The Associated Press media organization launched a lawsuit against the Department of Justice over the feds’ use of a fake news story to trail and capture a Washington state teenager who was suspected of making bomb threats.
The AP sought records from the agency about the 2007 operation, but never received them. So it joined forces with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to sue in district court to obtain access to the records, which they say would provide valuable insights about the FBI’s impersonation of a journalist, the Hill reported.
“We cannot overstate how damaging it is for federal agents to pose as journalists,” said Katie Townsend, the litigation director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement reported by the Hill. “This practice undermines the credibility of the independent news media, and should not be tolerated. Yet while the public clearly has a strong, compelling interest in knowing more about the FBI’s use of this tactic, the FBI seems determined to withhold that information. We have been left with no choice but to look to the court for relief.”
Documents from the government obtained by the media in October revealed an FBI agent pretended to be an AP reporter and created a fake story that appeared as a product of the Seattle Times, all in order to catch a teen who was allegedly making bomb threats to a high school. The story was emailed to that teen’s Myspace account. On the web, it was set in such a way so that malware would be planted on the computer of whomever opened it, and it was headlined to pique the suspect’s interest: “Bomb threat at high school downplayed by local police department.”
The fake story ultimately led agents to locate and arrest the teen, age 15.
But members of the media, and some lawmakers, weren’t amused.
Then-Sen. Judiciary Committee head Patrick Leahy warned in a letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder the mission carried “ethical and legal risks,” the Hill said.
The FBI, meanwhile, defended the action, calling it a justifiable strategy to stop an act of terror and saying “only the suspect was fooled,” the Hill said.
“No actual story was published, and no one except the suspect interacted with the undercover ‘AP’ employee or saw the fake draft story,” said FBI Director James Comey, in a letter to the New York Times about the incident.
