on April 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

How old am I? I’m old enough to remember when the only people on whom government wanted to put electronic bracelets were criminals. Attorney General Eric Holder testified yesterday on Capitol Hill about gun-safety programs promoted by the Department of Justice, which wants almost $400 million in the next budget for “common sense” regulations like electronic bracelets for firearms:

“I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe,” he said.

“By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.”

“It’s those kinds of things that I think we want to try to explore so that we can make sure that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, but at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the kinds of things that we see on a daily basis,” Holder said.

First, the electronic bracelet concept has barely passed the theoretical stage, let alone made it into the commercial market. There is literally one pistol model being sold in one gun story in America which fits Holder’s “common sense” requirement. How exactly would that allow Americans to “enjoy their Second Amendment rights”?  Most gun owners — and there are over 60 million of them — handle and store their weapons safely. More people get murdered each year by body parts than by rifles, for instance, which had been the focus of gun-control efforts over the last sixteen months.

Drunk drivers kill nearly twice as many people each year as all firearms, and that figure may be seriously underestimated. Driving is already a government-regulated activity, so why not focus on installing breathalyzers in autos? Because when people need to drive, they don’t want a failing breathalyzer unit to keep their car from starting, and since most car owners don’t drink and drive in the first place, they don’t want to be treated like a criminal just to exercise their privilege of driving on public roads. Why should law-abiding citizens have to deal with the same kind of system malfunction at the precise moment they need a firearm to defend themselves or their families?

“Common sense” would be to leave law-abiding citizens alone. Of course, “common sense” would also be to not traffic rifles to drug cartels across the border into Mexico without any way to track them or retrieve them, so we know what role “common sense” plays in Eric Holder’s DoJ.

Tags: Eric Holder, gun control, Operation Fast and Furious

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DarrellIssasubpoenastheATFovertheirstonewalling

Darrell Issa subpoenas the ATF over their stonewalling on rogue storefront tactics

posted at 6:01 pm on March 20, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Hey, remember Operation Fast & Furious — the hyper-shady Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives gunwalking operation in which federal agents deliberately pressed American gun store owners into selling untraceable guns to known Mexican drug cartel middlemen, the best possible explanation for which could only have been gross negligence and widespread incompetence? The only thing “botched,” as the media so often titles it, about that episode was that the Obama administration got caught, but the both the ATF and the head honchos at the Justice Department dismissed the whole thing as a poorly coordinated mistake and assured us that such a thing would never happen again.

Which I guess means House Oversight Chairman is just being a crazed partisan blowhard again, am I right? Nothing to see here, people.

Rep. Darrell Issa has subpoenaed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for information about what he calls a “dangerously mismanaged” program, which originally was launched to get crime guns off the street.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs, has been looking into complaints about the program for months. Under the operation, ATF agents set up storefronts in multiple cities to try and entice criminals to sell their crime guns, unwittingly, to the government so they could be traced. But their tactics and missteps, including using mentally disabled people, drew criticism.

Issa, R-Calif., claimed this week that the ATF has stonewalled him by withholding documents and shown a “complete lack of cooperation.”

“I have no choice today but to issue the enclosed subpoena,” he wrote to ATF Director B. Todd Jones. “… The time for hollow promises is over.”

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has been investigating this story and it garnered national attention back in December; the conspicuously weird gist of it is that the ATF has been opening small stores in poor communities across the country, ostensibly a fronts to try and get criminals with guns and drugs off of the streets, but in at least four cities they ended up baiting locals into committing crimes in the process and then arresting them for it — some of whom were mentally disabled.

ATF Deputy Director Tom Brandon insists that, “putting this into context, there were deficiencies with the storefront operations, but there have been many successes and it still remains a viable technique when managed well” — which doesn’t explain why they haven’t been fully cooperative with Congress’s attempted investigation. Why are the implications of the operation supposedly so very dire that you can’t even let Congress in on what the real deal is? If there’s no smoking gun here, why don’t you just prove it? Why, why, why is the Obama administration constantly, aggressively insisting that they absolutely have nothing to hide, but then turning around and acting like they very much do?

Tags: ATF, Darrell Issa, firearms, House Oversight Committee, Obama administration, Operation Fast and Furious

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YetanotherFast&Furiousgunturnsup

Yet another Fast & Furious gun turns up at a crime scene in Mexico

posted at 4:01 pm on January 2, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Lest anyone forget that the Obama administration has yet to fully come clean on the travesty that was Operation Fast and Furious — the not-”botched” but certainly crooked gunrunning scandal in which federal officials pressed American gun dealers into selling more than 2,000 weapons to known cartel smugglers, and then allowed those criminals to funnel the weapons back across the Mexican border with no way of actively tracing them — the results of the administration’s egregiously deficient enterprise are still popping up in the aftermath of deadly violence. Back in August, CBS reported on the unwelcome discovery of three Fast & Furious guns at cartel-related crime scenes, and now we’ve got another one, via CNN:

A U.S. official said Tuesday that investigators have traced at least one firearm recovered at a December 18 gunfight in Puerto Peñasco, across from the Arizona border, to Operation Fast and Furious. …

The shootout in Puerto Peñasco, also called Rocky Point by Arizona tourists, two weeks ago left at least five suspected cartel gunmen dead, including possibly a high level Sinaloa cartel chief, according to Mexican authorities.

