An FBI Outrage: The Bureau attempts to confiscate the records of the late columnist Jack Anderson

I guess I thought I’d seen it all after 25 years in Washington, but once again I realize that you will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of our law enforcement agencies, or overestimating the lack of common sense by these same folks.

Now I’ve just learned that the FBI is making an all-out attempt to rummage through the papers and notes of the late Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter and columnist Jack Anderson. Jack, as you might recall, passed away recently after a lengthy illness (he was also my first boss in Washington, and I spent six years as one of his reporters from 1981 to 1987).

I am not going to interject my own commentary into this ongoing tale. Let these e-mails speak for themselves:

First, this note on April 8th from Kevin Anderson, one of Jack’s sons and an attorney in Salt Lake City. This e-mail was sent to a number of Jack’s former reporters:


Hello All:

The family is trying to find out if anyone who used to work with Dad is aware of any connection between Dad and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former lobbyists with AIPAC who are being prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act; or Lawrence A. Franklin, who worked at the Pentagon and pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

If I missed anyone, please forward this message and cc me so I can add them to my e-mail list.

KEVIN N. ANDERSON


The replies, from reporters including Brit Hume, Dale Van Atta, and Indy Badhwar, all came back negative. Next came this e-mail on April 17th, together with the attached letter that I have copied and pasted below:


Hello Again:

Now the reason for my earlier e-mail will be more apparent. Attached is a draft letter to the FBI from Michael Sullivan on behalf of the family. We are outraged at government's request and hope that you all will support us in our refusal to cooperate. While I have attached a draft of the letter, it is for background/informational purposes only. We do not want you to quote directly from the letter or indicate that you have seen the letter. Michael is very uncomfortable with direct quotes and probably would not like me disseminating it so broadly. But, feel free to paraphrase or plagiarize from the attached. I am traveling until about 9:00 p.m. MDT, but will be available for additional comments after that. I am comfortable with quotes consistent with the content of the letter

Thanks again for your support.

KEVIN N. ANDERSON


Now the draft letter (which I include in its entirety given the wide distribution to current and former journalists on Kevin’s e-mail):


VIA REGULAR MAIL

Mr. Keith Salette, Supervisory Special Agent
Mr. Robert J. Porath, Special Agent
Ms. Leslie G. Martell, Special Agent
Federal Bureau of Investigation
601 Fourth Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20535

Re:
Request by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Review the Newsgathering Materials of Journalist Jack Anderson

Dear Messrs. Salette and Porath and Ms. Martell:

As you know, this firm represents the family of Jack Anderson in connection with the above referenced request. This letter follows up on our discussions during the meeting at my offices on April 5, 2006 at which you, on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), requested that the family of Jack Anderson permit the FBI to have access to Mr. Anderson’s journalistic work papers gathered during his more than six decades as a reporter for and the author of the Washington Merry-Go-Round. You represented that the FBI was seeking access to Mr. Anderson’s newsgathering materials in connection with its investigation of Messrs. Rosen and Weissman, two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”). Specifically, if we understood you correctly, you represented (1) that you had information to suggest that Messrs. Rosen and Weissman had met with Jack Anderson and/or one of his reporters and had shared classified materials; and (2) that you had information to suggest that “some other individual” met with Jack Anderson and/or one of his reporters and that this individual could accurately be characterized as an agent of a foreign intelligence service. You represented that these contacts may “go back to the early 1980s.” Finally, although you indicated that you had not reviewed past Washington Merry-Go-Round columns for the period in which you purport to be interested to determine whether Mr. Anderson ever even wrote about subjects pertinent to your inquiry, you nevertheless represented that you were seeking “reporter’s notes” and source materials for the period from 1980 through the present that might be contained in Mr. Anderson’s newsgathering materials.

After giving the matter careful consideration, Mr. Anderson’s family wishes to inform you that it cannot accede to your request. The family has met and discussed this matter at some length and feels that it has a duty to act in a manner that is wholly consistent with the wishes and intent of their deceased father and husband. In order that you might better understand the family’s position, it wishes to inform you of the following:

Jack Anderson was a patriot with a deep and abiding love for his country and its people. While he firmly believed in the essential goodness and wisdom of its people, he was often critical of those in government who wield power. He felt strongly that the role of a free press was to stand as sentinel, ready to sound the alarm when government overstepped its bounds. In Jack Anderson’s view, a journalist’s sacred duty was to criticize government when appropriate in the hope that it might do better. The press was certainly never intended to serve as the government’s handmaiden. As Mr. Anderson explained regarding his reporting on the Nixon Administration: “I have always published what I thought the American people ought to know.… Occasionally the decisions have been agonizing ones. But usually, when something has come across my desk classified as a national security secret, it has involved the misdeeds and manipulations of people who had abused the public trust, and then had swept the evidence under the secrecy stamp.” Similarly, he wrote about the fundamental precepts he learned from his mentor Drew Pearson who “took pains to inculcate his convictions on the moral objectives of the newspaper column and the just society: to champion the cause of the voiceless instead of the dominant, the dissenter as well as the organization, the helpless against their exploiters, the small enterprise over the octopus, the public’s right to know and control rather than the official’s prerogative to conceal and manipulate.” In short, his views can best be summed up as follows: Ours is a government of the people. The people are the sovereigns; those who work in government are our servants. We the people have the right to know what our servants are doing when they act in our name. In Mr. Anderson’s view, this bedrock principle could not be otherwise; for, as he emphasized repeatedly: “The stakes are too high in a democracy where everything rests on an informed people.”

