There was gnashing of teeth last week when it emerged that the Trump administration had seized the emails and phone records of New York Times national security reporter Ali Watkins in an investigation of former Senate Intelligence Committee aide James A. Wolfe. Wolfe had been leaking like a busted gasket to Watkins and is accused of lying about it to Justice Department investigators.
The initial outrage, however, was muted when it emerged that the wunderkind reporter had had a three-year affair with the 57-year-old Wolfe, who is three decades older. The incident calls to mind a legendary episode involving the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, who found out that a reporter had been sleeping with a Philadelphia politician she was supposed to be covering. He fired her on the spot and silenced the newsroom by declaring, “I don’t care if you [expletive] an elephant, just so long as you don’t cover the circus” for the paper.
The Trump administration’s seizure of Watkins’s records is nonetheless troubling. And it seems to be following in the footsteps of the Obama administration in this regard, though far less aggressively, to be sure. The Obama administration’s ardent leak-hunting led to its seizing phone records from a number of AP bureaus in 2012. As the AP reported at the time, “The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted.” That wasn’t the worst of it: Obama’s DoJ broke with decades of precedent and named Fox News’s James Rosen a “co-conspirator” in an espionage case.
Unlike Watkins, the journalists in these cases were doing their jobs with consummate professionalism. Pulitzer-winner and former Times reporter James Risen, who himself successfully fought a court battle to avoid being forced to testify in an espionage case, wrote an op-ed in the paper about the Watkins incident. The headline: “If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama.”
