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May 25, 2006
Oh please oh please oh please oh please
Will the New York Times be indicted? James Piereson says it's a "fair inference from the strange exchanges that have gone back and forth over the past few days between the Justice Department and the editors of the paper," i.e. AG Alberto Gonzalez's appearance last Sunday on "This Week" and Times' editorial the next day, which argued the Espionage Act of 1917 cannot be applied to punish journalists.
"The editorial reads much like a pre-emptive strike designed by lawyers to ward off impending indictment," Piereson notes. But then again, it doesn't - the Times editorial, he says, also says this: "the Bush administration was in no position to invoke congressional statutes since, in the view of the editors, it had routinely violated them in authorizing wiretaps without warrants and in failing to enforce civil rights and environmental laws. If the Bush administration can ignore the laws, the editors seemed to ask, why can't we?" This sounds like it's coming from an angry editorial board, not lawyers hoping to save the paper from federal prosecution.
The issue is the Times' story last December disclosing the Bush administration's instruction to the NSA to spy on suspected terrorists using wiretaps. Piereson's commentary is worth the read.
Posted by bill at May 25, 2006 09:30 AM
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