9 Mar 2017 11:54 am
Looking at someone's calling records is not the same as being 'wiretapped.'Fox News reporter smacks down Sean Spicer’s claim that his phone was wiretapped under Obama
During Wednesday’s briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer made a false allegation that a Fox News reporter’s phone was tapped during Obama’s presidency.
Spicer was commenting on a WikiLeaks dump on Tuesday that detailed the CIA’s alleged widespread hacking. “James Rosen had his phone, multiple phones tapped,” Spicer said.
Rosen himself debunked the claim during an appearance on Fox & Friends on Sunday. “I was not wiretapped, my parents were not wiretapped, which is where you place a listening device on someone’s telephone line and you listen to their conversations,” said Rosen.
Rosen retweeted a number of tweets on Wednesday after Spicer’s false allegations, including one that read, “No evidence of that. His calling records were obtained by Justice Dept.”
Rosen's records were looked at in the course of an investigation involving the leak of classified info.
The same type of investigation that is now being called for by 45 himself.
Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks.
The case centers on Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department arms expert accused of passing details to Rosen from a classified report within hours of its release to a small circle within the intelligence community.
Investigators pulled Rosen’s security badge records, phone logs and his personal e-mails, but they never charged him with a crime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ju ... ory_1.html