[Posted April 2, 2013; Last updated June 20, 2013 5:07 AM ET]
FBI Searched Fox News Washington Bureau Chief's (James Rosen) Emails, Phone Records
Washington Correspondent Fox News
[From article]
James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.
[. . .]
raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010.
[. . .]
The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea.
[. . .]
FBI investigators used the security-badge data, phone records and e-mail exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, court records show.
In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters
[. . .]
The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation.
[. . .]
Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
[. . .]
Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.
In the exchange, Rosen used the alias “Leo” to address Kim and called himself “Alex,”
[. . .]
Rosen instructed Kim to send him coded signals on his Google account
[. . .]
investigators said they needed to go a step further to build their case, seizing two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal e-mails — and all of his e-mail exchanges with Kim.
Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-rare-peek-into-a-justice-department-leak-probe/2013/05/19/0bc473de-be5e-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html
A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe
By Ann E. Marimow,
Published: May 19, 2013
Washington Post
* * *
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/snoops_we_did_it_again_hkPyVwpmrUvhGSL56edezJ
Feds also spied on Fox News reporter
By GEOFF EARLE, Bureau Chief
New York Post
Last Updated: 2:57 AM, May 21, 2013
Posted: 2:35 AM, May 21, 2013
The Strong Man
James Rosen
Doubleday 2008
New York
John Newton Mitchell
This is the first full length biography of John Mitchell, who was the intense focus of journalists when he was Attorney General and afterwards. The footnotes alone show an enormous amount of research. Rosen says there are 500 books about Watergate and related issues and people. The author refers to "'a decade of shocks' that spanned the Kennedy assassination to Nixon's resignation." That would be 1963 to 1974. I put the dates 1960 to 1974 for what I considered to be a national mob war which included the political leadership of the country. He recognizes the flawed records and testimony before panels of Congress and the special prosecutor's office.
Nelson Rockefeller, New York Governor
Mitchell created the idea for municipal bonds with a moral guarantee by states. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller got a state law passed to permit such bonds. It was adopted by 40 other states after successes in New York. Mitchell was reluctant to be Attorney General saying he thought Washington DC was "Disneyland East."
Erwin Nathaniel Griswold, Dean Harvard Law School, Solicitor General
Erwin N. Griswold, lifelong Democrat, Dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General said of Mitchell "I wasn't loyal to the President [Nixon] because I never conceived of my responsibility as representing the president. I conceived of my responsibility as representing the people of the United States. And I think Mitchell rather welcomed that point of view."
George Pratt Shultz, United States Secretary of Labor, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, U.S. Secretary of State, Professor of Economics at MIT and the University of Chicago, Dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Bechtel President, Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Robert R. Detlefsen, civil rights historian, said, "contrary to conventional wisdom, contemporary federal affirmative action policy owes far more to the likes of John Mitchell, George Shultz and Richard Nixon than to Lyndon Johnson, a fact that stands in sharp contrast to the typical caricatures . . . one finds in contemporary political folklore."
"What went unmentioned was the huge decrease in the percentage of Southern black children attending segregated schools--from 68 percent in 1968 to 8 percent in 1972--under the leadership of Nixon and Mitchell."
Executive Director, N.A.A.C.P.
It was "Mitchell's Justice [Department] that filed the first federal lawsuits charging cities with manipulation of zoning laws to discriminate on the basis of race. These lawsuits won applause even of Roy Wilkins, the NAACP official better known for telling the press that Mitchell's racial policies made him want to vomit."
Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
One of many examples of truth being obscured for a generation or more is the spying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of The Executive Branch. "Nixon asked [Haldemen] what Kissinger--the primary target of spying--had said about the prospect of criminal prosecution. 'What do you do on that?' Kissinger had asked. 'Well,' Ehrlichman responded, 'it's in the hands of the attorney general. . . . Admiral Welander thinks that we should put the yeoman in jail; Admiral Moorer thinks we should put Welander in jail.' Kissinger thought Moorer should go to jail. 'John and I both laughed,' Haldemen told the president. 'As you go up the ladder, everybody's going to crucify the guy under him, and nobody'll take the blame himself.'" Much of this information did not become available until the release of relevant tapes in 21st Century.
Henry Kissinger, Professor, Harvard University, Department of Government, Nobel Peace Prize winner, National Security Advisor, U.S. Secretary of State.
When he learned about being spied on, "Ehrlichman later wrote, Kissinger exploded in purple rage. '[Nixon] won't fire Moorer!' he shouted. 'They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won't fire them! . . . I assure you,' Kissinger intoned before stalking out, 'all this tolerance will lead to very serious consequences for this administration!' Kissinger was never more prescient."
Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States
"By allowing men he distrusted , and who distrusted him, to remain in place in the White House and at the Pentagon, Nixon ensured that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that infused his first term persisted until the Watergate scandal aborted his presidency."
Harry Robbins "Bob" Haldeman, Chief of Staff to the President
After Nixon gave an intense direct order to Richard Kleindienst to not file an appeal of an anti trust case, John Mitchell got the President to reverse his decision. The author says, "Here was one of Mitchell's finest hours as a public servant."