Witnesses reported hours of shooting and grenade explosions, with Mexican authorities using helicopters to attack fleeing suspected cartel gunmen on the ground. …

The ATF, in a statement, said: “ATF has accepted responsibility for the mistakes made in the Fast and Furious investigation and at the attorney general’s direction we have taken appropriate and decisive action to ensure that these errors will not be repeated. And we acknowledge that, regrettably, firearms related to the Fast and Furious investigation will likely continue to be recovered at future crime scenes.”

…Yes, well, as reassuring as I’m sure it is that that Attorney General Eric Holder has directed the ATF to take “appropriate and decisive action to ensure that these errors will not be repeated,” that assurance would carry rather a bit more weight if the Justice Department would talk the talk and walk the walk by finally releasing the subpoenaed documents they are still willfully withholding from Congressional investigation. Being held in contempt of Congress over the same evidently didn’t even phase Eric Holder, and the administration is still trying to get the executive-privilege pull making its way through the judiciary dismissed out of hand. Fortunately, a federal judge completely rejected the administration’s farcical argument that it somehow isn’t the courts’ role to adjudicate the dispute (“dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies,” the judge wrote), but the administration is unapologetically looking to appeal that decision — because the rule of law as well as that little constitutional mechanism we like to call checks-and-balances clearly do no apply to the Most Transparent Administration, Evah.

Tags: ATF, corruption, crime, Department of Justice, drugs, Eric Holder, guns, Obama administration, Operation Fast and Furious, violence

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EricHoldertryingtoappealthatdecisiondenying

Eric Holder trying to appeal that decision denying him from throwing out the Fast & Furious case

posted at 2:01 pm on November 17, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

While their tremendously incompetent disaster of a healthcare rollout has President Obama more or less making up new rules and interpretations of his crowning legislative achievement as he goes along, you might think that the Obama administration would be ever so slightly humbled and taking care to rein in their usual “we do what we want” attitude on other matters — but alas, that’s still their prevailing modus operandi on their other sidelined disasters, too.

Back in September, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration could not have the lawsuit over the administration’s executive-privilege pull in the Operation Fast and Furious case (the deadly gunrunning scandal in which the ATF pressed American gun dealers into funneling at least 2,000 weapons to Mexican straw purchasers with no practical efforts to trace the weapons) thrown out, basically because they just didn’t feel like dealing with it. The Obama administration had invented some argumentative blather about the federal courts having no basis for arbitrating the dispute because it would mean that all document fights between Congress and the administration could end up in court rather than being resolved through good-faith negotiation, or something.

District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson (an Obama appointee, by the way) all but laughed that silly excuse out of court: “Dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies. … The Court rejects the notion that merely hearing this dispute between the branches would undermine the foundation of our government, or that it would lead to the abandonment of all negotiation and accommodation in the future, leaving the courts deluged with subpoena enforcement actions,” she wrote — and the Obama administration certainly didn’t like that.

Ergo, on Friday evening, they filed their appeal to that obviously egregious, does-not-apply-to-them enforcement of a little ol’ constitutional mechanism called checks and balances, via Politico:

The new motion (posted here) asks Jackson to allow the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to weigh in on that question before the case continues.

“Absent settlement (which depends on the willingness of both parties to achieve a negotiated resolution), or an immediate appeal, this Court will proceed toward deciding the scope of the President’s assertion of Executive Privilege in response to a congressional demand, and will do so absent a definitive ruling from the Circuit that such a novel judicial inquiry, in a suit instituted by a Committee of Congress, is appropriate under the law, including the Constitution,” the DOJ motion argues.

“The very experience of participating in such proceedings will cause harm—to the Defendant, the Executive Branch, and the separation of powers—that cannot be reversed if the D.C. Circuit ultimately rules in Defendant’s favor on the threshold questions presented,” the motion says. “In light of the harm to the separation of powers that such an adjudication would entail, including the impact of such proceedings on the negotiation process between the political Branches—a process that has generally proceeded without judicial involvement since the inception of congressional oversight—Defendant’s jurisdictional objections should be resolved by the Circuit before this Court takes such a momentous step.”

These guys just won’t quit.

Tags: Department of Justice, Eric Holder, executive privilege, judiciary, Obama administration, Operation Fast and Furious

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CBS:GrenadeusedinMexicancartelshootoutlinked

CBS: Grenade used in Mexican cartel shootout linked to ATF operation

posted at 8:41 am on October 18, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

It’s not Operation Fast and Furious, but another ATF operation that ended up doing nothing about weapons smuggling across the border. The ATF knew about Jean-Baptiste Kingery and tracked him for a long period of time, collecting “significant evidence” of his arms trafficking, including grenades. They didn’t prosecute him, though, and now at least one of the weapons linked to Kingery was used in a battle in Guadalajara between Mexican cartel members and the police — three of whom died.

CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson reports:

CBS News has learned of a shocking link between a deadly drug cartel shootout with Mexican police last week and a controversial case in the U.S. The link is one of the grenades used in the violent fight, which killed three policemen and four cartel members and was captured on video by residents in the area.

According to a Justice Department “Significant Incident Report” filed Tuesday and obtained by CBS News, evidence connects one of the grenades to Jean Baptiste Kingery, an alleged firearms trafficker U.S. officials allowed to operate for years without arresting despite significant evidence that he was moving massive amounts of grenade parts and ammunition to Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels.

The gun battle took place last week in Guadalajara. Authorities say five members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel used at least nine firearms and ten hand grenades against Mexican police. If one of the grenades was supplied with the help of Kingery, as believed, it adds to the toll of lives taken with weapons trafficked by suspects U.S. officials watched but did not stop.

The Kingery case was overseen by the same Arizona U.S. Attorney and ATF office that let suspects traffic thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels in the operation dubbed Fast and Furious. The strategy was to try to get to the cartel kingpins, but it was halted after CBS News reported that Fast and Furious weapons were used by cartel thugs in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on December 15, 2010. Weapons trafficked by other ATF suspects under surveillance were used two months later in the cartel murder of Immigration and Customs Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico on February 15, 2011.

ATF tried telling Attkisson that they had no information on any connection between Kingery and the ordnance used in the fight. However, an ATF report explicitly notes the Kingery link to at least one of the grenades. The ATF had been aware since 2009 of Kingery’s trafficking in grenades, which had become the weapon of choice for the cartels at that time. Instead of seizing him at that time, the ATF deliberately chose to let him cross back into Mexico, over the objections of agents. Sound familiar?

Kingery’s luck ran out in 2011, though:

In 2011, Mexican authorities finally raided Kingery’s factory and arrested him — they say he confessed to teaching cartel members how to build grenades and convert semi-automatic weapons to automatic. The Justice Department has not provided an update on whether it’s trying to extradite Kingery to the U.S., and an ATF spokesman said on Wednesday that he doesn’t know the status of his case.

After the battle last week and the track record of the ATF and DoJ on Kingery, don’t expect the Mexican government to cooperate with any extradition effort. They’d prefer an actual prosecution, one would imagine.

Tags: ATF, grenades, Mexico, Operation Fast and Furious

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DOJtoallowATFagenttopublisha

DOJ to allow ATF agent to publish a “Fast and Furious” book, just not profit from it. Oh, and only after they edit it first.

posted at 3:21 pm on October 16, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

Last week, Ed brought brought us the story of the administrative drama currently plaguing Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Dodson in the endeavor to publish his personal account of his experiences in blowing the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the not-botched ATF operation in which the Obama administration pressed American gun dealers into selling thousands of weapons to Mexican narcotraffickers. Evidently, the Department of Justice was not entirely keen on the idea of Dodson writing a tell-all on the behind-the-scenes circumstances of the operation’s fallout, because they announced their intention to block his book’s publication due to some clearly made-up reasons about the possibilities for negatively affecting the agency’s “morale,” or something.

Even the ACLU — the ACLU, for goodness’ sake — saw the DOJ’s farcical excuse for what it was (i.e., a lame First-Amendment violation attempting to cover their own behinds) and announced they would be representing Mr. Dodson in his suit. Now, it looks like the DOJ may be having second thoughts about making a federal case out of Dodson’s book and drawing more attention than necessary to the deadly operation that they would really rather the American public never think on again: Hey, sure we’ll let Dodson publish his book — with just a few conditions, of course.

CNN reports:

A federal agent will be allowed to write a book with an insider’s account of Operation Fast and Furious, reversing an earlier government attempt to block publication for “morale” reasons. However, John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, won’t be allowed to make money on the book.

A U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the matter says the Justice Department, ATF and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will review Dodson’s manuscript and, after making redactions to protect sensitive law enforcement information, will clear it for publication. However, federal employee guidelines prohibit Dodson and other active agents from making a profit from their work in law enforcement, the official said. …

In an October 8 interview with Chris Cuomo, host of CNN’s “New Day,” Dodson rejected the claims about morale or about the ATF’s relationship with other agencies. “I think what happened, what we were doing, what the agency was doing, the Phoenix field division, the operation itself, I think that is what is harmful for morale,” Dodson said. “I think that is what is a detriment — to not only our relationship with other federal agencies, but our relationship with the American people and their trust in us.”

If the DOJ really wants to enforce the rules about active employees making a profit off of their work, then fine, but I have the gravest doubts that the DOJ personally redacting his story is going to be much of an improvement over simply banning the book’s publication altogether; Dodson has already clarified that he isn’t looking to reveal any sensitive information about ongoing operations, and I have a funny feeling that they’ll probably still rely on that utterly silly “morale” excuse as a major editing guideline.

I suppose we can only conclude that it isn’t for nothing that the Department of Justice is still actively stonewalling Congress on turning over thousands of documents that would shed more light on what can most generously be interpreted as the Obama administration’s willful and lethal negligence. Hmmm.

Tags: Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Obama administration, Operation Fast and Furious, transparency, whistleblower

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