Rosenstein, DOJ exploring ways to more easily spy on journalists

For months now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly has been working on a revision to its guidelines governing how, when and why prosecutors can obtain the records of journalists, particularly in leak cases.

The work has been supervised by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s office, especially since former Attorney General Jeff Sessions departed, but is not wrapped up.

ADVERTISEMENT The effort has the potential to touch off a First Amendment debate with a press corps that already has high degrees of distrust of and disfunction with the Trump administration.

Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker is aware of the effort but has not been given a final recommendation. Sources close to Whitaker say he will await final judgment but, in recent days, has developed reservations about proceeding with the plan.

“After a lengthy period of turmoil and regular criticism from President Trump, DOJ has enjoyed a period of calm normalcy that has put employees’ focus back on their work and not the next tweet. Matt doesn’t want to disrupt that unless a strong legal case can be made,” a source close to the acting AG told me.

The current guidelines have their origins back to a time when Bill Clinton was president and Janet Reno was attorney general, long before WikiLeaks was a twinkle in Julian Assange’s eye. They were designed to strike a balance between law enforcement’s investigative interests and the First Amendment rights of reporters.

John Solomon’s article and his personal travail at the hands of the corrupt Robert Mueller raise some serious questions about the 1st Amendment and journalists’ rights.

I was a card carrying journalist for years, from covering Congress and the Pentagon to Vietnam, etc. There were times when I saw classified information or was verbally told classified things, none of which I ever put into print or told people (Back in those days, most journalists, even most liberal ones, were patriotic Americans (some NYT, Wash. Post and syndicate writers excluded).

By the way, Geraldo Rivera’s drawing of a rough map in the sand in Iraq of where the US 3rd Infantry Division was moving put my son’s life in jeopardy, as well as those of thousands of others in that 100 mile long convoy, a perfect target for mortar attacks (because Geraldo mentioned a specific location). That is why he was thrown out of Iraq in 2003.

The big issue here is the “leaks” of classified grand jury, FBI investigations, CIA operations/agents identities, and electronic intercept ops and methodology information.

The Sullivan decision in the Pentagon Papers case was disasterous to American security. It allowed newspapers/journalists to claims “publication rights” under the 1st Amendment regardless of how damaging their contents might be to the security of the United States.

This was bullshit. If I had published some things I was told in SVN during the war, Americans and our allied would have been killed. Period. We were trusted with this information because it was part of a larger briefing for certain local/regional operations.

Things I discovered in interviewing NVA senior officers, POWS, and VC defectors led to our intelligence expanding some of their programs to find out more about this information. One item was of historical value only, but the other led to the discover of North Vietnamese heroin trains trying to bring those drugs close to So. Vietnam for distribution among American troops to undermine their effectiveness.

When I was in Saigon, “H” on the streets was as high as 90% pure, something no peasant group could achieve with their local, opium for smoking operations.

The implications of this high purity rate meant that the No. Vietnamese and Red Chinese had set up top-notch chemical labs to process THEIR heroin into high-grade purity quality.

Some of the Red Chinese operation (which had been documented since the 50’s), was confirmed to me by one of Mao’s bodyguards who had defected (He was a senior Red Guard official). He had seen the poppy fields in Yunnan Province that I had asked about, as well as having visited a drug-shipping wooden box facility (the boxes, oblong, fitted the descriptions I had gotten from old BNDD foreign reports of similar boxes being seized in Hong Kong and Amsterdam).

Details of this finding have never been published publically to my knowledge and I was never told more than what I have written here (other than leaving out some US operational information about those heroin trains).

One day I sat in the office of a very well known, experienced government internal security investigator when a phone call came in from a now very well known journalist who was then working for a syndicated columnist. My friend let me hear the conversation after he realized that the reporter was not interested in the truth about an govt intelligence operation that he learned about.

My friend vehemently denied claims by the reporter as to his activities (part of which was innocent enough, he was visiting a friend in the city in which he was temporarily working). The reporter published false accusations about my friend and his intel work despite being told the truth about the issue at hand.

However, he could not tell the whole story because it would expose another intelligence operation going on in the same location or nearby (I don’t know any details and wouldn’t write about them anyway).

I support limited national security subpoenas under strict court supervisor for materials that journalists receive that are “stolen” which involve national security operations, identifies (i.d. the Intelligence Identities Act purview), and legal operational methods”.

First Amendment rights are NOT absolute and some journalists are not only incompetent, dupes and careless, but are also ideological enemies of America. I have helped to expose at least three such “journalists” in several major American newspapers and as television network reporters overseas or in the US. One was a KGB operative, the second possibly KGB or DGI, and two were members of domestic communist parties. Another had been a longtime member of the Communist Party USA who was being used as a “disinformation conduit” for certain stories (which the Party accidentally let slip in something they wrote).

Journalism and journalists are out of control, some posing a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. It is an issue that must be addressed, but I wouldn’t trust Rosenstein to put a Band-Aid on my cat’s ass. PERIOD.

We need new (and experienced) faces to deal with this very important issue. No one even remotely connected to the anti-Trump “Deep State” should be allowed anywhere near this project, or even in DOJ.

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