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The Internet giant AOL libeled Free Republic as "hosting child pornography" in an article published Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at their Daily Finance news site. The site's masthead reads: Daily Finance An AOL Money & Finance Site.Authored by Daily Finance media columnist Jeff Bercovici, the article entitled Muzzled Reporter Says 'Maw of Yahoo' No Place for Journalism tells the story about John Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News and returning to his previous gig with Gawker. According to the article, Cook was the senior national affairs reporter for Yahoo's The Upshot news blog. Bercovici notes that he and Cook are...

"First he came for the whistleblowers and I didn't speak up because I was a liberal...." A conference called "Sources and Secrets" was held a few days ago at the Times Center in New York. The conference is described as "A conference on the press, government and national security." It's supported largely by left wing organizations and news outlets. At the meeting James Risen of the NY Times expressed an interesting opinion: New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information...

“It won’t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,” Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. “For better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.” The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference (links below), so I’m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to...

New York Times reporter James Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation” on Friday, explaining that the White House seeks to control the flow of information and those that refuse to play along “will be punished.” Poynter reports that Risen made the remarks while speaking at Sources and Secrets conference — a meeting of journalism and communication professionals held in New York City. The foreign policy reporter, who is currently fighting a fierce court battle with the federal government over his protection of a confidential source, warned...

Everyone proposes drinking games for the State of the Union speech. But it’s not just the president that can drive you to drink. It’s the opportunistic media elites deciding which branches of government have too much power, depending on which branches the Democrats presently control. After a lot of stalemate in 2013, the partisan media think it’s high time for the executive branch to go completely around the legislative branch. They think that now that Congress has proven itself unwilling to provide Barack Obama with the historical greatness he deserves, they should and must be driven around like roadkill. They’ll...

Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Slimes Reporter Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years. Sterling served on the Iran desk of the CIA in the 1990s, and oversaw a classified program aimed at sabotaging the development of its nuclear programming. He left the CIA in 2000 and sued for racial discrimination (he is African American) in a case that went all the way...

A former CIA officer was arrested on Thursday on charges of illegally disclosing national defense information about Iran to a New York Times reporter who wrote a book. The U.S. Justice Department said Jeffrey Sterling, 43, was charged with six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of unlawfully keeping national defense information, mail fraud, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstructing justice.

The Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks to the press has snared a high-profile conviction of an FBI linguist, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison Monday after pleading guilty to giving classified information to a blogger. The sentence for Shamai Leibowitz is likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media. His case represents only the third known conviction in U.S. history for a government official or contractor providing classified information to the press. And it reflects a surprising development: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department...

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing prison if he doesn’t reveal sources that gave him highly classified information on U.S. intelligence in Iran. Gabriel Schoenfeld says no reporter is above the law.

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

Report on 9/11 Suggests a Role by Saudi Spies By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON ASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — The classified part of a Congressional report on the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, says that two Saudi citizens who had at least indirect links with two hijackers were probably Saudi intelligence agents and may have reported to Saudi government officials, according to people who have seen the report. These findings, according to several people who have read the report, help to explain why the classified part of the report has become so politically charged, causing strains between the United...

NEW YORK Eric Lichtblau, one of two New York Times' reporters who broke today's story of a secret government monitoring of private banking records - which the Bush Administration sought to block - said the White House arguments to halt the story were not as strong as those that had kept a previous report on secret wiretapping out of the paper for a year. "They were similar in terms of the objections raised not to publish," Lichtblau told E&P today. "That the bad guys knew we were listening to them, but they don't know exactly how." But he said the...

I grew up during World War II, and remember not only that it consumed our thoughts and our energies, but that it was them or us. Today we are again at war with an enemy more widespread and barbarous than even Hitler's SS or Tojo's Bataan-march officers could ever have imagined, and we have faced before the terrors of suicide bombers (we called them Kamikazes). One big difference I see is the continual exposing of our nation's secrets by the New York Times - fed by liberal holdover leakers in the administration who think they know better than the President...

WASHINGTON, June 22 - Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling May 15, 2006 10:33 AM Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report: A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources. "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation. ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA...

Is The New York Times about to be indicted? That would be a fair inference from the strange exchanges that have gone back and forth over the past few days between the Justice Department and the editors of the paper. On Sunday, during the ABC news program, "This Week," Attorney General Gonzales was asked if the federal government might prosecute journalists who published classified information. "There are some statutes on the books," he answered, "which . . . would seem to indicate that this is a possibility." He went on to suggest that such prosecutions were implicitly authorized by the...

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security. The nation's top law enforcer also said the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly. "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Gonzales said, referring to prosecutions. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that...

Back to Story - Help US could prosecute reporters for leaks: Gonzales 18 minutes ago The federal government appears to have the authority to prosecute journalists or newspapers for publishing classified information, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Sunday. The Justice Department is investigating who disclosed the government's secret domestic surveillance program to The New York Times, which broke the story in December. "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Gonzales said told ABC's "This Week," when asked if the government could prosecute...

Nominations are needed tonight for Free Republic's Culture of Treason Media Awards to be presented tomorrow night outside the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C.The Culture of Treason Media Awards, aka the Benedict Arnolds, are to be awarded to those reporters and news outlets whose reporting has undermined the efforts by the United States to fight and win the war on terror.Nominations are needed by 11 p.m. tonight. Voting will start shortly after that and will end at 2:30 p.m. Saturday (tomorrow.)Some nominations to kick things off:Mark Knoller of CBS News for failing to report Cindy Sheehan's remarks calling...

NEW YORK On his national radio program today, William Bennett, the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official and now a CNN commentator, said that three reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes yesterday were not "worthy of an award" but rather "worthy of jail." He identified them as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who wrote about the CIA's "secret prisons" in Europe, and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, who exposed the National Security Agency's domestic (a.k.a. terrorist) spy program. Scott Johnson of the popular Powerline blog also weighed in today, under the heading "The...