this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
4 points (52.2% liked)

News

21662 readers
6508 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Archive link

THIS IS A story about a story — one that I haven’t finished reporting.

Federal prosecutors are so consumed by my efforts to report on a terrorism court case that they accused me in a recent filing of having “improper motives.” They said that, by doing routine reporting, I was somehow colluding with a terrorism defendant to “taint the jury pool and undermine the fairness of the trial.”

These dangerous claims are the subject of an evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Thursday.

Although President Joe Biden boasts that his administration defends press freedoms around the world, his Justice Department’s public claims are an egregious attack against me filled with baseless assumptions and statements taken wildly out of context.

Prosecutors appear to have subjected me to this attack for no reason other than that I was doing journalism in the public interest. (Lawyers for The Intercept submitted a letter to U.S. District Judge Jonathan J. C. Grey and will be present at the hearing Thursday.)

top 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] BradleyUffner 28 points 4 days ago

Sorry to say this, but regardless of the validity of your claims, the way you present your story, like having everything in capital letters, kinda makes you sound a little like a conspiracy nut. You may want to work on your presentation a bit.

[–] Senokir 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Paywall link + no context given as to what actually occurred other than someone claiming that they are being silenced. That very well may be true but without more context I can't make that determination. It may also well be true that the claims by the DoJ are true and that the narrator of this article is an unreliable narrator.

If you want me to think or feel a particular way then don't lock the article behind a paywall and give actual context so that I can come to my own conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They're not being silenced or anywhere close to it. The prosecutors asked the judge to order the defendant to stop talking to them about some aspects of the case, I guess because they don't want anything that might build any sympathy for the guy they're prosecuting, and the judge (apparently, from all appearances, since they wrote the story and seem to still be talking to the guy uninterrupted) said no.

And then the guy wrote a story like "hey it seems like every single action these prosecutors are taking is like they want to put him in prison, what the fuck is that, that's not balanced."

FWIW it's not a paywall; they just want your email address

[–] Senokir 3 points 4 days ago

Thank you. That's about what I suspected. And an email may not technically be a paywall but imo if they're going to sell it or even just use it to spam me with shit that's just another form of payment. I could make a fake email address or something but honestly I'm not going to go through all of that for what seems like a clearly shitty article from that parts that I can see.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago

What's with the all caps

If the Biden administration is serious about protecting press freedoms, officials from Washington might want to have a stern talk with federal prosecutors in Detroit.

Biden's officials absolutely should not have a stern talk with prosecutors from anywhere; the DOJ's day to day business is totally separate from being dictated by any political official for very good reasons.

If you told me the FBI and federal prosecutors were overreaching and being wildly way too aggressive, I'd agree with you, but that has not a lot to do with Biden and it bloody well should stay that way.

Even that being said, I don't see all that much in this other than them aggressively investigating and prosecuting. That's their job. There's all this stuff like:

When Naser returned to the U.S. from the trip, he found himself subjected to intense FBI questioning and surveillance. And he wasn’t alone. Dennison was an unwitting pawn for the FBI. Anyone who communicated with him became a target.

In April 2023, federal prosecutors complained in a court filing that Naser “gleefully shared information” with me. My calls with Naser became a central focus of a hearing in June 2023, during which prosecutors admitted that the protective order did not prohibit Naser from talking to me about the evidence in his case.

“He did not improperly distribute this information,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Dmitriy Slavin in the June 2023 hearing. “Because information that is general discovery which is still concerning this case, there’s no limit on him sharing that information with the media, and he has made it his mission to share that information with the media.”

So basically, they asked him questions and served him with search warrants, and then they charged him with a crime. When he talked to journalists, the prosecution asked the judge to make him stop (and from the fact that he didn't stop, it kind of sounds like the judge told them no.)

And, while doing so, they cooperated with local law enforcement to do their investigation, which they had some ability to do because the guy pepper-sprayed his boss and took money (which he "believed he was owed") from the cash register.

I am sure that it is not fun being questioned by the FBI or charged with a federal crime, but this guy's using all this language like "Prosecutors appear to have subjected me to this attack" (their court filings). I mean it's their job to attack the defendant. And then it's the defendant's job to defend themselves (which is often an unfair battle if you're in a foreign country and the full weight of the federal government is trying to fuck you over). The prosecution doesn't get to decide if you go to prison; that's the judge's job to sort out with the prosecution doing their best to attack you. I get that it's an unfair process that needs reform but I don't see what is so outlandish about them in this case doing a prosecution of the guy they're trying to prosecute.

[–] qx128 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

> mfw the paywall is preventing me from reading his “story” more than the Biden administration 🙄🥱😂

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I've added an archive link to the summary.

Thanks for the head's up.

[–] Thekingoflorda 7 points 4 days ago

Could you maybe edit your post to have it not be all caps?

[–] Pfeffy 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm with the prosecutors. This seems like some rookie journalist is just parroting the stories he's told by a criminal before trial without providing any evidence. He could have at least talked to some scholars or lawyers or get somebody to agree but it's really just a story that seems to be made up.

[–] Dkarma 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How is that different from local news stations just parroting often verbatim, from police reports?

[–] Pfeffy 1 points 2 days ago

Why does it have to be different from that and how does that have anything to do with what I said?

[–] Treczoks 4 points 3 days ago

Screaming does not really help your point. On the contrary.