because you're going to. be. coming up on r t it was revealed that the u.s. justice department was collecting associated press phone calls for months now the press will weigh in on president obama and the obama administration's explanation for how this could happen more on the fallout coming up. and authorities in moscow detained a member of the u.s. embassy under suspicion of him being a cia agent there are even calls for the suspected for the suspects expulsion from the country will have the latest on the case just ahead. her room will soon learn how the seventeenth round of negotiations on the transpacific partnership how will these talks turn out for trade relations and what's being hidden from the public we'll find out later in the show.

it's tuesday may fourteenth four pm in washington d.c. and i'm maggie lopez and you are watching our t.v. well we begin with the latest developments coming from the associated press department justice investigations the d.o.j. seized the phone records of twenty phone lines connecting journalists and editors ranging from washington d.c. to new york and hartford connecticut between the months of april and may of last year those phone lines cover one hundred journalists who work in the bureaus though the exact number of people of fact it is on no net still at this point the a.p. is one of the most highly recognized and respected news gathering agencies in the world so it was quite a shock to the journalism community last night when we discovered that the department of justice has been secretly monitoring the organization allegedly trying to root out the source of leaked classified information now executives from the associated press and members of congress are taking shots at the justice

department or to correspondent liz wall has more. it's being called an unprecedented government intrusion the justice department secretly collected two months of telephone records from the associated press and its reporters. the a.p. believes this story prompted the secret investigation the cia uncovered a plot to bomb a u.s. bound airliner a plot originated in yemen and was carried out by. the arabian peninsula by reporting this al qaeda was put on notice that the cia had an inside look at their activities be a piece as the justice department did not say why they needed the information but says among the nearly two dozen telephone records collected at least five of them were from reporters working on the story in question this was a very serious. very serious leak and a very very serious leak. i've been

a prosecutor since one thousand nine hundred six and i have to say that this is among if not the most serious it is even the top two or three most serious leaks that never see it put the american people at risk and that is not hyperbole eric holder announced today that he was recusing himself from this a.p. investigation the prominent news agency condemned the government's actions in a letter to holder yesterday associated press c.e.o. gary pruitt says quote these records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the a.p. during a two month period provide a roadmap to news gathering operations and disclose information about a.p.'s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know now the a.p. is asking for an explanation as to why the government pulled reporters' phone records without notifying them the worry now is the effect the news will have on the media and its sources i think the effect on the media has already been felt in

. you have sources that are being shut down doors just being shut in people's faces now that was probably the intention the intention was to scare. the turn off the faucet in other words from leaks in the wake of the controversy white house press secretary jay carney reiterated the obama administration's dedication to transparency he believes strongly in the need for the press to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism he also believes strongly as a citizen and as president in the need to ensure that classified information is not leaked because it can endanger our national security interests this balance between transparency and national security has been a delicate one since nine eleven the obama administration has a history of aggressively going after whistleblowers prosecuting more people for leaking classified information than any other administration combined and washington liz wall r.t.

well as you just saw team obama was on full fledged crisis management mode when the press went after white house press secretary jay carney as well as u.s. attorney general eric holder during separate press conferences today from the latest details on the benghazi consulate attack to the i.r.s. controversy and even the department of justice secret investigation on a.p. reporters there is no shortage of scandal coming out of d.c. this week to talk in greater detail about what the a.p. tops executive calls a massive and unprecedented intrusion and to how news organizations operate i'm joined now by marcy wheeler she's an investigative reporter at mt well dot net hi there marcy thank you so much for joining us now first of all you follow instances of surveillance this is not the first time that the department of justice has taken records from journalists or from private citizens why is this case so once usual and are we learned today as a result of this case in particular. the thing that's most unusual about this is

when the o.j. goes after reporters or reporters records they subpoena the report of they give notice and in this case they didn't do it in fact we still don't know when d.o.j. went and got these records no one in all of the blitz today have confessed that and so normally the a.p. would have had an opportunity to challenge this subpoena and argue for example that it was too broad which it probably wasn't argued that the public service interest of what they reported was not enough to merit turning over their sources but instead d.o.j. just went and took the records and gave notice after the fact and that's only happened a couple of times before and not for anywhere near as many journalists as this affected and they did in fact say that they use an exception and or it's not be able to communicate they said that it would actually infect the integrity of fact the a taggerty of this investigation now earlier this afternoon deputy attorney general actually responded to the eighty's letter and he said i have in every case to

