The Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on gov't whistleblowers

IRS identifies their whistleblower, will he or she be arrested?

NOM chairman John Eastman wants the DOJ to prosecute both the unnamed IRS leaker and Meisel, the recipient of the leaked documents. “This should be a relatively simple matter,” he says. Also a professor of constitutional law, Eastman is point-blank. As if reading from the statute itself, he tells me, “Any person who inspects or discloses a tax return and knowingly is not authorized to have it is guilty of a felony, and we expect the Department of Justice to seek an indictment.” Only if Eric Holder’s DOJ does take up the case will the veil of privacy and the protection afforded by section 6103 be lifted.

Having committed a felony by disclosing NOM’s donor list, the perpetrator is protected by the same law he broke. “I am astounded at the ease by which an individual was able to obtain and release confidential information including private citizens’ names and addresses,” House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) tells National Review Online. “What makes the situation even worse is that the law, intended to protect taxpayers, is being used as a shield for those that perpetrate this wrongdoing.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362667/investigation-ids-irs-leaker-eliana-johnson

U.S. leads the world in global persecutions of journalists:

Recent attempts by the U.S. Congress to officially decide who qualifies as a journalist.

The freedom of the press has never experienced such a determined and relentless attack in all the years since its protection was enshrined in the Bill of Rights over 200 years ago. 

Should the federal government succeed in establishing itself as the decider of who is and is not an “official journalist,” and if President Obama is allowed to persist in his persecution of anyone whose sense of duty compels him to disclose official misdeeds, then liberty will be yet another historic relic of republican government.

In September, during committee hearings on a bill aimed at protecting journalists from having to reveal their sources, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered an amendment that would have limited the protection to those reporters who conformed to her own narrow definition of a journalist.

Feinstein's contribution set out the definition of a "covered journalist,” a term that would have included someone who collects and/or reports news on behalf of "an entity or service that disseminates news and information," so long as they were carrying out "legitimate news-gathering activities.”

This provision amounted to nothing more or less than an attempt by Senator Feinstein to set up the Senate as the federal journalist licensing bureau.

Any such infringement on the freedom of the press is a hostile and open attack on the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from passing any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Next, there is the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen. The Obama administration targeted Rosen, branding him a “conspirator” for having reported a story given him by a State Department employee. By being tagged with that title, Rosen could be prosecuted under anti-espionage acts.

In May, the story broke of Attorney General Eric Holder’s seizure of records of calls made to and from reporters for the Associated Press (AP). The New American reported at the time of the break of the scandal: 

In what its top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" by the government into news gathering activities, the AP reported Monday that records were seized of calls from both office and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, and from general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, in addition to the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. Records for more than 20 different phone lines assigned to the AP and its journalists were seized for the months of April and May, 2012, according to AP lawyers.

More than 100 journalists work in the offices where the phone lines were targeted, the news agency said.

Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney in Washington, sent notice of the action in a letter the AP received on Friday. The records were obtained through Justice Department subpoenas, though it is not known whether a judge or grand jury authorized the subpoenas, the AP said.

The most recent example of the “war on journalism” occurred in August. As reported by The New American’s Alex Newman:

According to investigative reporter Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist who helped expose problems within the Department of Homeland Security in articles for the Washington Times, swarms of DHS agents and Maryland State Police officers descended on her home in a pre-dawn assault on August 6. Armed with full battle gear and a warrant authorizing a search for firearms (her husband was apparently convicted of “resisting arrest” almost three decades ago and so was supposedly not allowed to be near guns), the federal and state agents ended up seizing Hudson’s private notes, too.

“They took my notes without my knowledge and without legal authority to do so,” Hudson told the online Daily Caller, which first reported on the raid. “The search warrant they presented said nothing about walking out of here with a single sheet of paper.” The federal agents, however, walked out with stacks of papers, including records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and notes of her interviews with “a lot” of confidential sources trying to expose wrongdoing. “When they called and told me about it, I just about had a heart attack,” she said. No charges have been filed so far.

In 2008, then-president-elect Obama declared, "We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.”

Not that politicians have a habit of keeping campaign promises, but President Obama’s policy of zealously pursuing, prosecuting, and punishing those who report abuses in government is remarkable for its relentlessness.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, is quoted in a story published by Reason magazine online, explaining, “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

The first such whistleblower prosecuted by the president was Thomas Drake. Drake, a senior executive at the National Security Agency who made the mistake of revealing to the Baltimore Sun that the NSA’s Trailblazer Project, a project intended to analyze data carried on in the United States and elsewhere through the Internet, cellphones, and e-mails, not only violated the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against unwarranted searches and seizures, but it was a “billion-dollar computer boondoggle.”

In April 2010, Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury of several crimes, including violation of the Espionage Act.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/16845-in-global-persecution-of-journalists-u-s-takes-the-lead