Obama Administration Criticized for Investigation of Journalist James Rosen

Just as the furor over the scandal involving the Department of Justice tapping into over 20 phone lines at the Associated Press was starting to die down, it appears as if it was not an isolated incident.

In a particularly scathing article by Ann Marimow in the Washington Post it was revealed that the Obama Administration took similar action against a Fox News reporter in 2010.

While investigating a 2009 leak of classified information pertaining to North Korea's nuclear ambitions, the Obama Administration may have crossed a line while investigating Fox News journalist James Rosen. In investigating Rosen's interactions with government advisor Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the administration used Rosen's security badge to track his trips to the State Department, timed when he spoke with Kim and received a search warrant to read Rosen's personal emails, according to the Washington Post.

This case, as well as the current case involving the AP, shows the lengths that the Obama administration has gone to in order to find the source of leaks. First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin finds the actions of the administration to be troubling.

"Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public," Tobin said. "That's a very dangerous road to go down."

According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration has pursued more cases involving leaked information than all other administrations combined. The Justice department has defended their actions in both the Kim case and the AP case saying in a statement that they had followed "all applicable laws, regulations, and longstanding Department of Justice policies intended to safeguard the First Amendment interests of the press in reporting the news and the public in receiving it."

The issue at question here is whether the Justice Department overstepped their bounds when seizing Rosen's records, a journalist's work is protected by the First Amendment unless there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks, the federal judge who signed the search warrant believed there was probable cause that Rosen had broken the law, according to the Washington Post.

What remains to be determined is if it is illegal for a journalist to solicit classified information, no journalist has ever been prosecuted for doing so in the past, according to the Washington Post.

Journalists reacted to Marimow's article with sharp criticism for the latest actions by the Obama administration in what is being perceived by some as a war against journalism, according to the Huffington Post.

Ryan Lizza, a Washington based contributor for CNN, tweeted, "Case against Fox's Rosen, in which O admin is criminalizing reporting, makes all of the other "scandals" look like giant nothing burgers."

Eli Lake, the senior national security reporter for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, took things one step further in tweeting, "Serious idea. Instead of calling it Obama's war on whistleblowers, let's just call it what it is: Obama's war on journalism."