Journalists Worried Obama’s Powers May Be Used Against Them

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

I experienced this pressure firsthand when the administration tried to compel me to testify to reveal my confidential sources in a criminal leak investigation. The Justice Department finally relented — even though it had already won a seven-year court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court to force me to testify — most likely because they feared the negative publicity that would come from sending a New York Times reporter to jail…

“I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and the need for journalists to pursue every lead and every angle,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Rutgers University student newspaper. “I think that when you hear stories about us cracking down on whistle-blowers or whatnot, we’re talking about a really small sample…

But critics say the crackdown has had a much greater chilling effect on press freedom than Mr. Obama acknowledges. In a scathing 2013 report for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post who now teaches at Arizona State University, said the war on leaks and other efforts to control information was “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”

These tools have no idea. My own suspicion is most of what is described above is not actually harassment. It is cover, designed to convince the media that they have been keeping the government totally in the dark about their activities, and that their tradecraft has been completely effective in shielding their sources.

I mean, if the government is taking them to court, and trying to make them testify to find out who their sources are, the government must not know who their source are – right? If the government had them under 24/7 surveillance coverage, to the point they did not utter a word that the government didn’t record, didn’t type a character the government didn’t see, and they didn’t make contact with a person without the government knowing, then the government would already know their sources, and the trial would not be necessary. So those wily reporters with their top notch spooky tradecraft must have totally fooled the government, and kept everyone totally in the dark. That the government is prosecuting them is practically hard proof.

And then there is Drudge, who is seeing the more direct side of the action that the leftist media has missed out on these past few years:

Readers were unable to access the pioneering powerhouse news website Drudge Report for an hour and a half on Thursday, due to what site founder Matt Drudge says was a denial-of-service attack.

On Twitter Thursday night in the midst of the attack and shutdown, Drudge questioned whether the U.S. government might be behind the attack, which he said was the largest in the website’s history. Later, Drudge said the attack came from “thousands” of sources…

The disruption came the same night that the Obama administration issued sanctions against Russia over unproven allegations of hacking, a claim toward which Drudge has shown skepticism.

I’m sure Drudge has more info than he released publicly, and has had experiences that he has endured over the past eight years which he isn’t sharing for fear of sounding crazy, but which have let him know that he is undoubtedly an enemy of the state.

I say, that now that Donald is assuming power, it is time to spread the merriment, and show these traitorous fuckers in the leftist media just what they have been missing. Trump should turn up the heat on all of them with 24/7 decoy/diversion surveillance, pucker up their assholes 24/7 with the stress of knowing they are in the fishbowl, give them a few angry/glaring uniform patrol driveby’s each day for fun, and then maybe punch a few reporter’s tickets in blatant hits, just to up the pucker factor and make things really interesting. If anybody asks, we’ll blame it on immigrants.

I can see the Donald’s tweet now:

Four reporters critical of me murdered brutally yesterday! Sad – must be immigrants I warned of. Love!

– @realDonaldTrump

As enthusiastically as I voted for Donald in the last election, I would vote for him five times as enthusiastically if he did that.

I really missed my calling. I was made for running the domestic security state in an Alt-Right administration. If anybody wants to put a word in with Trump on my behalf to take over Homeland Security and the domestic security state, please do. I’ll wait for the call.

Spread r/K Theory, because there is a lot of merriment ahead of us.