Did the Justice Department Really “Bad-Mouth” Glenn Greenwald to Muslim Leaders? Uh, Nope.

[sheshe2]

At the Washington Post, Erik Wemple fact checks one of the more inflammatory claims in the latest Glenn Greenwald article about alleged NSA/FBI spying on American Muslim leaders: that the Justice Department went around to Muslim groups before the story was even written, warning them Greenwald’s article was full of errors and misrepresentations. Would you be terribly surprised to find out Greenwald’s claims are … false? You wouldn’t?


This is the paragraph in question in The Intercept’s story:

The Justice Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story, or for clarification about why the five men’s email addresses appear on the list. But in the weeks before the story was published, The Intercept learned that officials from the department were reaching out to Muslim-American leaders across the country to warn them that the piece would contain errors and misrepresentations, even though it had not yet been written.

Wemple contacted Greenwald to ask for more information on this claim, and Greenwald responded:

He said that the remarks of the officials were “designed to poison our relationship with people in the Muslim community by bad-mouthing us and saying this story is inaccurate before it’s even written. They literally did it before we put pen to paper,” says Greenwald.

snip/

However, when Wemple reached out to Muslim-American groups and the Justice Department, he discovered that the truth was exactly opposite to the way Greenwald portrayed it. Muslim leaders had heard rumors about Greenwald’s upcoming article, and they specifically asked the Justice Department to discuss the issue.

Read more at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43588_Did_the_Justice_Department_Really_Bad-Mouth_Glenn_Greenwald_to_Muslim_Leaders_Uh_Nope.#jpsFUwgQwCGXIpll.99

[Historic NY]

1. I'm shocked, just absoutely shock.

[PoliticalPothead]

2. Actually yes, they did.

For the Record: Yes, the Government Really Did Trash-Talk Our FISA Story
By John Cook 12 Jul 2014, 1:58 PM EDT

The Washington Posts‘s Erik Wemple has cast doubt on two details we reported in Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain’s story this week on FBI and NSA surveillance of prominent Muslim-Americans. His quibbles are not central to the story, but they merit a response because he is simply wrong.

Wemple disputes two claims we made in the story: 1) that while we were reporting the story, officials at the Department of Justice reached out to Muslim community leaders and claimed that it would contain errors even though it hadn’t been written yet, and 2) that Justice Department officials refused to acknowledge our requests for comment.

With respect to 1), Wemple contends that it was Muslim leaders themselves who went to the Justice Department to talk about our story, and not the other way around. His evidence is an account of a regularly scheduled July 1 meeting between members of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and a variety of government officials at the Justice Department. According to a memo Wemple obtained, it was the ADC itself that put the issue of “NSA surveillance of community organizations” on that meeting’s agenda, purportedly because our reporting had by that point kicked up enough dust that word had gotten around. Wemple also talked to several participants at the meeting, who described government officials as simply cautioning against making “assumptions,” as opposed to making claims that story would be inaccurate.

“That the ADC placed this matter before the government,” Wemple writes, “raises doubts as to just how strenuously Justice officials were ‘reaching out’ to discredit the pending Greenwald-Hussain story.”

I’m not in a position to dispute Wemple’s account of the July 1 meeting. But we began hearing about Justice Department officials attempting to discredit our story long before that meeting took place. Below are three emails, dated June 19 and 20, that I sent to Justice Department chief spokesman Brian Fallon telling him that “the Department of Justice has been reaching out to Muslim leaders in advance of the story” and inviting him to correct any inaccuracies.

Whatever happened at the July 1 meeting, it occurred almost two weeks after we had already reached out to Justice officials about their efforts to undermine our story.

Read more: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/12/yes-government-really-try-undermine-fisa-story-response-washington-post/

[Thinkingabout]

3. Too much credibility has been given to procedures which occurred from 2002-2008.

Many people have just gotten details wrong, from the NSA is listening to all of our phone call and now Greenwald reveals something which happened six years before with out starting the story with six years before illegal activity was occurring and changes was made.