AP President Blasts "Unconstitutional" Phone Records Probe

The Associated Press doesn't question the Justice Department's right to have seized two months' worth of its phone records, the organization's president and CEO Gary Pruitt said Sunday on CBS "Face the Nation." It was the methodology - "so sweeping, so secretively, so abusively and harassingly overbroad," he said - that breached the Constitution.

As part of its criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot in Yemen, the department "issued a secret subpoena for the phone toll records for 21 AP phone lines and these were phones lines for reporters, direct lines, cell phones, home phones but also the office numbers," Pruitt explained.

"So over 100, approximately a hundred journalists used these telephone lines as part of newsgathering and over the course of the two months of the records that they swept up, thousands upon thousands of newsgathering calls were made.

"...Under their own rules, they are required to narrow this request as narrowly as possible so as to not tread upon the First Amendment," he went on. "And yet they had a broad, sweeping collection, and they did it secretly. Their rules require them to come to us first but in this case they didn't, claiming an exception, saying that if they had it would have posed a substantial threat to their investigation. But they have not explained why it would and we can't understand why it would."

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