DOJ Falsely Claimed That Reporter James Rosen Was Involved In Bombings In Trying To Hide Fact It Spied On Him

DOJ Falsely Claimed That Reporter James Rosen Was Involved In Bombings In Trying To Hide Fact It Spied On Him: Okay, here's one that's just crazy. A few weeks ago, lots of folks, including us, covered the story of how the Justice Department claimed to a court that reporter James Rosen was "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" in a leak of some State Department info concerning North Korea. He was none of the above. He was a reporter, but the DOJ was abusing its power in order to spy on his email and phone records, to try to find the source of the leak. Soon after that, it came out that the DOJ had been working overtime to make sure that the details of the surveillance of Rosen's communications was held under seal.



However, some are noticing an odd statement in the DOJ's filing to try to keep the case under seal. In what is likely a case of an overworked DOJ lawyer just cutting and pasting from a different attempt to keep some surveillance a secret, one of the motions to keep the search warrant sealed falsely claimed that Rosen was involved in a bombing, rather than just disclosing information on North Korea.

Somehow, if the DOJ can't even read its own motions to seal that carefully, you have to question if they really "considered alternatives less drastic than sealing," or if they were happy that throwing in key words like "responsible for the bombings" despite the case having nothing to do with bombings, only helped to keep it secret that they were spying on a the communications of a reporter, almost certainly in violation of the DOJ's own guidelines, and potentially in violation of the Constitution.

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