The White House on Wednsday asked Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to reintroduce legislation that would grant journalists added protection from federal seizure requests, the New York Times reports:
The official said that President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, called Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who is a chief proponent of a so-called media shield law, on Wednesday morning and asked him to reintroduce a bill that he had pushed in 2009. The measure was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee but never received a floor vote.
The new push comes as the Obama administration has come under fire from both parties amid the disclosure this week that the Justice Department, as part of a leak investigation, secretly used a subpoena earlier this year to obtain a broad swath of calling records involving Associated Press reporters and editors.
A spokesman for Schumer told the Times that he would reintroduce a compromise version of the bill that passed in the Judiciary Committee.
