Negotiations are underway and are reportedly nearing some end point for global media mogul Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, to buy Dow Jones, Inc.

The publicity surrounding this effort has focused entirely on Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal, and with ample reason, since nobody in his right mind would want to see reporting at the Journal go the way of the WSJ editorial page. But Dow Jones engages in other activities besides publishing.

For example: in the past two years’ worth of motions filed by attorneys back and forth in the CIA leak case, specifically in Judith Miller and Matt Cooper’s unsuccessful efforts to quash a subpoena, several of those motions have been filed by Dow Jones.

Dow Jones, you see, has filed several times as an amicus curiae – “friend of the court” – asking the courts to unseal parts of the court record in the Miller and Cooper matters that remain sealed because they contain classified material.

The short story here is that every time Dow Jones files a motion to unseal classified material, Americans have to pay for the process. With Rupert Murdoch’s news empire, reportedly worth $68B, behind these efforts, there will be deeper pockets than ever to bleed the taxpayers.

Here's how the process works: the high-dollar amici – friends of the court – file their motion to unseal, opposed by several government agencies including the CIA. Then the prosecution team has to file a motion in response to the pleading, taking time away from other government prosecutions. To date, the prosecution has responded by offering to unseal some further parts of the record but not those still unrevealed publicly, and the courts have acceded. Then judges have to rule on the motions, which as said have so far been partly granted and partly turned down by the courts.

All of this takes place in courts and using court personnel provided by the taxpayers, and in the name of the public's right to know – somewhat ironically, looking at the WSJ editorial page. Indeed, one wonders why that zeal to inform the public didn't turn up back in 2002 and early 2003, when the White House was boosting mythical Iraq WMD, mythical Iraqi complicity in 9/11, and a mythical partnership between Saddam and Islamist partisans.

In any case, with the politics of Rupert Murdoch behind these efforts – he of Fox News – they are unlikely to lighten up.

The timing of the amici filings in the Miller and Cooper matters already suggests that political considerations have been part of the mix. When then-New York Times reporter Miller and Time Magazine reporter Cooper were subpoenaed by the Special Counsel in the CIA leak case and lost their round in federal District Court (Judge Hogan), they appealed their subpoenas in the appellate court in Washington, D.C. The appeals court turned them down on February 15, 2005, with some parts of the court’s ruling classified.

Dow Jones filed to release classified parts of the ruling in the subpoena case on November 2, 2005 – more than nine months after the court’s ruling, but only five days after the October 28, 2005, indictment of Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. In other words, the sequence suggests that Dow Jones’ amicus brief was impelled less by the classification of some parts of the subpoena ruling than by progress in the CIA leak case.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald responded that a redacted version of the court’s ruling should be unsealed, and the appeals court ordered the redacted version published on February 6, 2006.

Dow Jones again filed an amicus motion to unseal the remaining sealed parts of the ruling, on December 6, 2006 – ten months after the court’s ruling, but shortly before the January 16, 2007, beginning of jury selection in the trial of Lewis Scooter Libby.

Again the amicus filing looks more like a response to developments in the CIA leak case – the Libby trial – than to three appellate judges’ classifying part of their ruling. In fact, it looks as though Dow Jones felt an interest in overloading the prosecution as much as possible during the Libby proceeding; basically the amicus filings to unseal – all destined to lose – chronologically paralleled flurries of motions by the Libby defense team.

The second motion to unseal by Dow Jones, this time joined by the Associate Press, was denied by the court on February 9, 2007. Obviously the prosecution had to respond to the motion to unseal while working on the Libby trial. Dow Jones then renewed its motion to unseal on March 7, 2007 – the day after Libby was convicted on four of five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements, and while appeals were being prepared by the Libby defense team and responded to by the government.

The government responded to the renewed motion, again offering part disclosure and part redaction, on March 22; Dow Jones and the AP filed a reply to the government motion on March 30 and a supplemental memorandum on June 1, 2007 (all three most recent Dow Jones amicus briefs for some reason dated 2006 rather than 2007, though the Certificate of Service gets it right); and the government filed a sealed motion on June 19, 2007. There has been no ruling yet on the most recent filings.

The even shorter story here is that Dow Jones’ legal actions seem to have fallen quietly in line with the interests of its editorial page, while publicly professing alignment with the interests of its reporters.

Let’s just hope all this wasn’t part of what attracted Murdoch to Dow Jones in the first place. Worse, let’s hope that this process wasn’t concocted or designed to make Dow Jones attractive to Murdoch in the first place.

While all this behind-the-scenes maneuvering has gone on, rightwing 'noise machine' outlets, including Murdoch's media, have complained in print and on air about the time and expense consumed in these legal actions – without ever quite getting around to telling the public how much of that drain on the polity has been caused by their own little white-collar goon squads.