Chuck Todd: Obama Wants to 'Criminalize Journalism'

NBC’s chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd said on Wednesday that the Obama Administration’s seizure of reporters’ emails and phone records is evidence that “they want to criminalize journalism.” 

Todd, who made his comments on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, said that if President George Bush and Dick Cheney had engaged in spying on and seizing journalists’ private emails and phone records, “candidate Obama would be unloading.”

Todd said individuals he now talks to are “quite uncomfortable having conversations on the phone. Maybe that’s the intent.” 

The NBC reporter added: “you can’t look at this and see it as anything other than an attempt to basically scare anybody from ever leaking anything ever again.”

Todd is not alone in condemning Obama’s unprecedented intrusion into press freedoms. Today, the New York Times blasted the Obama Administration, as did progressive Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank who said “the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility.”