BROKAW: HOLDER WILL RESIGN OVER PRESS PROBE ADO

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw remarked that “it’s tough to see” how Eric Holder can remain as U.S. attorney general following the recent controversies over DOJ investigations of journalists who have received information from whistleblowers within the government. “People think it would be better if he left,” Brokaw said. “It would be better for the president to get this cleaned up.” On CBS’s Face the Nation, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson charged that under the Obama administration, “the process of newsgathering is being criminalized.” She claimed that as a result, “reporters who work for the Times in Washington have told me that many of their sources are petrified to even return calls at this point. Appearing on the same program, Bob Woodward, who used leaked information to uncover the Watergate scandal, said that the issue goes beyond the DOJ’s investigations of reporters. “It’s all very troubling. And you lump all these things — the IRS, Benghazi, and this — together and what you’ve got is a feeling that no one’s coming clean, that we aren’t getting straight talk.” At the New Yorker, staff writer Steve Coll, a former president of New America Foundation, made the case that “the Justice Department has acted belligerently [against the press] even in cases where no grave harm to the public interest has been demonstrated, or where, as in the A.P. case, the leaks under suspicion have served to publicize the Administration’s successes.”