Eric Holder Judge-Shopped to Get Warrant to Seize Fox Reporter's Emails and Phone Records

Via Gateway, here’s Ryan Lizza’s piece on how the Attorney General of Remorse actually handled his part in the war against Fox News.

The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time.

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The new documents show that two judges separately declared that the Justice Department was required to notify Rosen of the search warrant, even if the notification came after a delay. Otherwise: “The subscriber therefore will never know, by being provided a copy of the warrant, for example, that the government secured a warrant and searched the contents of her e-mail account,” Judge John M. Facciola wrote in an opinion rejecting the Obama Administration’s argument.

Machen appealed that decision, and in September, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, granted Machen’s request to overturn the order of the two judges.

Holder not only personally signed off on the warrant, he judge-shopped to get the best deal he could get to keep the snooping so secret that Rosen didn’t even know he’d been snooped on until the story broke. He shopped for judges the way White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler shops for shoes.

But it’s ok now, because Holder feels bad about it and Obama has set him to investigate himself and promise never to do it again. If we’re lucky, neither Obama nor Holder have their fingers crossed.