strike a proper balance between the public's interest in the free flow of information and the public's interest in the protection of national security and effective enforcement of our criminal laws we believe we have done so in this manner your thoughts on this balance marcy do you believe the attorney general the assistant attorney general at his word. you know not at all one of the thing that's not getting enough reported about this is that john brennan was responsible for the most damaging part of this leak by his own sworn testimony and yet he claims he's not he's neither a target nor a suspect and after he testified to the f.b.i. he was given a big promotion so if this leak is so damaging as eric holder suggested today you said it was one of the three two or three worst in his entire thirty some year career why did john brennan get a promotion after being a key participant in this leak that's a very good question that i'm sure a lot of people are searching for the answers to mel before the attorney general's

office went into went after the a.p. phone records and conducted more than five hundred fifty interviews and reviewed tens of thousands of documents why was this article in may of two thousand and twelve deserving of so much time and so much manpower in comparison to some of the other leaks that have actually come out leaks like the stuxnet virus that was attacking iran looks like the targeted killing program leaks like those that are happened when osama bin ladin raid happened. well i think that's a really good question and we think stuxnet it is still going on eric holder kind of dodged a question on that today there's not much indication they're investigating the many many many many links on the targeted killing program probably because they have to admit which ones were white house sources in which ones were trying to rebut white house claims which were false but when it comes down to it when you look at what happened with the story the reason the white house got so angry at the a.p.

is because the a.p. noted that the white house had been saying at the time oh there's no threat of terrorism around the anniversary of osama bin laden's killing and by exposing this on their terms on the a.p. terms were rather than on the white house terms which they were going to do the next day anyway it kind of hurt the white house's ability to spin this and not not contradict their earlier claims and i think that's what it comes down to because when you look at the bad the damaging part of the leak didn't come from the a.p. yet as far as we know the a.p. is the one target of this investigation and that is a very interesting point that you bring up in this case and that is the fact that the a.p. actually delayed reporting on this story of the may seventh terror plot at the request of government officials who said it would actually jeopardize national security once officials said that those concerns were allayed the a.p. disclose the plot though the obama administration continued to request that the

story actually be held until the administration could make an official statement that's not how journalism works obviously they were going to run with the story they had held it as long as they could and then they went with it which is rightfully so so what do we really know about about this part of the investigation about the fact that they went to the steps they're not hiding anything from the government and get the government is so distrustful that it's actually monitoring their phone records. right i mean that it could be any number of things one is they're just really angry that the a.p. scooped them on their own story the other possibility is they got so embarrassed because republicans were making such a big deal out of self interested white house leaking that they had to have an investigation and nobody seems to want to include john brennan in that investigation but i do think the later revelations that this was all just a saudi plot it wasn't a real attack i think we're damaging on a number of fronts and i think some of our partners on this were badly positioned

because they broke their own national laws in doing this battle was damaging but i think this has this investigation has been used as an opportunity to go after the a.p. rather than do anything about leaks themselves now let's kind of switch the conversation a little bit and get into some hypotheticals here the reason why the supreme court dismissed the feisty amendment act lawsuit was because the people that were bringing the suit up the journalists of the authors and the professors they didn't have a standing because they couldn't prove that their phone records were actually being collected a.p. now has proof that their phone records were in fact taken could they bring a new suit to trial for instance against find a given this new information. there's no indication the that vice that was used here it appears to have been in ministry of subpoena signed by the deputy attorney general and so they could try and quassia the subpoena after the fact to get all of the records back that's kind of you know the barn door problem is the the horse is

