"If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist..."

"... he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama," writes James Risen in the NYT.

Over the past eight years, the [Obama] administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

I experienced this pressure firsthand....

Now that the power must be handed over to Trump, it's time to put a spotlight on all of Obama's overreaching.

The administration’s heavy-handed approach represents a sharp break with tradition. For decades, official Washington did next to nothing to stop leaks....

Things began to change in the Bush era, particularly after the Valerie Plame case. The 2003 outing of Ms. Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative led to a criminal leak investigation, which in turn led to a series of high-profile Washington journalists’ being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury and name the officials who had told them about her identity. Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, went to jail for nearly three months before finally testifying in the case.

The Plame case began to break down the informal understanding between the government and the news media that leaks would not be taken seriously....

But isn't that what the liberal media demanded at the time?

Fortunately, power shifts from one party to the other. That's some kind of safeguard. If you exaggerate your power, your successor will have exaggerated power.

Unfortunately, people are short-sighted.

"Jayson Blair and the resurrected corpse of Spiro Agnew would be a great diavlog."

Former NYT reporter Judith Miller goes on BloggingheadsTV to talk about this article about female suicide bombers, and gets a tirade of abuse from the commenters:

Oh my god! Where do hack NYTimes reporters go to die, figuratively speaking of course! Why it's Blogging Heads TV!!!! Will we be seeing Rick Bragg and Howell Raines here next?

Oh God. Bloggingheads has stooped pretty low in the past, but really - Judith Miller? A dishonest hack and a proud purveyor of pre-war propaganda, one of the chief vehicles for the lies the Bush administration used to sell its phony war? Why is she being given a platform here? Could Bob not find anyone more intellectually dishonest - the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, perhaps?...

Why bother watching this? How would it be possible to guess when she's lying and when she isn't? There ought to be some minimal standards for who appears on bloggingheads.

Next up on Bloggingheads - Jayson Blair and Steven Glass...

Jayson Blair and the resurrected corpse of Spiro Agnew would be a great diavlog.

Etc. etc.

ADDED: Since I've been savaged by commenters at bhTV, I may have a distorted perspective, but I hate to see Miller treated this way. For one thing, she's talking about an interesting important subject, and it would be nice if people could pay attention to it. For another, I think her experience there will deter others from going on the show. You already have to face an interlocutor who will argue with you, perhaps intensely, in an hour-long session that will not be edited. But you also see that a strange horde of pseudonymous commenters is waiting to shred you.