Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was voted in civil and criminal contempt of Congress by Republicans during his time at the Department of Justice, launched a verbal assault on Judge Terry Doughty for halting the federal government's use of big tech to subvert the First Amendment.
Well this is pretty stupid. And potentially dangerous. https://t.co/Yuqy9pzmo4
— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) July 5, 2023
During Holder's time as attorney general for President Barack Obama, DOJ illegally spied on reporters and prosecuted more sources under the Espionage Act than any other administration in history. Under Holder's leadership, DOJ tapped phones and monitored emails belonging to reporters, news executives and their family members.
Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on the controversial warrant application that the Justice Department used to obtain the personal emails of a Fox News reporter.
The warrant, which was obtained after the Justice Department identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible criminal co-conspirator for communicating with a source who allegedly supplied him with classified information, allowed investigators to obtain two days' worth of email correspondence from Rosen's personal Gmail account.
Holder said previously that he had recused himself from a separate leak investigation that involved reporters for the Associated Press, but did not do so in this case, and personally signed off on the warrant to obtain the reporter's emails, according to NBC. Holder recused himself in the previous case involving AP, because he said he himself had been questioned by investigators as a witness in that leak investigation.
In light of the controversy over this and another leak investigation that involved the work and personal phone records of reporters at the AP.
More background:
The Department of Justice secretly obtained phone records for reporters and editors who work for the Associated Press news agency, including records for the home phones and cell phones of individual journalists, according to the AP, in what the agency characterized as "serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news."
The records, covering all of April and May 2012, were seized by the DoJ earlier this year and covered more than 20 separate phone lines. The records listed outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, as well as the general phone lines for AP bureaus in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and a main number used by AP reporters in the House of Representatives.
Throughout his tenure, Holder used the power of the federal government to prevent information from being released to the public and went after reporters, exercising their First Amendment rights, to do it. It's no surprise he's fine with using big tech to censor information he dislikes or that is politically inconvenient to the Democratic Party.
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