Attorney General Eric Holder said in a somewhat shocker of a statement — given the White House’s reputed animosity with Fox News — that in the end, he wished he had handled the subpoena for the cable outlet’s journalist, James Rosen, a bit differently.
Mr. Holder made the statement while replying to a question at the “Washington Ideas Forum” from Atlantic magazine about his one do-over wish, the New York Post reported.
“I think about the subpoena to the Fox reporter, Rosen,” Mr. Holder said, the New York Post reported. “I think that I could have been a little more careful looking at the language that was contained in the filing that we made with the court — that he was labeled as a co-conspirator.”
The label set off a firestorm among the media world and among First Amendment supporters. The Justice Department used that court filing to obtain a search warrant and go through Mr. Rosen’s emails to find his source about a story he broke regarding North Korea’s nuclear plans in 2009.
The Justice Department did back off the co-conspirator label — eventually. But Mr. Holder was put in the position of meeting one-on-one with various news outlets in order to do damage control, the New York Post reported.
Mr. Rosen is hardly appeased by Mr. Holder’s latest claim and said the outgoing attorney general’s remarks “scarcely address the relevant facts of his conduct,” the New York Post said.
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Mr. Rosen, in a statement to Fox News, also said Mr. Holder’s actions “raise[d] serious concerns about the state of press freedoms under the present administration.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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