Holder is said to have expressed a willingness to revise investigation guidelines. Holder to media: I get it

Attorney General Eric Holder expressed concern on Thursday about how the Department of Justice has handled recent media investigations at an off-the-record meeting with leading representatives of the press, according to those who were present.

At the session, Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole expressed a willingness to revise the guidelines for such investigations, journalists present at the get-together told POLITICO.


But Holder stopped short of offering any concrete changes to the guidelines. Instead, the Attorney General sought to assure the journalists that he and the DOJ were trying to seek a balance between the demands of national security and the free flow of information, and sought suggestions from the journalists on how those changes might be achieved.

( POLITICO Junkies: DOJ’s new media guidelines – PR stunt?)

“[Holder and Cole] said they are reaching out to editors and counsels for news organizations about how to strike what they called ‘the balance’ between protecting the flow of information and journalists’ ability to do our jobs and what they described as national security damage,” said POLITICO editor-in-chief John Harris, who was present at the meeting.

“The guidelines require a balance between law enforcement and freedom of the press, and we all argued that the balance was out of kilter, with the national security and law enforcement interests basically overwhelming the public’s right to get information,” one journalist at the meeting said. “The language concerning ‘aiding and abetting’ comes out of the Privacy [Protection] Act, and they discussed trying to revise that language so that reporters don’t need to be defined as co-conspirators in order to execute search warrants.”

The five journalists at the meeting were Harris; Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post; Gerald Seib, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief; Jane Mayer, The New Yorker staff writer; and Jim Warren, the Washington bureau chief for The New York Daily News.

( Also on POLITICO: On leaks: The case against the media)

At the end of the session, Justice Department officials agreed that the journalists could discuss publicly and in general some of the ideas that were discussed during the course of what otherwise an off-the-record meeting.

The purpose of the meeting was to make sure the department’s new guidelines were drawn up as tightly and narrowly as possible, journalists said. But few if any of those journalists came away from the meeting confident that the Department knew precisely how those guidelines might change.

“I think it was overall a constructive conversation, but whether it results in real change remains to be seen,” Mayer told POLITICO. “I felt all the journalists there spoke up well about the issues, and pulled no punches.”

”I didn’t come away with a precise understanding of how those guidelines might change, and I didn’t have impression they were settled in their own mind,” said Harris.

Over the one-hour meeting, Holder stressed that the Justice Department had conducted its investigations out of a regard for national security, and said reporters had been subpoenaed out of a genuine threat to national security, according to those present. But Holder also indicated that the decision to label Fox News reporter James Rosen as an “aider and abettor” in a criminal investigation wasn’t necessary.

Several news organizations boycotted the session, citing concerns with the provision that it be held on an off-the-record basis. The Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, CBS News, Reuters, McClatchy, and The Huffington Post all passed on the meeting.

In a statement, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson said “it isn’t appropriate for us to attend an off the record meeting with the attorney general. Our Washington bureau is aggressively covering the department’s handling of leak investigations at this time.”

But other news organizations stood by their decision to attend the meeting, including POLITICO.

“As editor in chief, I routinely have off-the-record conversations with people who have questions or grievances about our coverage or our newsgathering practices,” Harris, who was invited to represent POLITICO at the meeting, said in an email. “I feel anyone—whether an official or ordinary reader—should be able to have an unguarded conversation with someone in a position of accountability for a news organization when there is good reason.”

ABC News, Bloomberg News, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times/Chicago Tribune also accepted the invitation and will attend a meeting on Friday.

Responding to the boycott earlier on Thursday, the White House said it was still “hopeful” and “optimistic” that news organizations would attend the meetings.

“We are genuinely interested in the input, the opinion, the advice of leaders of prominent media organizations,” White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One . “We are hopeful and optimistic that we are going to find a way to get their input.”

When asked if the White House was involved in setting the off-the-record rules, Earnest declined to answer.

The meetings come in the wake of revelations about the Justice Department’s seizure of the phone records of several AP reporters and its targeting of Rosen, and are part of President Barack Obama’s announced review of the department’s existing guidelines governing investigations involving reporters.

Administrations officials present at the meeting included Attorney General Holder; Deputy Attorney General Cole; Margaret Richardson, Chief of Staff to the Attorney General; Jenny Mosier, Deputy Chief of Staff and Counsel to the Attorney General; David O’Neil, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General; Stuart Goldberg, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General; Paul O’Brien, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division; Deborah Sorkin, Chief of the Policy and Statutory Enforcement Unit, Office of Enforcement Operations, Criminal Division; and Nanda Chitre, Acting Director, Office of Public Affairs.