The general news media met the recent release of 42,000 pages of government documents, withheld for more than two years under President Obama’s one and only invocation of executive privilege, with a predictable-yet-inexcusable yawn.
The documents relate to the Justice Department case “Fast and Furious” in which federal agents secretly facilitated delivery of thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.
The story was so significant that independent judges awarded it top investigative reporting honors two years straight.
Yet many in the popular news media had declared it a political scandal of little consequence.
They’d bought into propaganda from government interests who used social media, bloggers and direct contact with news organizations to marginalize whistleblowers who exposed the wrongdoing, politicians who dared to ask tough questions and reporters who had the audacity to cover it.
Still, one would think the belated document release would generate widespread interest. After all, there’s now an expressed consensus that the Obama administration has been the most difficult in recent times for press freedoms and transparency.
Journalists from the New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the White House Correspondents Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and the White House Photographers Association have said so.
Ironically, it wasn’t the press that forced release of the Fast and Furious material. It was private lawsuit by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
My review of more than a thousand pages so far reveals textbook examples of government attempts to manipulate the press.
There was a frenzied email exchange between White House and Justice Department press flacks after my producer and I published a story on the “CBS Evening News” anchored by Bob Schieffer Oct. 3, 2011.
Attorney General Eric Holder had given sworn testimony to Congress stating he’d only recently heard of Fast and Furious for the first time. But I had internal documents proving Holder’s top aides had sent him briefings about the case many times the year before.
The federal press agents weren’t upset that the [Fast and Furious] documents contradicted Holder’s testimony. They were upset that I reported it.
“No stories…From NYT, AP, Reuters, WaPo, NBC, Bloomberg,” writes the Justice Department’s Tracy Schmaler to the White House’s Eric Schultz on Oct. 4, 2011, apparently relieved that the news organizations saw nothing newsworthy in the developments. “I’m also calling Sharryl’s [sic] editor and reaching out to Schieffer. She’s out of control,” Schmaler continued, referring to my story.
“Good. Her piece was really bad for [Attorney General],” replies Schultz. “Why do you think nobody else wrote?…And I sent [National Journal’s] Susan Davis your way. She’s writing on Issa/FandF and I said you could load her up on the leaks, etc.”
(The e-mails provided do not detail what spin the administration hoped to “load” Davis with. About two weeks later, Davis published a profile on the aforementioned Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigating Fast and Furious, and declared that Issa was “wagering a fair amount of his credibility” in what she termed his “increasingly strident pursuit of Holder.”)
It’s significant to note that in their email exchanges, the federal press agents weren’t upset that the documents contradicted Holder’s testimony. They were upset that I reported it. And they were also stumped as to why other journalists didn’t publish articles even though that was their goal.
Schmaler e-mailed Schultz that she had “spent much of last night explaining to everyone it’s a bulls–t accusation.”
Matthew Miller, an outside adviser to Holder, suggested more ways to use the press for damage control. In an email, he writes Holder:
“…[Y]ou could find a way to ‘run into’ a couple of reporters on your way to something. Maybe Pete Williams, Carrie, Pete Yost — that part can be managed. Most important is that you’re in front of a camera in a relaxed manner giving a response you have rehearsed…It would be ideal if those two things happened in the same day so you didn’t have two news cycles of responding — you want to do it all at once. There may be things you need to do to go on offense as well, but I think most important right now is that you answer the charge about covering this up. Then you can move to offense.”
Pete Williams is an NBC News correspondent and Pete Yost reports for the Associated Press. “Carrie” may refer to Carrie Johnson, who covered Fast and Furious for National Public Radio.
Other e-mails reveal a shocking claim on Holder’s part: that he doesn’t read his briefings from top aides. “Sigh,” Holder writes in an e-mail about the briefings. “sure I didn’t read them. I rarely do.”
It’s hard to argue none of this is newsworthy.
Additionally, it appears the e-mails should not have been withheld, as they do not appear to qualify for executive privilege.
But who, exactly, will hold the administration accountable — if not the press? If the improper withholding of public information isn’t challenged and punished, successors in either party have an implicit green light to repeat the offense.
It’s just one more example of ways in which the press is allowing our constitutional freedoms and rights to be chipped away, with barely a whimper…rights that are easily lost but difficult to regain.
Sharyl Attkisson is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of the bestselling, “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.” (HarperCollins 2014).