Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, doesn’t yet believe that Department of Justice investigators impeded on the freedom of the press by secretly obtaining the phone log records of Associated Press journalists in connection to an administration leak of classified information last year.
“I’m not one of them that has said the Department of Justice has exceeded their boundaries,” Feinstein told Roll Call on Wednesday. “I think it’s important that we find out exactly what was done. As I understand it, it was a very short period of time and the only thing collected was what we call metadata — which is not content of a call, it’s numbers. I would assume because prosecutions are so difficult to make in this era that being able to trace where the leak came from to the person that receives the leak is important.”
