U.S. Government Seizes Records of Associated Press In Unprecedented Search and Seizure Of American Press Organization

The United States government, through its Internal Revenue Service, has seized records from phone lines associated with the Associated Press news organization.

The AP. said today that for a period of two months in 2012, the government, according to AP conducted a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into the operations of one of the largest news gathering organizations in the world, as reported by the Washington Post.

According to the Washington Post, the records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

AP CEO Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency's website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 lines assigned to the agency and its reporters.

'There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,'' Pruitt said in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder. 

The U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia, which notified the AP of the seizure, issued a statement on Monday saying it was ''careful and deliberative'' when dealing with issues around freedom of the press, according to the Washington Post.

'We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,'' the office said.

The letter did not state a reason for the seizure, but the AP speculated that prosecutors have previously said they are conducting a leaks investigation into how the news cooperative learned about an al Qaeda bomb plot in Yemen before it was made public last year.