The AP Phone Records

Via Kevin Drum, here’s an LA Times article on why the Administration was not happy about the leak of information to AP reporters.

Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials.

The operation received new scrutiny this week after the Justice Department disclosed it had obtained telephone records for calls to and from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press news service and its journalists in April and May 2012 in a high-level investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

To make a long story short, British intelligence had a mole planted in al Qaeda in the Saudi Peninsula, and he had given the U.S. some information on new bomb-making techniques and the people behind them, but information leaked to and published by the AP made further use of the mole impossible. Apparently the Administration was after the leaker, not the reporters.