SUPREME COURT TO NY TIMES: BUZZ OFF
I noted the NYTimes' attempt this weekend to seek protection from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for two accused blabbermouth reporters, whom the feds believe tipped off two Muslim charities fronting for terror.
Well, wonders never cease. The Times reports this afternoon that the court rebuffed the leak-dependent paper:
The United States Supreme Court refused today to stop a federal prosecutor from reviewing the telephone records of two reporters for The New York Times. The records, the paper said, include information about many of the reporters’ confidential sources.In a one-sentence order offering no reasoning and noting no dissenting votes, the Supreme Court rejected a request from The Times to stay a lower court’s decision while the paper tried to persuade the high court to review the case.
Today’s order effectively allows the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, to begin reviewing the records, which he has already obtained from phone companies, as early as this week.
The Justice Department told the Supreme Court on Friday that Mr. Fitzgerald is under enormous time pressure. “The statute of limitations,” the government said, “will imminently expire on December 3 and 13, 2006, on certain substantive offenses that the grand jury is investigating.”
The grand jury, in Chicago, is looking into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in December 2001 against two Islamic charities in Illinois and Texas. The disclosures to the reporters, the government lawyers wrote Friday, may have amounted to obstruction of justice.
Message to blabbermouths: You are not above the law, no matter how ostentatiously you wrap yourselves in the First Amendment.
John Stephenson: "I have to wonder if Ginsburg was sleeping again for this ruling."
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