already out it's not clear what other legal legal recourse they have but i do think that if and when anybody is ever charged on this they can challenge the propriety of the way these records were gotten because it doesn't comply with the own guidelines and finally marcy the department of justice that we were talking about these very strict policies that they have when it comes to subpoenaing records they have to have grounds to set a federal crime was committed they have to use every other resource and exxon they have to contact the news organization will forehand in most cases and they have to draw the narrowest possible subpoena is there any evidence that all of those or any of those measures were actually met the first two probably were the last two don't appear to have been i mean they've got as you said they've got records from a bunch of reporters who had nothing to do with the story it's not clear whether the timeframe of the record claimed was as narrow as deputy attorney general cole

claims it was but most importantly the only i mean normally the reason they don't give. people notice of a subpoena is if the investigation itself is secret but this was one of the most public leak investigations of the past decade and a half so it's not like everybody involved with this didn't know that it was coming after them and so the most likely conclusion is that d.o.j. just didn't want to subpoena a.p. directly because they didn't want to give them a chance to argue it in court and i frankly think they would have lost at least given the scope of this subpoena on on the subpoena because it doesn't because obviously i mean there's there's also the public interest question and there's a number of reasons it is a scary day when the fourth estate cannot do its job which is to keep the checks and balances of the government without the fear of repercussions marcy wheeler says she is an investigative reporter with empty we'll dot net thank you for your

reporting thanks well looks like a scene straight out of a cold war spy thriller an undercover agent dressed in a wig and ball cap wearing dark sunglasses actually takes to the streets of moscow to gather intel and to recruit spies ryan christopher fro girl was the third under secretary of the political department of the u.s. embassy in moscow and he was actually arrested last night the russian federal security service also known as the f.s.b. claims that full worked for the cia and was carrying out a mission to recruit informants of the for the cia for the cia for the u.s. the f.s.b. is calling mr fogel persona non-grata and they have actually asked for him to actually be immediately expelled from russia the u.s. state department confirmed for well was detained at a press briefing this afternoon but provided very few details. we can confirm that an officer it was going to see the script was briefly detained it was released we

have seen the russian foreign ministry announcement we have different from the boys here spot. oh it can confirm for you as a. member of our mission was to take the list but wait a minute i thought the cold war was over and what about all of this data sharing between the u. why said russia when it came to with this our naive case for instance all four and some insight retired cia officer raising mcgovern joins me now raising you so much for joining us both so let's start with this this in challenge and gathering and the sharing of intelligence between the u.s. and russia obviously they've been working together but there's still a lot of distrust between the two you know the misconception is that there is such a thing as a friendly intelligence service there's no such animal you can cooperate very closely with another intelligence service but friendly is beside the point now there is a point for this kind of intelligence collection and there is a very i do do not to mean that at all when i first come on we did see a we had

a soviet spy named costs. who gave us all manner of very very important information including information that helped avoid the cuban missile crisis so trade went better so there's a market for that the problem is supposed to be done with a degree of professionalism you're not supposed to get court you know especially with wigs and it looks like if you know if one assumes that the story is reasonably correct it does look like he was entrapped just like the f.b.i. in traps ninety nine percent of the so-called terrorists here this country you can entrap people by leading them on and it very much looks like if this is just a story is correct that this follows not very well trained in that he was entrapped into brush and that's what happens let's talk about that you're saying he was a very well trained or it didn't seem like that what i said it kind of seemed like it was straight out of

a movie he had wigs he had sunglasses he had knives see how the money in currency in different places he also had a handwritten notes that he was planning on heading to this person with very specific instructions details on it and he wanted that person to set up a g. mail account of all things david petraeus also use g.-mail accounts e-mail is used by so many people around the world to talk about this so why do you mail. well i think g. mail has a there's a special way you can be anonymous on g. mail and i don't know how to do that but apparently this one one fellow did now i think the major point here is that you're going to have boys will be boys you're going to have inertia here with a whole bunch of spies who were good billion we got twice as much money in the intelligence community then we had before nine eleven i mean what do you do with this money why do you try to recruit and what is the need to recruit russians like that will have to will won't know that until we find out what this russian was and

