The letter was written in response to the Obama Justice Department’s decision to secretly look at Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails and phone records after Rosen broke a story regarding North Korea’s plans to test a nuclear bomb. In order to attain the warrant for Rosen’s emails and phone records, the DOJ labeled Rosen a “co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act — essentially claiming he was a spy for doing what journalists do: dig for information and publish stories on their findings.
The State Department adviser who gave Rosen the information, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, has already been indicted for “unauthorized disclosure of national defense information.”
Mr. Ailes is the latest in a long line of First Amendment defenders expressing outrage at the DOJ’s decision to label a journalist as a “co-inspirator” for doing their job.
Judge Andrew Napolitano and numerous others have described the Administration’s actions as unprecedented.
“This is the first time that the federal government has moved to this level of taking ordinary, reasonable, traditional, lawful reporter skills and claiming they constitute criminal behavior,” said Napolitano.
The White House Correspondents Association also issued a statement that said, in part:
“Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs. The problem is that in two recent cases, one involving Fox News’ James Rosen and the other focused on the Associated Press, serious questions have been raised about whether our government has gotten far too aggressive in its monitoring of reporters’ movements, phone records, and even personal email.”
The Obama Administration is well known for leaking information to the press, including national security intel, when it is politically advantageous to the president.
David Sanger of The New York Times, for example, was given access to sensitive information regarding the Stuxnet virus that was used to cripple Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons.
After reading Sanger’s latest book, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You learn more from the book than I did as chairman of the intelligence committee, and that’s very disturbing to me.”
In short, it appears that Administration mouthpieces are funneled secret information to publish while journalists searching for the truth are labeled as conspirators against the United States.
Ailes letter:
Dear colleagues,
The recent news about the FBI’s seizure of the phone and email records of Fox News employees, including James Rosen, calls into question whether the federal government is meeting its constitutional obligation to preserve and protect a free press in the United States. We reject the government’s efforts to criminalize the pursuit of investigative journalism and falsely characterize a Fox News reporter to a Federal judge as a “co-conspirator” in a crime. I know how concerned you are because so many of you have asked me: why should the government make me afraid to use a work phone or email account to gather news or even call a friend or family member? Well, they shouldn’t have done it. The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.
I am proud of your tireless effort to report the news over the last 17 years. I stand with you, I support you and I thank you for your reporting with courageous optimism. Too many Americans fought and died to protect our unique American right of press freedom. We can’t and we won’t forget that. To be an American journalist is not only a great responsibility, but also a great honor. To be a Fox journalist is a high honor, not a high crime. Even this memo of support will cause some to demonize us and try to find irrelevant things to cause us to waver. We will not waver.
As Fox News employees, we sometimes are forced to stand alone, but even then when we know we are reporting what is true and what is right, we stand proud and fearless. Thank you for your hard work and all your efforts.
Sincerely,
Roger Ailes
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