AP CEO addresses phone records seizure and safeguards Prepared remarks
Gary Pruitt
President and CEO, The Associated Press
Address to the National Press Club
June 19, 2013
Good afternoon.
Before coming over here to talk to you today, I thought I should get a sense of how the seizure of AP's phone records by the DOJ is affecting our reporters. It's been six weeks, after all, and of course we now know that our phone records aren't the only ones being collected by the government.
What I heard from our journalists should alarm everyone in this room.
The actions of the DOJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this case. Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us -- even on stories unrelated to national security. In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person.
In one instance, our journalists could not get a law enforcement official to confirm a detail that had been reported elsewhere.
Imagine: officials were so fearful of talking to AP they wouldn't even confirm a fact that had already been reported by numerous other media.
And I can tell you that this chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP. Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.
Now, the government may love this. But beware a government that loves too much secrecy.
Today, I want to provide you the latest news on the seizure of AP phone records by the U.S. Department of Justice, what AP is doing about it and the implications for all of us.
Let me recap how this all started. On May 7 last year, AP published a story on a foiled plot by an al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen. Al-Qaida was planning to use a new, sophisticated bomb to destroy an airliner headed for the United States. Our story revealed that the CIA had thwarted the attack, which was intended to coincide with the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Now this was a real scoop -- broken, incidentally, by two longtime AP national security journalists who shared last year's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
It was not, however, a surprise to the U.S. government: As the story itself pointed out, AP held the report for five days at government request, because the sensitive operation was still underway. Only after the administration assured us that their security concerns had been allayed did we release the story.
The story was important on its own merits: Don't Americans have a right and need to know that such an attack was being plotted and that their government was able to prevent it?
But it also brought into question a statement by White House spokesman Jay Carney.
Just two weeks earlier Carney had said, We have no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the anniversary of bin Ladens death.
And here was AP finding that, in fact, the CIA had been in the middle of foiling exactly such a plot. It turns out that the person who was to carry the bomb was actually a double agent working with the CIA, the Saudis and the British.
Some have argued that AP got the context wrong, that this was never an al-Qaida plot but a CIA scheme from the outset. That interpretation strains credibility. The attempt was an al-Qaida operation: al-Qaida constructed the bomb, and its agents were working to activate the plan.
The story received wide attention and, soon after, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was launching a leak investigation and appointed a U.S. attorney to head it up.
Now, fast forward one year.
Last month, on Friday, May 10, we received a letter from the Department of Justice informing us it had secretly seized records for 21 AP phone lines over most of a two-month period around the time that our story was released.
This unprecedented intrusion into AP's newsgathering records by government officials was so broad, so overreaching and so secretive that it violated the protective zone that the First Amendment provides journalists in the United States.
We do not dispute that the government has the right to pursue those who leak classified information. This administration has prosecuted leakers like no other in this country's history.
But the Justice Department has rules about subpoenas that target the press. These rules date back to the Watergate era -- and require that any demands be as narrowly drawn as possible. They also require news organizations be notified of a subpoena in advance, giving them time to appeal in the courts -- unless doing so would substantially impair the integrity of the investigation.
In the sweep of AP phone records, the DOJ leadership violated its own rules.
First, the subpoena was not focused as narrowly as possible: It was overbroad. The telephone records seized included not just the work and personal numbers of individual AP journalists, but general AP numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and AP's main phone number in the U.S. House of Representatives press gallery. It included incoming and outgoing calls.
These were not just the phone lines of our investigative team. They are the general office numbers where as many as 100 reporters and editors work. Thousands of phone calls were swept up by our count.
Among the AP phone records taken by the DOJ was a switchboard number at the former location of our Washington bureau that we vacated more than six years ago. It also included a line that belonged to a reporter when he worked in Hartford, nearly seven years before.
This was hardly a surgical strike on a few carefully chosen targets; it was an
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AP CEO addresses phone records seizure and safeguards Prepared remarks 
