Holder passed buck on journalist surveillance to Deputy Attorney General James Cole

(WMR)—Attorney General Eric Holder announced that in June 2012 he recused himself from the Justice Department investigation of the alleged leak of classified information on a CIA counter-terrorism operation in Yemen after he was interviewed by the FBI as part of their investigation of the leak. The Associated Press published report in May 2012 about a classified CIA counter-terrorism operation in Yemen that intercepted an advanced underwear bomb destined for a passenger plane.

Holder revealed in a news conference on Tuesday that Deputy Attorney General James Cole took the lead in the leak investigation last year and that it was Cole who authorized the subpoena for the workplace, home, and cell phone records of over 100 Associated Press journalists. The surveillance of journalists involved trap and trace pen registers placed on some 20 phone lines at AP bureaus in Washington, DC, New York, Hartford, and a phone used by the AP at the House of Representatives Press Gallery.

Holder did not respond to specific questions about the content of journalists’ e-mail being intercepted and read by Justice Department prosecutors. Both Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney evaded questions at two separate news conferences about whether the Obama administration’s surveillance of the communications of Associated Press’s reporters and editors extended to other news organizations.

The Justice Department is pursuing two reporters for The New York Times, James Risen and David Sanger, for their sources on stories that the Justice Department alleges were based on leaks of classified information.

Carney, in response to a question by NBC News’s Chuck Todd, said Obama was committed to a media shield law that would have prevented the Justice Department’s fishing expedition aimed at the AP while he was a U.s. senator in 2007. However, Todd pointed out that as president, Obama allowed a shield law supported by Congress to die because it did not contain a “national security exception” that would have permitted exactly the type of fishing expedition the Justice Department engaged in for two months last year targeting the AP.

Carney said something very instructive at the White House press conference. Carney said if people understood the president’s background, they would know exactly where he is coming from on press freedom. While Carney was obviously referring to Obama’s alleged background as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, a closer read of Obama’s background—as the son and grandson of CIA operatives and someone who also worked covertly for the agency at Business International in New York and other positions—there is no question as to “where Obama is coming from.”

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).