The Justice Department bullies and threatens investigative journalists for doing their jobs, former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson testified Thursday during confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, urging her to change matters if she is confirmed.
"They bully and threaten the access of journalists who do their jobs, news organizations that publish stories they don’t like, and whistleblowers who dare to tell the truth,” said Attkisson, one of several journalists who have accused the DOJ of spying on them, reports
The Hill.
After she left CBS last year, Attkisson filed a $35 million lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder over allegations that his department spied on her and others who were investigating Operation Fast and Furious, the DOJ's failed guns sales scheme that resulted in Mexican drug cartels obtaining weapons.
Attkisson said Thursday that her investigation of the Fast and Furious project upset Obama administration officials, who pushed her superiors at CBS to stop her story, and that the DOJ kept her from briefings on the matter.
"Government officials weren’t angry because I was doing my job poorly,” Attkisson said. "They were panicked because I was doing my job well."
She said it wasn't until later that she learned through three independent forensic examinations that the government was spying on her remotely by monitoring her computer keystrokes, capturing passwords, and eavesdropping on her conversations.
"If you cross this administration with perfectly accurate reporting they don’t like, you will be attacked and punished,” Attkisson said. "You and your sources may be subjected to the kind of a surveillance devised for enemies of the state."
Earlier this month,
Attkisson told Newsmax TV that she will get "facts and information" that was deliberately withheld by the government through her lawsuit.
"The purpose of the lawsuit isn't to stop harassment," Attkisson told Newsmax's Ed Berliner, but to "shed light on what happened, so that when some computers are illegally intruded upon — especially a journalist whose work and whose sources are compromised — it should be [considered] very serious things, no matter where you stand."
Attkisson, who
resigned from CBS last March, claiming the network stymied her work out of a liberal political bias, and says that she has no doubt there are people in the administration — and among Obama's allies on the left — who continue to work to discredit her.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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