The groups asked the DOJ to explain how government lawyers 'overreached.' 52 media groups protest DOJ action

More than 50 major media organizations on Tuesday sent a letter to the Department of Justice protesting the seizure of two months of The Associated Press’ phone records and calling for the department to “mitigate the damage it has caused.”

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney James M. Cole, the organizations — which include POLITICO and Allbritton Communications Company — ask that the DOJ return the secretly subpoenaed phone records and explain how government lawyers “overreached so egregiously in this matter.”


The department should also announce any other pending media-related subpoenas and publicly disclose additional information about who has had access to the AP phone records, the groups wrote.

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“The scope of this action calls into question the very integrity of Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, on its own, its police powers against the First Amendment rights of the news media and the public’s interest in reporting on all manner of government conduct, including matters touching on national security which lie at the heart of this case,” the letter from The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 51 other news organizations including Advance Publications, Cox Media Group, The McClatchy Company, The New York Times Company and NPR, among many others, stated.

The media organizations also noted that no one could “remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review” in the 30 years since the department issued guidelines about its subpoena practices for journalists’ phone records.

The AP reported on Monday the DOJ had obtained records that listed incoming and outgoing calls and the duration of those calls for work and personal phone numbers of AP reporters and phone lines for AP offices in New York, Hartford, Conn. and Washington, as well as the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery. The government seized records — which listed incoming and outgoing calls and the call’s length — for more than 20 separate lines assigned to the AP and its reporters.

The DOJ informed the AP on Friday that its phone records had been obtained through subpoenas. The AP’s president and CEO, Gary Pruitt, on Monday called the action “a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.”

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In Tuesday’s letter, meanwhile, the media organizations blasted the DOJ decision not to inform the AP about the intent to pursue a subpoena and negotiate for the release of the phone records — which under the guidelines is only allowed if prosecutors find that it would “pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.” The department has “severely harmed its working relationship with the nation’s news media” over that decision, the groups wrote.

“By deciding that in this case involving one of the nation’s oldest and most respected news organizations that a subpoena would pose such a threat, the Department has severely harmed its working relationship with the nation’s news media, which time and time again have undertaken good-faith efforts to cooperate with government lawyers in a way that protects the public’s interest both in law enforcement and in independent and autonomous newsgathering,” the letter stated.

And beyond writing the letter to express their “displeasure with how this incident was handled,” the media organizations added they want to “demand that any similar actions in the future be handled with greater consideration of the news media’s First Amendment rights.”