Politico

A new directive issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prohibits employees of certain government agencies from discussing any intelligence-related matter with the media, classified or not.

“[Intelligence Community] employees … must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on intelligence-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” the directive says.

DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said that after the "damaging leaks in 2012," Clapper ordered a review to determine if there were a "consistent baseline requirement" for the intelligence community for engaging the media.

"The review demonstrated that baseline requirements were not consistent across the IC, but that there were best practices within the Community that could inform a consistent approach. That approach took shape as IC Directive 119," Turner wrote in an email. "This policy is being issued together with IC Directive 120 to ensure that members of the Intelligence Community are made aware of the protections provided them as whistleblowers who make protected disclosures. As with ICD 119, ICD 120 was initiated before Edward Snowden stole NSA property and leaked it to the media.”

FreedomWorks has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.

The FreedomWorks-Beck relationship is just one example of a powerful and profitable alliance between the conservative movement’s most aggressive groups and the most popular radio hosts. The details of the arrangements are little-known, but they have been lucrative for the recipients, and, in turn, have helped ensure that the groups get coveted airtime from hosts with a demonstrated ability to leverage their tens of millions of listeners to shape American politics.

It’s an alliance that helped spawn the anti-establishment tea party and power Republicans to landslide victories in the 2010 midterms. It’s also exacerbated congressional gridlock by pushing a hard line on the budget, immigration and Obamacare, and it is roiling the Republican Party headed into critical midterm elections.

It’s Comcast vs. Sen Al Franken -- Round Two.

The Minnesota Democrat, who pilloried the telecommunications giant and its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable at a congressional hearing, continued his attack a day later -- stressing in an interview that the $45.2 billion megadeal threatens competition and could spike consumers’ cable rates.

Asked during the interview what he’d do with Comcast’s merger, the senator added, “The first thing I would do is not let the largest cable TV company buy the second-largest cable TV company.”

Sen Franken also repeated his criticism that Comcast hadn’t kept some of the promises it made to federal regulators during the company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. Specifically, Sen Franken said that Comcast hadn’t done enough to market its standalone broadband service to consumers. And he charged that Comcast had tried to shaft programmers like Bloomberg, which competes with Comcast’s own business offering, CNBC.

The Justice Department charged a trio of men with defrauding the so-called Obamaphone program of $32 million in a scam that allegedly featured a jet, a Lamborghini and a yacht called Knight Crew.

Thomas Biddix, Kevin Brian Cox and Leonard Solt were charged in a Florida court with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 15 counts of wire fraud, false claims and money laundering for bilking the phone subsidy program for the poor, which is officially known as Lifeline and managed by the Federal Communications Commission.

The indictment -- the result of an investigation by the FBI, the FCC inspector general and the Internal Revenue Service -- represents another effort by the Obama Administration to crack down on abuses of the controversial program. Republicans in Congress, as well as some Democrats, have criticized Lifeline for poor management and misuse. The program has been dubbed Obamaphone by critics, even though it dates back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Biddix, Cox and Solt allegedly oversaw the submission of falsely inflated claims to Lifeline from September 2009 to March 2011 that diverted $32 million in fraudulent funds to a company called Associated Telecommunications Management Services. Biddix is the chairman of ATMS, according to DOJ.

Hillary Clinton discussed her work at the State Department, called for young women not to take criticisms personally and rapped the media for treating powerful women with a double standard at the kickoff of “Women in the World” in New York City.

Midway through the panel, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman asked Clinton if there is “still a double standard in the media in how we talk about women in public life?”

“There is a double standard,” Clinton said, adding, “We have all experienced it [or seen it]. The double standard is alive and well, and I think in many respects the media is the principal propagator of its persistence,” she added. “And I think the media needs to be, you know, more self-consciously aware of that.” She added that her advice to women who want to, as Friedman put it, “rise up in the world” is that they have the task of making other people, “predominantly” men who they will deal with, relate to them and listen to their ideas.

The main US Spanish-language nightly news programs skew liberal on domestic issues and spent most of their air times in the last few months covering the new health care law, immigration reform, and immigration law enforcement, the conservative-leaning media watchdog group Media Research Center found in a new study.

Ken Oliver-Méndez, Director of MRC’s new Spanish-language watchdog group MRC Latino, said in an interview that of the newscasts of Noticiero Univision and Noticiero Telemundo from November through February, 45 percent of stories on US domestic policy issues tilted liberal, 49 percent were balanced or neutral and 6 percent skewed conservative.

According to the study, Univision’s stories tilted left 50 percent of the time, were balanced 43 percent and were perceived as conservative 7 percent of the time, while Telemundo’s stories tilted left 54 percent of the time, were balanced 40 percent of the time and tilted conservative 5 percent of the time. The study also found that Democratic surrogates and liberal-leaning groups were featured on both networks more frequently than Republicans or conservative groups, but the group also faulted conservatives for not reaching out more to Latino media.

There’s little that tends to unite a leading liberal like Sen Dick Durbin (D-IL) and a conservative firebrand like Ted Cruz (R-TX). But when the two senators join their colleagues for a hearing on Comcast’s $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable, many of them will have something in common -- they’ve each collected Comcast cash.

The cable giant historically has been a major Beltway player, and it’s sure to strengthen its political offense in order to sell the new, controversial megadeal. Yet even before announcing its plans for Time Warner Cable, Comcast had donated to almost every member of Congress who has a hand in regulating it. In fact, money from Comcast’s political action committee has flowed to all but three members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Checks have landed in the campaign coffers of Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), who oversee the chamber’s antitrust panel. Meanwhile, the cable giant has donated in some way to 32 of the 39 members of the House Judiciary Committee, which is planning a hearing of its own. And Comcast has canvassed the two congressional panels that chiefly regulate cable, broadband and other telecom issues, donating to practically every lawmaker there -- including Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). Comcast stresses its donations are a function of its business. “Comcast is a very sophisticated political player.

They know that the money they give to both Republicans and Democrats buys them access -- everybody admits that in Washington today,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. “So they have covered their bases by giving to nearly every single member of the committees that do oversight.”