Newsletter

A less-than-arresting idea

Rieder, Rem

2014

Overview

\"So if I'm a newspaper reporter for -- fill in the blank -- and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I'm a newspaper reporter?\" [Mike Rogers] asked FBI Director James Comey at a hearing Tuesday. \"If I'm hawking stolen, classified material that I'm not legally in possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?\" When Rogers pressed him on the issue, the FBI's Comey, to his credit, was reluctant to embrace the whole journalists-as-fences meme. It's one thing, he said, if the nefarious scribes are \"hawking stolen jewelry, \" but quite another when they're writing stories. There's that pesky First Amendment thing, after all. \"What the congressman calls 'fencing stolen property,' journalists and the Supreme Court call 'serving the public interest and the First Amendment,' \" [Chuck Tobin] says. \"The democracy is infinitely stronger when the people have more information and the government hides less. Our history, from the leaks of secret 18th century treaty negotiations with the French through the Pentagon Papers, teaches that.\"

• Publisher: USA Today, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, Inc
• Subject: Greenwald, Glenn / Rogers, Mike / Snowden, Edward