Federal Bureau Of Investigation

It was a rare moment in relations between the media and the government: In 2008, FBI Director Robert Mueller called the top editors at The New York Times and The Washington Post to apologize because the bureau had improperly obtained reporters' telephone records four years earlier.The extraordinary call was an admission that the FBI's actions violated Justice Department policy about seeking journalists' phone records. But nothing about what the FBI did in 2004 appeared to run afoul of any law.The Justice Department's latest effort to examine whom journalists are talking to — the secret subpoena of Associated Press phone records from April and May of last year — demonstrates how government investigators are guided more by policy and the judgments of high-ranking officials than by specific laws or, in this case, the need to satisfy an independent federal judge.The AP case involves a criminal investigation into who gave information to the news cooperative's reporters about a foiled bomb p...

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