Im howard kurtz and this is mediabuzz. Julian assange and, of course, the media and punching back on twitter, lets get back to my interview with sean spicer, i spoke to him from trump tower. Sean spicer, welcome. Thank you, howie. Donald trump tweeted, im asking the chairs of the house and Senate Committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with nbc prior to me seeing it. I can understand his concern, but does that signal as president he will be ordering Leak Investigations to find out Reporter Sources . Well, its not the Reporter Sources, its trying to figure out where it came from. Theres a big difference between reportest doing their job and
sourcing thicks and people in the government improperly giving Classified Information to people or potentially doing that. I think theres a big difference whether youre targeting the source or recipient. Right. Trumps twitter Feed Paralyzes and some seem say, hey, we shouldnt cover tweets which is ridiculous, why do you think the sho
position, with what barr and the trump justice department tried to do there to rescue trump from that case. merrick garland is going to stick with that plan. oh, but wait, there s more. we also learned this week about bill barr and the trump justice department going after reporters to try to get their sources. first it was reporters of the washington post, then it was the pentagon correspondent at cnn, then most recently it was four reporters from the new york times. all of these reporters had written stories way back in 2017 that in their own ways were critical of trump and the trump administration. years later, in the last days of the trump administration, during 2020, william barr apparently approved subpoenas to try and find out those reporters sources for those stories. under william barr, they demanded these documents and records to try to find out reporter sources. they did it in secret without notifying the news organizations of what it was they were looking for.
policy as former attorney general explained in our interview. very clear violations of the justice department and a really serious issue. that s justice department officials breaking justice department policy, miss behaving in serious and substantive ways. what do you do about that? what is merrick garland now in charge of the justice department doing to clean up the behavior of his agency under its previous leadership? to find out what happened, to make sure people get in trouble for having done that so it doesn t happen again, so it doesn t become a de facto precedent that future corrupt presidents will use. what did merrick garland to in response to the revelations of that misbehavior by justice department official when it came to seeking reporter sources? what did he do? well at least for a while during the biden administration, the justice department kept
carroll case coming up later on in the show. we re also watching closely now in terms of how the justice department is going to go after reporters sources. after this kerfuffle with the washington post reporters in the new york times reporters just today new threats from the biden administration that they have opened a massive leak investigation into the source behind this big bombshell story from propublica about the richest americans radically under paying their taxes compared with regular americans. of course, unauthorized disclosure of private or stolen information from the irs is a big deal but so is using the power of the criminal law to try to pry reporter sources out of them. that was done improperly, potentially illegally under the trump justice department. under the biden administration, some of that continued. how are they going to handle
president that future corrupt presidents will use. what did merrick garland do in response to the revelations of that misbehavior by a justice department official when it came to seeking reporter sources? what did he do? at least for a while during the biden administration, the justice department kept doing it, kept seeking the reporters records and not telling the news organizations what they were doing. at least for a while. at least until it started to come out. come on. i mean, i get the poetic justice of putting judge merrick garland in this really big, prestigious job after he was so mistreated by the republicans in the senate and didn t get the seat. i get the karma over there. but at the justice department which he is running, there is a challenge unlike any other in government right now, which is to clean house at that department with its awesome