Indeed, Jack Anderson wrote about what drove him as an investigative journalist: “I have tried to break down the walls of secrecy in Washington. But today the walls are thicker than ever. More and more of our policymakers hide behind those walls. Only the press can stand as a true bulwark against an executive branch with a monopoly on foreign policy information. It has all the authority it needs in the First Amendment.” Lastly, please understand that Jack Anderson was a deeply religious man who viewed investigative reporting as a noble calling from God. He believed that life is an eternal struggle between good and evil, and that the United States Constitution was “a divinely inspired document.” For Jack, the First Amendment itself was a divinely inspired charter that sanctioned his journalistic mission.

With the benefit of this background, the family hopes you will appreciate that when they turn to the present matter, they cannot help but think that Jack Anderson would have been troubled by the present prosecution of Messrs. Rosen and Weissman. Indeed, for anyone who believes in the fundamental importance of robust public debate to our American system, this prosecution is troubling. While Messrs. Rosen and Weissman find themselves in the dock today, there is no reason under the government’s reading of the law, that journalists will not find themselves facing similar charges tomorrow. Rather than supporting such a prosecution, it is more likely that Jack Anderson would have used the Washington Merry-Go-Round to criticize this effort as a dangerous departure and government overreaching.

After much discussion and due deliberation, the family has concluded that were Mr. Anderson alive today, he would not cooperate with the government on this matter. Instead, he would resist the government’s efforts with all the energy he could muster. To honor both his memory and his wishes, the family feels duty bound to do no less.

In addition, the scope of the government’s review is too broad. The duty you feel as agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to remove all material marked as “classified” in any form and either permanently retain them or return them in some redacted or edited form would destroy the historic, political and cultural value of Mr. Anderson’s papers. In addition, it could still expose the identity of sources of the Washington Merry-Go-Round. As the family understands the government’s interpretation of existing laws, this could expose those sources to criminal prosecution.

Finally, as a practical matter, the family notes that it is extremely unlikely that Mr. Anderson’s journalistic work product contains material that may be pertinent to your inquiry in any event. First, the relevant time period specified in the indictment of Messrs. Franklin, Rosen and Weissman is from April 1999 until August 27, 2004. See Indictment, United States v. Franklin, No. 05-225 (E.D. Va. Aug. 4, 2005). Due to his failing health, Mr. Anderson was no longer actively engaged in reporting during the relevant period. Second, because you represented that Mr. Anderson and/or his reporters had contacts with Messrs. Rosen and Weissman that “go back to the early 1980s,” the family undertook to contact all the eminent journalists who shared the by-line with Jack Anderson during the period from ___ to ___: Dale Van Atta from ___ to ____; Michael Binstein from ___ to ____; and Jan Moeller from ___ to ____. None of Mr. Anderson’s co-authors were aware of any significant contacts with AIPAC or its lobbyists Rosen or Weissman during those years. What is more, in an effort to be thorough, the family also contacted over 45 former Washington Merry-Go-Round reporters who worked on the column since the late 1960s and none were aware of significant contacts with AIPAC or its employees. Indeed, it appears from the reporters that the contacts with AIPAC were minimal at best and involved routine newsgathering; for example, to get updates on the hunt for Nazi war criminals or to obtain information for news stories on anti-Semitism in the United States and abroad. Last, as we explained to you during our meeting, the notion that Mr. Anderson would have maintained “reporter’s notes” that might be of use to you, flies in the face of his general reporting practices, i.e., he took and maintained very few handwritten notes.

We hope the foregoing has been helpful to you in understanding the family’s views regarding this matter. If there is something you feel the family has overlooked in its deliberations or that you wish the family to consider further, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Very truly yours,



When I saw this letter, I asked Kevin if the FBI had demanded to review Jack’s papers and take any records that they deemed to be classified. His response:



To clarify, yes.the FBI has requested that it be able to review Jack’s papers supposedly to look for AIPAC related stuff, but they want to review all of the boxes and say they will be "duty bound" to seize anything that is marked classified, check with the relevant agency and, if the documents have been or can be declassified they will be returned so marked.


But there’s more. I next heard from Mark Feldstein, an award-winning journalist with CNN and WUSA (and Jack intern in 1978) who on the faculty of the George Washington University School of Communications, and is finishing a book about Jack and, among other topics, his battles with the Nixon White House. Here’s Mark’s e-mail:


Yes, 2 FBI agents came to my home... ...flashing their badges and demanding access to the papers the late Jack Anderson donated to my university. A somewhat intimidating experience for your average professor, I would say, but just a small part of the most concerted assault against the news media since the infamous days of Richard Nixon--ironically, the very subject of the book that I am now writing ("Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture," to be published next year by Farrar Straus & Giroux). Hard to know whether Jack would be amused, outraged, or proud--probably all three.

Mark


I don’t know whether to be amused or outraged by this—or more likely both. Jack has not been an active journalists for many years, and the events and papers under scrutiny date back 20 or 30 years. How could they be relevant to any ongoing criminal investigation, let alone contain anything close to resembling state secrets. Surely, the Bureau must have anticipated that their keystone cops antics would be made public—or maybe I am giving them too much credit. Stay tuned…