RUSH: The Associated Press: The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusionÂ’ into how news organizations gather the news.”

The Obama administration is spying on state-controlled reporters from the Associated Press. Don’t they know that the AP would have given him this information if he just asked for it? “The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.”

“The government would not say why it sought the records. US officials have previously said in public testimony that the US attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

“In the letter notifying the AP received Friday, the Justice Department offered no explanation for the seizure, according to [the lawyer’s] letter and attorneys for the AP. The records were presumably obtained from phone companies earlier this year although the government letter did not explain that. None of the information provided by the government to the AP suggested the actual phone conversations were monitored.”

But that doesn’t get around the fact that the Obama regime is spying on AP reporters, and who knows who else. You have to wonder what all these mainstream news reporters think of this. You know, you let a president like Richard Nixon do something like this and there are calls and demands immediately for impeachment. The administration will probably say that the Department of Justice was collecting AP phone records of low-level workers at the AP, not anybody really major. But, I mean, this is a pretty big thing.

Now, some have speculated, “You know, Rush, the AP is not gonna be upset by this. The AP is not gonna be bothered at all. I mean, they may act upset for a while, but, at the end, they’re gonna end up forgetting it, because the last thing the AP wants is to hand conservatives a victory, and they’re not gonna help us in categorizing Obama and his administration as anything chicanerous.” But I’m not sure about that. Folks, if that were the case, if the AP didn’t think anything of this, they would not have written that letter to the government protesting what took place. I know that they’re pro-Obama all the way, but that doesn’t hide the fact that the AP was spied upon. The AP was attacked.

Now, it may not last, but they went public with their attack, and they have done some damage. This is the kind of thing that Obama’s supporters think is impossible with Obama. Spying on their own. Now, if the AP had been replaced by a conservative news organization, Obama was spying on a conservative organization, they would have applauded that. But this is the regime spying on its own stenographers. And I guarantee you, Obama’s supporters are scratching their heads because they’re made up of civil libertarians and people who have these lofty ideals about Obama.

The fact is, Nixon never did anything like this. Nixon never really used the IRS against his enemies. And he also never really had an enemies list. I mean, those are popular media myths. The so-called enemies list was created and maintained by John Dean, but Nixon was pretty much a stranger to it.