We met Gary Pruitt in 1984 in our next-to-last year reporting for the Sacramento Bee when he was hired as counsel for the parent McClatchy Company.
By April 2012 when he took on the job of CEO of the Associated Press — one of America’s oldest and largest cooperatives — Pruitt had risen to the role of
Chairman and CEO of McClatchy.
Thirteen months after he took the helm of AP, Pruitt found himself in the eye of a major legal storm triggered by Obama administrations relentless and ruthless war on whistleblowers, a vendetta that has landed more news sources behind bars than were imprisoned by all previous administrations in American history combined.
What triggered the AP furor was the receipt letter from the Department of Justice revealing that the federal government had collected two months of phone records for 21 phone lines, including the office and private numbers of reporters and editors as well as the main office lines of AP headquarters in New York City and for news bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives.
The feds were eager to bust the sources for a leak about a successful CIA sting operation targeting Al Qaeda Arabanian Peninsula operatives.
Revelations of the records seizures had an ominous chilling effect on sources, which we suspect was a major intention of the notoriously paranoid Obama White House — the same one that had promuised us The Most Transparent Administration in History™.
Here, from University of California TV is a just-released video of Pruitt’s 30 October appearance before an audience at Berkeley’s Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy:
The Free Press vs. National Security: A False Choice? with Gary Pruitt
Program notes:
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt argues that a free and independent press is fundamental to a functioning democracy. It differentiates democracy from dictatorship; separates a free society from tyranny. Governments who try to set up a situation where citizens think they must choose between a free press and security are making a mistake that will ultimately weaken, not strengthen them. It’s not a real choice. It’s a false choice. Recorded on 10/30/2013. Series: “Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.”
Here’s an excerpt of the letter Pruitt wrote Attorney General Eric Holder on learning of the subpeonas via USA TODAY:
There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.
That the Department undertook this unprecedented step without providing any notice to the AP, and without taking any steps to narrow the scope of its subpoenas to matters actually relevant to an ongoing investigation, is particularly troubling.
The sheer volume of records obtained, most of which can have no plausible connection to any ongoing investigation, indicates, at a minimum, that this effort did not comply with 28 C.F.R. §50.10 and should therefore never have been undertaken in the first place. The regulations require that, in all cases and without exception, a subpoena for a reporter’s telephone toll records must be “as narrowly drawn as possible.” This plainly did not happen.
We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.
The ensuing media storm brought about a rare unanimity of opinion across the normally divided ranks of mainstream media.
One outcome, as Pruitt discusses in his talk, was the formulation of new Justice Department guidelines governing evidence collection from the media — the only business activity singled out for protection by the Constitution. The new guidelines, announced in July, are available online here [PDF].
In his talk, Pruitt suggests that one intent of the Obama administration in seizing the records was the intimidation of leakers. We are convinced that the intimidation was not simply a side effect of the government’s action, but rather its primary purpose.
And combined with the revelations of Edward Snowden, the combined impact is a new form of repression that is chillingly effective, ensuring that even tif that tree falls in the forest and someone hears, no one will dare spread the word.
