[grandpa jones]

1) (Evading legal transparency requirements is, like persecuting whistleblowers, a standard practice for the Most Transparent Administration Ever™: recently disclosed emails revealed that Jim Messina — then-former White House deputy chief of staff, now the Obama campaign manager – deliberately met with lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry at coffee houses rather than the White House when drafting the health care bill, and used his personal rather than official email account to communicate with them, in order to evade record-preservation and transparency obligations).

2) The drama is unfolding as Congress debates whether to toughen anti-leak laws to crack down on classified information being provided to the news media. The Obama administration has responded by ordering that thousands of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement employees be questioned about media leaks when they’re polygraphed during security clearance screenings. In an unprecedented move, the administration also has criminally prosecuted numerous government employees for leaking. Whistleblower and media advocates fear that the aggressive efforts will have a chilling effect on the reporting of government wrongdoing but won’t stop classified information from being leaked when it’s politically advantageous to administrations.

3) The attack on whistleblowing, by design, seriously impedes investigative reporting; as Jane Mayer put it recently: “when our sources are prosecuted, the news-gathering process is criminalized, so it’s incumbent upon all journalists to speak up.” Worse still, allowing the Executive Branch to leak at will information that glorifies the President and his policies, while aggressively suppressing all information that does the opposite, is the classic recipe for propagandizing without limit.

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[jazusamo]

Thanks, the meetings in the coffee houses with Jim Messina and lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry must be what I remembered.