Richard Gordon Kleindeinst, U.S. Attorney General
"In May 1974 [Kleindienst] pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that he refused to testify 'accurately and fully' before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Nixon's angry telephone call to him in 1971."
James Walter McCord, Jr., CIA Employee, Watergate Burglar
Discussing the breakin at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, Nixon said, "It doesn't sound like a skillful job. . . . If we didn't know better [we] would have thought it was deliberately botched." According to Len Colodny in his book, Silent Coup, tape was put over the door lock. When it was discovered by the building security he removed it. McCord, working for the CIA, replaced the tape so that the security guard knew someone was in the offices. It was deliberately botched.
John Wesley Dean, III, White House Counsel
Rosen reports that John "Dean was keenly aware of his mental superiority over the president. In Blind Ambition, Dean wrote that Nixon was lucid and logical only sporadically, and was mostly rambling, forgetful, and disorganized, unable to remember what Dean told him from day to day. In a 1989 interview, Dean recalled much the same of Mitchell: 'He wasn't sharp. . . . He didn't remember a lot of details. . . . I had to--used to prepare Mitchell to testify, to go up on the Hill. And he wasn't very good. He wasn't a very good witness. He couldn't hold facts. He couldn't hold information."
John Daniel Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs
John Ehrlichman said Nixon "didn't know what the truth was [. . .] He didn't know what he had said, didn't know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment." Could this also be true about Barack Obama?
Charles "Chuck" Wendell Colson, Special Counsel to the President
Charles Colson told the House of Representatives that Nixon seemed "genuinely confused by all of the conflicting accounts."
Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., CIA Officer
"The tapes show Dean ran circles around the president, used his superior comprehension of the scandal to shape the topics discussed, options considered, and courses pursued."
"Such was the pinstriped atmosphere of Watergate: Peril appeared most often in the form of smiling friends, colleagues--"
Sam James "Samy" Ervin, Jr., U.S. Senator (D-NC), Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities.
Sam J. Ervin, Jr., 76, (D-NC) was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. "Challenging Nixon gave Ervin a populist persona that belied his retrograde Southern Democrat record: He had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, Medicare, and consumer legislation; supported the Vietnam War and the draft; and lobbied in behalf of the infamous segregationist manifesto, the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, which encouraged Southern states to defy the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Blinded by hatred of Nixon and Mitchell, the national press corps was eager to forget all that and was led, as in much else, by Walter Cronkite, who fawned over Ervin as 'this Renaissance man of Washington.'" Today journalists show a similar hatred toward all conservative politicians, especially presidential candidates. Are they misleading voters as thoroughly as the previous generation did during Watergate?
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., Journalist, CBS News
Rosen reports that before trial, "How the former attorney general proposed to scale the awesome edifice of allegations erected around him became the subject of consuming media interest." Though there is no media interest in my ordinary life, that phrase describes my situation too, "an awesome edifice of allegations erected around" me.
"Gallup and Harris polls showed John Dean won more favorable reviews than Mitchell [. . .], and that Dean was more likely, despite his pervasive deception of the [Senate] panel, to be seen as 'truthful.'"
"A Baptist minister, sermonizing on 'the moral dilemma of Watergate' admonished Mitchell for violating the 'spiritual law which forbids men to do evil even when they think good will come of it.'"
Daniel Ellsberg, Military Analyst, Rand Corporation, U.S. Department of Defense, Released Pentagon Papers to the New York Times; his psychiatrist's office was bugged by CIA burglars.
Rosen reported this strange confession. "Charles Colson pleaded guilty to one count of plotting to defame Daniel Ellsberg and his lawyers[.]" Is that a crime or a tort? There are a lot of people guilty of that over the past 40 years who plotted to defame me. They were extremely successful.
John Joseph Sirica, Chief Judge, District of Columbia Courts
"By 1970, the year before seniority made him the District of Columbia's chief judge, John Sirica was reportedly the most reversed federal judge in Washington. That dubious achievement, along with his sloppy, biased conduct of U.S. v. Liddy, the original Watergate breakin trial, fueled Mitchell's hopes for securing an acquittal on appeal." I remember how popular Sirica was during this period. None of his misguided actions were reported, at least I never saw any of them. Then again I did not read as carefully or as thoroughly then as I do now.
George Gordon Battle Liddy, Lead Watergate Burglar; I saw him in 1968 multiple times on the Columbia University campus and on the New York City Subway system. I thought he was a professor the way he dressed. Five years later I saw him on television and realized he was doing surveillance on campus of student leaders.
Rosen reports, Sirica complained "I can't keep track of everything going on," at Mitchell's trial. "At various points, he forgot to excuse a witness; forgot key dates in the case's chronology; permitted forms of cross-examination he later barred, without ever admitting error; proposed, unfathomably that a witness be cross-examined outside the presence of the jury, then withdrew the idea; admitted he 'maybe' allowed the prosecution to pose leading questions to a witness on redirect examination, a flagrant violation of courtroom procedure; admitted he 'may' have improperly allowed the prosecution to make a closing argument to the jury during the questioning of a witness; admitted he 'probably' gave the prosecution 'too much latitude' in questioning a witness; admitted he couldn't always discern the speakers on the Nixon tapes, the trial's most important evidence; mocked Nixon from the bench; and shrugged 'when you have a situation like we have, that has been highly publicized, you just can't have a perfect trial.'"
