A public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption has obtained some documents revealing that President Obama's re-election team appears to have worked out a secret deal with a filmmaker to make the president look "gutsy" in the upcoming film about the killing of Osama bin Laden.
As reported earlier, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King believes the CIA and Defense Department jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with filmmakers producing a movie on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Now, documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal that the Obama administration did so in hopes that the film -- titled Zero Dark Thirty -- would help Obama's re-election effort.
"For instance, the filmmakers were given access to a translator who was on the raid," notes Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "Presumably the identities of people like that are top secret, or ought to be classified as sensitive, but I guess if you're a Hollywood filmmaker about to make a movie that, at least according to the documents, suggests that the president's call was 'gutsy,' you're going to get this type of special access."
And though public disclosure of this story has compelled the producers to change the film's release from October to December to keep it from helping Obama, Fitton says it does not matter.
"The question is whether or not information was being leaked to these filmmakers to help them achieve a political result," he notes, "and you can't draw any other conclusion. But folks can go and look at the documents themselves."
Fitton concludes that there needs to be a thorough investigation by a special counsel, independent of the Justice Department.