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Barack Obama’s administration has been the worst on record for whistleblowers, said New York Times journalist James Risen on Abby Martin’s show Empire Files.
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Risen, who fought a seven-year legal battle to protect his source, said that he was surprised at Obama’s “real zealous approach” to his case and to “inconvenient” investigative journalists “in a way that is unprecedented in modern American history.”
George W. Bush had also pressured Risen and the New York Times back in 2005 to not expose his administration’s circumventing of congressional law to implement mass surveillance, and was successful in delaying its publishing until after election year.
Obama is very similar to Bush, said Risen, in their selective persecution of journalists and whistleblowers. Both also worked to greatly expand an unsustainable war economy and develop the “Kafka-esque nature of what we’re trying to do as a country on counterterrorism."
Watch Abby Martin’s show to hear more about Risen’s trailblazing career: from dispelling lies about Iran’s nuclear weapons program to uncovering government infiltration and impediment of a lawsuit by the families of 911 victims.
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