The Right-Wing Hissy Fit Machine just kicked into high gear over a report in the Washington Post that James Rosen's emails were subpoenaed by the Obama DOJ in its probe into a national security leak. While I wait for more details to pass judgment, one thing is certain: Fox will completely forget its 2012 hissy fit over the national security leaks they will now have a hissy fit for being implicated in.

This kind of thing makes me extremely queasy even if the target is a Republican propagandist like Rosen. On the other hand, there’s no excuse for a reporter to be breaking the law.

According to the Washington Post, the case against Rosen is part of an investigation into State Department security advisor Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Rosen published CIA information about North Korea believed to have been leaked by Kim.

(FBI agent Reginald) Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.

But the thing is, prosecutors may have been using Rosen to build a case against Kim:

Court documents show abundant evidence gathered from Kim’s office computer and phone records, but investigators said they needed to go a step further to build their case, seizing two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal e-mails — and all of his e-mail exchanges with Kim.

Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

So was Rosen legitimately targeted as a law-breaker or was he merely a pawn in an investigation targeting someone else? I believe that remains to be seen.

Regardless of the facts, it’s a safe bet that Rosen and Fox News will twist them to fit their Republican agenda, thereby clouding the question of whether or not Rosen was acting as a legitimate reporter even further.