Attorney General Eric Holder went on the defensive on Tuesday explaining why the Justice Department secretly obtained two months worth of reporters' telephone records in an 'unprecedented' search for a confidential source.
'This was a very serious leak and a very, very serious leak,' Holder said at a press conference explaining the department's actions which have been criticized for going against the constitutional right to a free press.
Holder said that he recused himself from the making the controversial decision to subpoena the phone records of Associated Press journalists, saying that it was made by Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
He said that he was 'confident that the people involved in this … followed all applicable Department of Justice regulations' even though he claimed not to actually know the details of the decision-making process as a result of his recusal.
President Obama was forced to follow Holder's press conference with the release of a statement saying that the incident does not shake his faith in his close friend and the country's top legal adviser.
'The president has confidence in the attorney general,' press secretary Jay Carney said.
The controversy came when the Associated Press reported that two months worth of reporters' telephone records without their knowledge, obtaining a wide breadth of records that had nothing to do with the leak of information that they were concerned about.
The Justice Department has spoken in the past about how they were upset over the leak of information about a foiled al Qaeda plot where the terrorist group planned to detonate a bomb on a plane bound for the United States.
'I've been a prosecutor since 1976 and I have to say that this is among, if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks I've ever seen,' Holder said.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324501/Attorney-General-Eric-Holder-defends-deputys-decision-secretly-obtain-journalists-phone-records-saying-searching-leak.html#ixzz2TN3HoglR
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