|
(Continued from page 27)
scandal that has driven the Obama administration to distraction. Shulman is testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, which has launched a bipartisan investigation into the matter.
• On Monday, the White House revealed that chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior presidential advisers knew in late April that an upcoming inspector general's report was likely to find that IRS employees had inappropriately targeted conservative political groups.
• ___
In absence of federal shield law, discretion guides pursuit of reporters' records
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- It was a rare moment in relations between the media and the government: In 2008, FBI Director Robert Mueller called the top editors at The New York Times and The Washington Post to apologize because the bureau had improperly obtained reporters' telephone records four years earlier.
• The extraordinary call was an admission that the FBI's actions violated Justice Department policy about seeking journalists' phone records. But nothing about what the FBI did in 2004 appeared to run afoul of any law.
• The Justice Department's latest effort to examine whom journalists are talking to -- the secret subpoena of Associated Press phone records from April and May of last year -- demonstrates how government investigators are guided more by policy and the judgments of high-ranking officials than by specific laws or, in this case, the need to satisfy an independent federal judge.
• The AP case involves a criminal investigation into who gave information to the news cooperative's reporters about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. The AP's May 7, 2012, story attributed details of the operation to unnamed government officials.
• The government informed the AP 10 days ago that it had secretly obtained records for 21 phone numbers, including those of the reporters on the bomb plot story. The department's guidelines, first drafted in the wake of Watergate-era government abuses, call for news organizations to be informed before investigators ask phone companies for records unless doing so would compromise the investigation.
• ___
When is it OK for wunderkinds to drop out of school? (Hey, it worked for Tumblr's founder!)
• NEW YORK (AP) -- Thomas Sohmers, 17, of Hudson, Mass., has been working at a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since he was 13, de (Continued on page 29)
|
|
