Milbank: Reporter Snooping Actions 'Shatter the President's Credibility'

Progressive Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank joined the chorus of journalistic outrage over the Obama Administration’s decision to spy on Fox News reporter James Rosen and to seize and comb Associated Press reporters’ phone records, writing that “the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility.”

“The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.”

The Obama Justice Department also obtained Rosen’s private emails from Google and named Rosen “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” for his reporting on North Korea.

“If Obama really is ‘a fierce defender of the First Amendment,’ as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this,” wrote Milbank. “Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.”