Journalist Alleging She Was Illegally Spied Upon by Obama Administration Seeks to Re-Open Case
Shane Trejo
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Journalist Sharyl Attkisson filed a complaint to re-open her case this week, alleging that the Obama administration spied on her illegally from 2011-2014.
She originally filed the lawsuit in 2015 alleging that her civil liberties were violated, but the case was ultimately dismissed. Attkisson believes that new information that has come to light will vindicate her once the case is reopened.
“The plaintiffs first acquired the details regarding key individuals involved in the surveillance in August 2019 from a person involved in the wrongdoing who has come forward to provide information,” Attkisson said in a complaint filed in federal court in Maryland.
Attkisson also made a filing in Virginia, where the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of her lawsuit last year. She worked as a journalist at CBS News during the alleged instances of illegal spying, and now hosts a television show on Sinclair broadcasting.
Attkisson broke the story of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, an Obama-era program that ended up running guns to drug dealers south of the border. Her reporting on that case was a black eye on the Obama regime that allegedly put her in the sights of the administration.
Rod Rosenstein is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit, as he was a U.S. Attorney at the time. He would later become an infamous figure due to his participation in Russia-gate while serving as deputy attorney general in the Trump administration.
Attkisson believes that her 4th Amendment rights were violated by the Obama administration, and her electronic devices were monitored by the regime as she reported on issues like the Benghazi attack in 2012.
While President Trump regularly gets maligned as waging a war on the free press for calling out the fake news, it was really Obama who engaged in a war against journalism.
Obama engaged in an unprecedented crackdown on journalists and leakers, using the Espionage Act to prosecute them:
It’s hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call “Obama’s war on whistleblowers”. James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that “President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information” and added: “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.”
Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists – its first-ever on press freedoms in the US – powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process…
And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: “Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said ‘the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration’ in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies.” It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.
The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker’s investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration’s attacks: “It’s a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn’t quite strong enough, it’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.”
Attkisson may have another chance to receive justice as she pushes back against the unconstitutional practices of the Obama administration.
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