who he was and whether it was active in the caucasus but the major point is this is par for the course what will happen now is will will expel some russian spy from new york or from washington but very much as was the case three years ago with miss chapman chapman fellow girl of health zero literally t.v. star yeah well we traded ten for four and that one the f.b.i. got ten people hadn't done anything yet but we get four really good spies out of the russian prison so that'll happen and i think what we have here is the interesting question is that they made it public ok sometimes the russians or we would just sort of say hey we got this guy this is really rethink it's going to have it we don't want to we will want an incident in this case putin and the other said you know this would be a good shot across the swift boat by john kerry ok you know he came in and he says he's dictating to us and says whether we should do about syria let's just throw him

a lesson you know we can pretty powerful we can retaliate we can the shoot stuff off across his bow as well and the only sad part of all that is because we need russia syria. russia is not going to give up on syria and the major flaw was saying well we got to get rid of assad and we can't do that all by ourselves and i don't think the russians. going to let us do it let's get back to the repercussions in just a minute the super trouper replications of us could have photos protected by diplomatic community that's because he's very high up in the u.s. embassy in moscow so he will be expelled from russia assume assumably but he won't be imprisoned for anything that he does so we expect this type of blowback as you're saying for all these different organizations within russia and also within the u.s. well i think it's he had diplomatic immunity and under that kind of you know assuming the server yes right ok assuming it was an intelligence agent then he's

a diplomat undercover and he gets gets to go home and nothing happens to him now the real spies don't have diplomatic cover they're not so easily to provoke so we're trapped is that really that surprising for you i don't i don't understand all of the asli of the undercover spy world but is it surprising that he was so high up and allegedly a spy well actually you know it depends on how you look at it embassy has a third secretary that's you know there's a second secretary there for a secretary there's no political counselor you know so high up is a little a little exaggerated that he had to when it cover that's what counts and that's why you can go home to his wife and kids in the break about what he tried to do in russia if as i say these facts resemble the truth now one has to be a little careful these wigs these incredibly i make sure if sort of things i wouldn't put it past the russian service to play at the several of those to make it

look even more embarrassing to our man in moscow it was very interesting case and i'm sure we're honored to be learning a lot more about it in the near future i retire a cia officer ray mcgovern thank you for your insight most welcome. well get ready for another round of trans-pacific partnership negotiations the seventeenth round to be exact and still very little information about this massive international collaboration is actually known government officials in twelve countries are meeting with respective representatives excuse me from over six hundred businesses to discuss international trade for free trade talks are set to end in october with individual governments voting on the agreement shortly after if passed it would be the biggest trade agreement in history but something this big isn't without its fair share of critics groups have criticized the secrecy of these negotiations the brett what the t.p. actually covers and the possibility of it overriding individual country laws and so

much more one of those critics is laurie wallish she's the director of public citizen's global trade watch thank you so much for joining me so let's start off by talking about the schedule that they have in the seventeenth round of negotiations it's still very unclear what they were doing they put out a schedule giving us some time to the idea of what's going on and involves a lot of activities for stakeholders but what really do we know about what's going on there besides this aside from this this little very vague release well unfortunately the schedule is typically the same whatever they put on paper representatives from eleven countries meet together behind closed doors in the lobbies and in meetings before and after are corporate representatives trying to influence the talks the meetings the negotiations or trying to set up a set of binding international rules that each of the countries would have to conform all of their domestic laws to most of it has nothing to do with trade

rather all of these negotiators are sitting down despite the fact that their parliaments are congresses are doing business as normal and rewinding huge parts of their. mastic law so for instance one of the things i know they're talking about this round of negotiations is the seventeenth time in three years that they've gotten together and before that was a whole year under bush so since two thousand and eight this dance has been going on in the dark this time they're talking about these these as four workers countries in this involved in vietnam australia new zealand singapore malaysia visas for workers to come here and work and you would say isn't congress having a discussion right now about immigration why are they having a similar discussion behind closed doors between a few countries very good question lots of issues like that are in the tepee financial deregulation requiring us to import food that doesn't meet our standards

