Lichtblau of 'NYT' Explains Attempt to Halt His Bank Records Scoop

By: Joe Strupp Eric Lichtblau, one of two New York Times' reporters who broke today's story of a secret government monitoring of private banking records - which the Bush Administration sought to block - said the White House arguments to halt the story were not as strong as those that had kept a previous report on secret wiretapping out of the paper for a year.

"They were similar in terms of the objections raised not to publish," Lichtblau told E&P today. "That the bad guys knew we were listening to them, but they don't know exactly how." But he said the objections "did not rise to as high a level as last time."

But Lichtblau stressed that the paper gave as much consideration to the White House concerns on the banking story as on the wiretapping report, actually spending several weeks in discussions about the Bush Administration objections.

"I don't think we could reasonably be accused of moving too quickly," he said. "We waited so long that the competition caught up to us."
This comment referred to the Los Angeles Times' posting a story about the bank records program on its Web site last night. That paper said it had also been asked by the administration to hold off.

Lichtblau said that in the case of the previous Pulitzer-winning story, which detailed a National Security Agency (NSA) program of wiretapping, President Bush himself had gotten involved. The president was not been directly part of the effort to halt publication of today's story. "It was done at the cabinet level this time around," Lichtblau said.

Lichtblau, who co-wrote both stories with Times reporter James Risen, said that in each case the newspaper believed that the information it was reporting would not put anyone in harm's way. "I think we came down on the same side in both questions," he said of the two stories. "That this is not giving away information that is tangibly helping terrorists know what they don't already know."

Risen declined to comment, while Times Executive Editor Bill Keller did not return a call seeking comment.

In the wiretapping story, which ran in late 2005, the paper revealed that it had held off running the story for more than a year after Bush had intervened and requested it be held. In the latest case, Lichtblau said, the administration first sought to block the story several weeks ago, but declined to provide an exact date. "There were complex factors in each case," Lichtblau said, without giving specifics. "But the objections of the administration did not rise to as high a level as last time."

Lichtblau added that the reaction to the wiretapping story, which included both criticism and support for the paper, made it easier to go with this story. He noted that there had been no proof that the previous story had endangered national security.

"Our belief that it did not have any tangible impact has been borne out," he said. "That was in the back of our minds this time." He also said that "the intense public interest in the NSA story showed that this is obviously a matter of intense public interest. We see similar interest in both cases, the pendulum, as far as public disclosure versus national security, has swung in the direction of public disclosure....

"We went about this in a thorough enough way," he added.