"Most egregiously, Sirica bent the heresay rules, even by the lax standards of conspiracy cases, to allow John Dean to relate to the jury what he had been told by individuals who were neither defendants in the case nor unindicted coconspirators."
Sirica stated in Court, "It is too bad that Mr. Mitchell didn't say, 'Throw them out of here, get them out fast,' and you wouldn't even be in this courtroom today. It is too bad it didn't happen that way. Anyway, it is not for me to say what should have been done. The jury hasn't heard that and no harm can be done."
Spiro Theodore Agnew, 39th Vice President of the U.S.
Rosen notes, "From the lips of the purportedly neutral umpire presiding over his trial, a defendant could scarcely imagine hearing a more prejudicial remark."
Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr., General U.S. Army, Chief of Staff to the President, U.S. Secretary of State
Rosen reports "Alexander Haig believed Agnew's downfall was part of a 'conspiracy' by Democrats. 'They were already in liaison with the Baltimore investigation,' Haig said. 'They saw the prospect of a converging double-impeachment, and the turnover of the government to the Speaker of the House [Carl Albert], a Democrat--and also a drunk.' Haig recalled that when he was named chief of staff, in April 1973, Democratic lawyer Joe Califano warned: 'Al, don't do it.' Asked why, Califano replied: 'Don't you know we have this guy? We got both of 'em!' Agnew's grand jury probe was not yet publicly known[.]"
Joseph Anthony Califano, Jr., U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare
Rosen cites Robert Novak who "decried the 'false conception . . . that the impeachment of Nixon was unbiased and nonpartisan . . . The efforts by Chairman Rodino to get Nixon were very strong. Nixon made enough mistakes that he couldn't garner enough Republican support, but you can't imagine how much the Democrats hated Nixon--I think even more than Republicans hated Clinton[.]"
Peter Wallace Rodino, Jr., U.S. Rep. (D-NJ)
Rosen reveals Renata "Adler uncovered the startling fact that the famous Watergate judge, a former boxer, was himself indicted in 1927 on charges of tax evasion and conspiring to fix the famous Dempsey-Tunney 'long count' prizefight; for unknown reasons, the case never went to trial."
Carl Bert Albert, U.S. Rep. (D-OK), Speaker U.S. House of Representatives
"Dick Moore, a friend [of Mitchell's since] 1930, delivered the eulogy: 'He was the strongest man I ever knew,' Moore said. 'It has been said that you can judge a man by the friends he makes--and keeps. By that test John Mitchell was a giant. He made good friends in every phase of his life, in his every field of endeavor . . . indeed, in every one of the fifty states. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that every friend John Mitchell made throughout his lifetime was still his friend the day he died."
Anna Chennault, Journalist, Nixon Campaign Adviser
Rosen quotes Job 4:8: "Those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same." He adds that the intelligence community noticed the efforts of Nixon campaign adviser Anna Chennault, who went to Vietnam during the war to urge them not to cooperate with President Johnson. It was to make Nixon's campaign more likely to succeed. "Thus the enlistment of Yeoman Radford as a thief of Nixon's and Kissinger's documents--selectively leaked by generals and admirals unsympathetic to the administration's foreign policy--and the deployment of Messrs. Hunt and McCord as spies, respectively, inside the Nixon White House and Mitchell's Committee for the Re-election of the President. These are best seen as institutional responses to the intrigues of 1968, products of the warped political atmosphere created by the protracted war in Vietnam."
Martha Beall Mitchell
"Mitchell's friends and family [wondered]: What was his great mistake in life? Why did so brilliant and accomplished a lawyer, such a warm and witty drinking companion, wind up so disgraced? [. . .] There were those who believed Mitchell's great mistake was marrying Martha Mitchell and those who believed it was allying himself with Richard Nixon. [. . .] Martha and Nixon [. . .] blamed the other for the downfall of the man they both considered the bedrock of their lives. Of course, the answer was that both were to blame, that it was the twin pressures of Martha and Nixon that brought the strong man down."
When asked "If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? MItchell paused [then explained] The year was 1960, [. . .] He was seated in his law office [. . .] when a secretary said he had a visitor, a man named Bobby Kennedy. Mitchell was busy [and kept] the younger man waiting. Kennedy didn't like that. When Mitchell finally saw him, Kennedy said he understood Mitchell was an important man, with contacts in nearly all fifty states. How did he feel about helping to run his brother Jack's presidential campaign? Mitchell demurred. Kennedy was undeterred. He started waving around documents, suggesting it would be in Mitchell's interest--and those of his clients--if he reconsidered. With that Mitchell threw the younger man out of his office. [. . .] 'If I had it all over to do,' Mitchell said with a smile, 'I'd run Jack Kennedy's campaign.'"
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