limits on internet freedom and very scary a proposal to set up tribunals outside a court system where foreign corporations could directly sue our governments and grab our tax dollars right out of the treasury that's a very interesting point and you think you did a really good job kind of wrapping up all the dangers that critics have of this behind the doors negotiations one of the aspects that really caught my attention while i was researching this is that negotiators within the u.s. are lobbying for the fact that they don't want congress to be able to debate it they want to simply a yes or a no answer it's called fast tracking talk about the dangers of fast tracking so fast track is a very arcane procedure used only sixteen times since it was cooked up by shakur richard nixon so it was first in one nine hundred seventy four when trade agreements really only cover real trade stuff like border taxes tariffs came up with this procedure and the idea was to speed through congress with no amendments

limit to debate tariff cuts well now here comes a trade negotiation through a commission branding right the t p p is much bigger than trade and the idea of those now being kicked around by some of the really big businesses there. president obama is to get this arcane procedure and this is how it works the executive branch gets to negotiate and sign an agreement without congress actually going to vote first it then gets to write legislation changing all of our domestic laws to meet the agreement it negotiated and signed without congress they're going to send it to congress and the normal committee procedure is forbidden no review no in many minutes in committee and then it goes to the floor forty five days automatic yes or no vote no amendments twenty hours of debate house staff it it's like a legislative lose ron you can put any terrible thing in sheer force of gravity takes it right through congress and into our lives very dangerous you don't need this obviously to pass an agreement that the public would like you only need this

to shove through congress something that is bad for the country and so this is the process that goes into the world trade organization that guys into nafta but we've had hundreds of decent trade agreements that didn't use this so very dangerous process but it only can go into place of congress agrees so we all have the ability by telling our members of congress they have constitutional exclusive authority over trade and we better tell them they need to stick to their authority not give it away we expect them to work for us and that starts with not giving away their power to make sure we have good trade agreements very interesting conversation thank you so much for coming into the studio laurie wallace director of public citizen's global trade watch thank you so much. well you may have learned about the separation of powers in civics class that there are three branches of government the executive branch the legislative branch and the judicial branch and that they have checks and balances to prevent any forms of tyranny well one judge is saying

that his colleagues are too quick to approve of executive branch secrecy this is u.s. district court judge royce lamberth at a conference george judge lamberth said that other judges are too quick to give exceptions for freedom of information act requests out of national security concerns josh bernstein of report political actually reported this the freedom of information act lets private citizens and media access information about the government however government agencies can apply for exception of one claims though through the court system which allows them to keep information secret if disclosing it could endanger national security judge lamberth said that other judges give a quote almost blind difference to these claims keeping citizens in the dark the judge said that the next intelligence scandal may not just be that far away as this week shows as some of those scandals may already be upon us and we're going have to

wait to see if there's future ones and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we have go to youtube dot com slash r t america. technology innovation and the developments around. the future of ard. real damage and complexity of this oil spill was not something you can grasp just by looking at dirty birds we have between four to five million people in this directly affected area of the coast and it's pretty clear why it's not being reported because b.p. can't afford to have a reported all along the gulf coast are clean they are safe and they're open for business if b.p.

is the single largest oil contributor to the pentagon the us war machine is heavily reliant upon b.p. and their oil this is a huge step backwards for the marker sea it's a step forward. corrects it is toxic as it looked like spraying and. it was it was not a picture that either the government or b.p. really wanted to have out there i don't want dispersants to be the agent. of this boils. down load the official publication to yourself choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. if you're away from your television just doesn't matter now with your mobile device you can watch on t.v. anytime anywhere.

good afternoon welcome to prime interest i'm harry and boring here and in washington d.c. and here's the stories that we're tracking today. you hear it first here on prime interest and we're calling it bloomberg gate and heating up by a scandalous break in at a washington hotel first at goldman sachs complained they got wind that bloomberg reporters are trowing their. records now we know at least one employee was keeping tabs on the none other of ben bernanke and tim geithner no word on how often the chairman checks the price of gold but in a related development more than ten thousand private messages sent from bloomberg terminals turned up on the web after a simple search. for the new york mayor's namesake from and we're just one week away from the most anticipated shareholder meeting of the u. .