Attorney General Eric Holder has held his off-the-record meeting on press freedom with some members of the media. The meeting, which was about press freedom, can be characterized generally by those who answered Holder’s summons. Holder is even benevolently allowing them to report some specifics, but not all.
The main news, such as it is given the clamps that Holder placed on the meeting, coming out of it all is that the Justice Department will change the guidelines by which it will obtain journalists’ emails. Going forward, Justice won’t tell a judge that it believes the journalist in question is a criminal co-conspirator, as it did to Fox’s James Rosen. It will just argue that it needs them and, if the Rosen case is precedent, judge shop until it gets whatever it wants.
This is a loosening of the standards, is it not? Having been caught red-handed abusing the judicial process to obtain the private emails of a reporter who had committed no crime, the Holder Justice Department’s answer is to make it easier to go and obtain other journalists’ emails, without even bothering to accuse them of any crime…?
This is acceptable? Only if we live in a banana republic.
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