The Attorney General's Willful Ignorance Of The AP Phone Records Seizure Just Seems Ridiculous
Henry Blodget|33 minutes ago|195|4
Attorney General Eric Holder is testifying in front of Congress today.
Not surprisingly, he is being asked about the Justice Department's obtaining Associated Press phone records without telling the Associated Press in advance.
As I described earlier, this seizure of the records may well have been legal and justifiable.
Under current law, the DOJ has the right to demand media phone records when the DOJ can't obtain the desired information through other reasonable means. The DOJ even has the right to do this without telling the media organization in advance--if it thinks telling the media organization will threaten the integrity investigation.
If those two conditions were met in this case, the DOJ has nothing to worry about. But Americans certainly have every right to ask whether those two conditions were met. (And, then, to wonder whether giving the DOJ these rights is really in the country's best interests).
But Attorney General Eric Holder is saying that those conditions were met.
He's saying he doesn't know anything about the AP case, because he recused himself from it.
That just seems ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous that Eric Holder recused himself from the case. If he felt he needed to recuse himself, he should have recused himself.
What seems ridiculous is that he's using his recusal as an excuse to say he knows nothing about the case.
Eric Holder runs the Justice Department. He can be recused from a case and yet still make inquiries about it to understand the decisions that were made in investigating it so he can explain these decisions to Congress.
Even if he's not involved in a decision in his organization, that doesn't stop him from being able to ask questions about it for the purpose of relaying this information to investigators.
Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/attorney-general-ap-phone-records-2013-5#ixzz2TOFdvATz
