Obama was also spying on the media

Red States:

The Columbia Journalism Review reports that a newly released document indicates the Obama DOJ’s spying operation was far more comprehensive than had been thought.

CJR writes, “In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom, issuing sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of The Associated Press and several of its reporters and editors as part of a leak investigation. At the time, the subpoenas were widely seen as a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations. Last month, we learned that they told only part of the story.”

The spying was triggered by an AP report “on a thwarted Yemen-based bomb plot, which contained classified information about the CIA operation.” The DOJ conducted a search for the leaker by gathering two-months of phone records on 21 different lines.

AP Chief Gary Pruitt stated that the information “collected could 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.”

It was actually worse than Pruitt had thought. “The new report, obtained by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, finds that the DOJ actually collected records on 30 phones.”

The report shows that DOJ attorneys at one point considered subpoenaing records of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News and “strongly suggests that the attorneys went so far as to obtain ‘telephone numbers and other contact information’ for reporters and editors at those organizations who had worked on articles about the Yemen bomb plot.”

The CJR goes on to say, “Disturbingly, the report does not come close to explaining why the subpoenas targeted the trunk lines of major AP offices — lines which could potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the AP’s newsgathering activities.”

Issues & Insights John Merline says that the Obama administration’s intrusion of the AP was not an isolated event. The administration tried to “bully and silence the few reporters who dared challenge his spin on events.”...
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There is more.

This was in addition to its attempts to block Fox News from doing its job.  It now looks like Obama's extensive spy operation was much more extensive than just going after the Trump campaign.