Obama’s Justice Department is under fire following revelations revealed by the Associated Press that the government secretly obtained two months worth of private phone records from the news agency in 2012 during what appears to be a brazen attempt to discover the source of an intelligence leak.

Calling the seizure of records a “massive and unprecedented intrusion,” AP itself disclosed the events on Monday after being informed by a US attorneys office on Friday:

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a sharply worded letter, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt protested the government’s action, saying it was a direct assault on the freedom of the press.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” the letter stated. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” Pruitt said.

“The media’s purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance,” said the ACLU’s Laura W. Murphy, director of the group’s Legislative Office in Washington, DC. “The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again.”

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