Quotes of the Day

Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein on Tuesday called the scandal involving the Department of Justice securing telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors a “nuclear event.”

“This is outrageous,” Bernstein said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It is totally inexcusable. This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning.

“The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters,” he said. “This was an accident waiting to become a nuclear event, and now it’s happened.”

The AP reported late Monday afternoon that the “Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.”

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““And it goes beyond even the story,” National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who covered the Clinton and Bush scandals and was once the AP Washington bureau chief, said on the show. “One common thing with Benghazi and the IRS scandal, is we’re being misled every day. We were lied to on Benghazi, on the talking points behind Benghazi, for months. We were lied to by the IRS for months and now they’re sending a clear message to our sources:

Don’t embarrass the administration or we’re coming after you.”