DER SPIEGEL & Merkels tapped mobile phone: Some people seem to be out to discredit DER SPIEGELs 2013 reporting on Angela Merkels tapped mobile phone. Unfortunately, some complicated and convoluted quotes by German federal prosecutor Harald Range are helping them do precisely that. Nevertheless, DER SPIEGEL stands behind its reporting and has every reason to do so. Several media outlets, including Reuters, have been misrepresenting what prosecutor Range was trying to convey when he said on Thursday there was no proof so far that NSA bugged Merkels phone. He was, in fact, only speaking about forensic proof that would allow him to bring charges. There was no judgement involved on the veracity of the reporting, Ranges spokesperson Marcus Köhler told DER SPIEGEL on Friday. He added that his boss had explicitly denied a journalists question during the press conference about whether the transcript, which was provided to him, was a fabrication. What was the prosecutor actually trying to say? Basically, that he was not in the possession of an original document, that he was only given a transcript of the database entry and that it wasnt possible to prosecute anyone on those grounds. However, prosecutor Range knew from the very beginning that he had been provided with a transcript, as DER SPIEGEL has made explicitly clear in all of its reporting and also when it handed over the transcript to Chancellor Merkels spokesperson Steffen Seibert for a response to its research in October 2013. In the course of his subsequent investigation, prosecutor Range tried to get access to the original NSA database from US authorities but to no avail. He then asked DER SPIEGEL to provide him with the original document, but DER SPIEGEL had always made clear that its reporters had obtained their information from an NSA database to which they had access. So no new facts are out -- except perhaps prosecutor Ranges frustration that he seems to be unable to prosecute anybody in this high-profile case.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 14:09:33 +0000
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