‘Any Way We Can Fix Fox?’ Attkisson Relays DOJ Fast & Furious Email (See Update: WH/DOJ Clearly Withholding Other Emails)

How long it would have taken from the time of its exposure for the press to have prominently reported on an email sent from the the Bush 43 White House to its Justice Department asking, “Any way we can fix the New York Times?” We can be confident that it would have taken less than a New York minute, and that saturation coverage would have continued for days.

Well, one revelation in a series of Saturday tweets by former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, one of only a very few establishment press journalists who did serious reporting on the Department of Justice’s Operation Fast & Furious Mexican gun-running operations beginning in 2011, is that the Obama administration was considering what it could do to “fix” another news operation.

Attkisson’s tweets arose from a review of over 10,000 Fast and Furious-related emails covering over 40,000 pages pried out the Obama administration by watchdog group Judicial Watch after years of stonewalling which ultimately resulted in a court order.

Here’s the news organization-targeting tweet Atkisson posted yesterday:

More context is at Attkisson’s related post at her web site, including obvious and successful strong-arming of several news outlets and continued administration stonewalling (bolds are mine):

Docs: Adviser Tells Attorney General Holder How to Manipulate Press on Fast & Furious

… p. 522

[DOJ's Tracy Schmaler discusses with White House's Eric Schultz on how to spin the press Oct. 4, 2014]

“I’ve talked to NYT, NBC and NPR —gave them all this. NBC not likely to go. Still waiting on other two.” [Note: Then, the documents redact the 'points' Schmaler actually sent to the news outlets. That is public information that should not be redacted.]

[Schultz to Schmaler]
Any way we can fix Fox?

p. 518

[Schmaler to Schultz regarding my reporting on Fast and Furious] “No stories..From NYT, AP, Reuters, WaPo, NBC, Bloomberg … I”m also calling Sharryl”s editor and reaching out to Scheiffer. She’s out of control”

[Schultz to Schmaler] “Good. Her piece was really bad for AG. Why do you think nobody else wrote? Were they not fed the docs?…And I sent NJ’s Susan Davis your way. She’s writing on Issa/FandF and I said you could load her up on the leaks, etc.”

p. 482

[Schmaler compliments Washington Post "Sari" Horwitz to Holder] “Sari (WaPo reporter) was good – pointed out Issa previous briefing, that weekly reports didn’t reveal tactics and noted previous op in Bush Admin.”

There’s more material which may become fodder for future posts, but for now, note how intense the White House and DOJ attempts to manage and intimidate the press were — and how willing most of the fourth estate’s members apparently were to go along.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: Great Friday catch at Powerline —

The funny thing is that the reference to “Sharryl” in the first email comes from out of the blue. It is obvious that Schmaler and Schultz had been talking about Attkisson and that the first email we see is the middle of a conversation, not the beginning. Yet, a search of the 40,000 pages produced by DOJ does not include a single additional reference to Attkisson. With the single exception of the email above, her name appears only when she is referred to in a news story that is reproduced in an email. Strange.

A reader writes with a theory:

The reason that this reference to Sharyl Attkisson made it into this document dump is that her name was mis-spelled (Sharryl rather than Sharyl). There are assuredly more emails about this that were searched for and deliberately withheld. They apparently did not search for this particular mis-spelling of her name.

Bingo. I think he is right. Someone at DOJ systematically searched for references to Sharyl Attkisson and pulled out all emails where DOJ and White House personnel were talking about her and, as we now know, how to block her Fast and Furious investigation. A single email, which gave away the game, slipped through because her name was mis-spelled.

It is harder than many people realize to cheat on a document production. Judicial Watch and others should now start hounding Eric Holder to release the rest of the story–the other emails where Holder’s DOJ and Barack Obama’s White House plotted to kill the Fast and Furious investigation by, among other things, influencing senior managers at CBS News.

Judicial Watch needs to go after contempt charges with the judge who ordered the emails’ release.