Obama Administration Went Judge-Shopping to Spy on Fox Reporter

Over the weekend, another shoe dropped in the White House’s journalism spying scandal. Apparently, the Justice Department (DOJ) went judge-shopping in order to secure its search warrant to clandestinely snoop on Fox News reporter James Rosen‘s personal email account. It took three judges before the administration found one to grant its warrant; recently-disclosed DOJ court filings show the administration was turned down by two separate federal judges before being allowed by a third to read Rosen’s emails without his knowledge.

The Obama Justice Department was peeved by a 2009 article Rosen penned in which he reported classified intelligence about North Korean nuclear tests. For this, the DOJ initiated a leak investigation which called Rosen — in federal court filings - an “aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator” to a crime. The DOJ has admitted that embattled Attorney General Eric Holder personally approved the legal request to trove Rosen’s emails and asked the court for permission to do this without informing Rosen. Two separate federal judges rejected that argument and, ruling against the Obama Administration, ordered the Justice Department to inform Rosen they were reading his emails.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth overruled those judges and granted the DOJ’s request. Even so, in an unusual move, Lamberth publicly apologized just last week for the fact that these court documents were not made public until now- more than a year and a half after he ordered them unsealed in November 2011.

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