Sadly, no recent occupant of the White House has been more aggressive in persecuting whistleblowers than President Transparency. Nonetheless, prior to their newfound concern for a free press, the GOP was just last year attacking President Obama for an imagined lack of zeal in pursuing leaks. John McCain even wanted a special counsel outside the Justice Department appointed to investigate national-security leaks about Obama’s “kill list,” a story about which ended up in The New York Times. The “kill list” strangely wasn’t the problem for the GOP. The leaks were.
At a 2012 hearing in which the GOP tried to ascertain whether it could prosecute reporters, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) suggested that the U.S. attorneys subpoena journalists and demand they reveal sources that provided classified information. Gowdy said: “Put [reporters] in front of the grand jury. You either answer the question or you’re going to be held in contempt and go to jail, which is what I thought all reporters aspire to do anyway. I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter’s résumé to actually go to jail protecting a source.” When your baseline belief is that reporters like to go to jail, let’s just dispense with the fiction that you care about a free media.
When The Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration had secret prisons, conservatives went nuts. Then-speaker J. Dennis Hastert and then–Senate majority leader Bill Frist sent the chairmen of the intelligence committees a request to launch a joint investigation to find the whistleblowers. It was the leaks, not the existence of secret prisons and “black sites,” that so offended their delicate sensibilities.
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