Breaking: Justice Department Admits to Spying on Over 100 Individual Associated Press Journalists Over Two Month Period

DOJ’s phone surveillance was a, “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

In what could become one of the biggest scandals of the Obama Administration, the Justice Department has admitted to unconstitutional wide ranging spying on the phone records of over 100 individual Associated Press reporters and editors.

A letter from the Justice Department received by the AP on Friday acknowledged the spying had gone on but provided no explanation as to why they had conducted the massive surveillance operation.

The Associated Press reported:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.

AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt sent a letter of protest to the Obama Justice Department, noting that the wide ranging surveillance was well beyond anything that would be legal in a specific investigation.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.

These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

With over 100 journalists targeted, all covering a wide variety of topics, it is clear that the Department of Justice could not have been conducting the phone surveillance over one specific story, rather it seems they were targeted for a variety of reasons, many that will may never know.

With that being said, the AP report did note that a U.S. official had stated in previous public testimony that the US attorney in Washington was conducting a criminal investigation into who leaked information that appeared in a May 7, 2012 Associated Press report on a CIA terror plot.

The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.

The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an Al Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP’s source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”

In the days ahead we will surely see leaders in the Justice Department, especially Attorney General Eric Holder, deny knowledge of the seizure of over 100 journalists phone records but the fact of the matter is that their own rules require the Attorney General to approve the subpoenas of news organizations.

Simply put, this IS an Eric Holder, Obama Administration operation.

This startling and extremely important news comes at a time when the Obama Admin is already dealing with a massive scandal in which the IRS specifically targeted Obama’s political enemies during the 2012 election. Not only that, they also targeted groups who simply supported the Constitution or freedom in America.

Predictably, Obama has claimed that he had no idea that the IRS was doing this, which would essentially mean that the IRS was targeting HIS enemies and in turn helping him get reelected all by themselves. (in other words, IMPOSSIBLE)

When you couple the IRS scandal with the news that the Justice Department was also illegally spying on journalists, a clear picture emerges.

The federal government is and will continue to target their political and ideological enemies in any way they see fit. Free from the hassle of having to abide by the Constitution, these thugs will continue their wave of tyranny until the American people DEMAND it stops.