“I’m amused,” Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ Jan Crawford, “by these people who make a living disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I’m going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods.”

He went on after further questions, “Well, the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do and I will.”

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You don’t have to have been “in the business” for Barr’s nearly 50 years to understand what he means….

Some called for prosecution of the Times for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalized the publication of classified information and was signed by President Woodrow Wilson two months after the U.S. entered World War I. But as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, the Espionage Act is over-broad and the government tends to over-classify information, including even newspaper articles.

Accordingly, successive administrations, up to and including George W. Bush’s, have declined to prosecute news media for publishing stories, including leaks of classified information, that seem clearly forbidden by the words of Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act.

Abandoning that precedent, perhaps surprisingly, was the administration of President Barack Obama, who described himself as “a strong believer in the First Amendment” and dismissed “stories about us cracking down on whistleblowers or whatnot” as “a really small sample.”

Actually, they were an unprecedentedly large number. James Risen, co-byliner on the Times’s original Swift story, wrote in December 2016 that the Obama administration “has prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.”

Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Associated Press phone records of AP trunk lines and 30 separate phones. It identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage Act leak case. The supposedly liberal and pro-First Amendment Obama administration was actively pursuing what the Columbia Journalism Review called “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations.”

It’s true that Obama did not emit as many tart words for the press in his eight years as president as Trump has in his two and a half. But Trump has come nowhere near to challenging Obama’s record as the president most inclined to sic law enforcement on the press since Woodrow Wilson himself. Liberal Democrats aren’t necessarily the best friends of press freedom.  (Excerpted from The Washington Examiner artcle by Michael Barone)