House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa spoke out on Monday regarding the shocking news that the Department of Justice has been monitoring Associated Press phone lines, including a line in the press gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The news of the DOJ’s media monitoring sent a chill and raised concerns across the country in news outlets big and small.
“This is obviously disturbing. Coming within a week of revelations that the White House lied to the American people about the Benghazi attacks and the IRS targeted conservative Americans for their political beliefs, Americans should take notice that top Obama Administration officials increasingly see themselves as above the law and emboldened by the belief that they don’t have to answer to anyone. I will work with my fellow House Chairmen on an appropriate response to Obama Administration officials.”
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a letter he sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
According to HotAir.com, the AP “says that, in the letter they received from the DOJ on Friday notifying them of the DOJ’s actions, they were offered no explanation for the seizure, but sounds like the AP suspects it had to do with a DOJ investigation into who “leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot” that disclosed “details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.”