Give credit to Jake Tapper, senior White House correspondent for ABC News, who in a press conference challenged the Obama Administration for celebrating aggressive journalists that have died in Syria as it simultaneously goes after similar journalism in the United States.

In any case, given the way the government responds to FOIAs, we’ll probably learn more about this in 5 years or so.

The government says it hasn’t subpoenaed the phone records of any reporter. Presumably they mean no reporter has been the target of a subpoena. But with a community of interest subpoena, of course, the government would get Risen’s call data without subpoenaing him directly.

The government appears to hope three time’s a charm. The last two times they subpoenaed James Risen in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, Judge Leonie Brinkema quashed the subpoena. But they’re trying again, this time to get him to testify at Sterling’s trial.

Who says fun things don’t come on Fridays? There is some nice little spooky news on the wire this afternoon. Jeffrey Sterling, a former veteran CIA agent on the Iran beat, was charged back in January with leaking classified information to a reporter. the reporter is widely known and accepted to be none other than the New York Time’s James Risen, and the material supposedly was contained in his book State of War. The prosecution, headed by DOJ leak hitman William Welch (disgraced supervisor in the unethical prosecution of Ted Stevens). For some unknown reason, Welch was installed by the Obama/Holder DOJ as head of their unprecedented crackdown on leaks to the media.

The New York Times has one of the most stunning headlines of the day: Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million. The story tells a story of Afghanistan’s own “Too Big to Fail” problem that offers opaque descriptions of precisely what caused the problem, but waits until the 17th and 18th paragraph to explain the real problem with the bank. The fact that our government is discovering, but not revealing, the degree to which we have been backing “a vertically integrated criminal enterprise” is the real story.

Now Brennan’s role in negotiating with Stirling on the discrimination claims already provides one reason why Brennan might have a personal interest in seeing DOJ renew its pursuit of Stirling.

But there’s another: to go after Risen personally.

After all, whatever role Brennan had in Stirling’s discrimination suit, there’s no reason to believe it put Brennan at legal risk.

But Risen’s other big scoop in State of War did.

As I have shown, for at least a year, John Brennan was in charge of the process that picked who Dick Cheney would wiretap in his illegal domestic surveillance program.

This all seems to be about the CIA’s efforts to prevent you from knowing that it gave Iran nuclear blueprints in 2000.

The only way the British Defence Advisory notice to UK media makes sense,in my opinion, is if Britain’s partners are making similar efforts to request prior restraint from the other major news outlets that have the Wikileaks dump.

Very Serious Journalists, like James Risen, may look down their noses at bloggers, imagining us at our keyboards in our pajamas. They can laugh, but the kind of journalism practiced by FDL is running rings around them. “He said/she said” may work for the Village media, but FDL aims to sort out who’s right and why, and then tries to make things better. If FDL’s version of journalism appeals to you, we could use a little financial support to make things even better down the road.