Obama administration assailed over IRS scandal and reporters' phone records Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said "categorically" that no one in the President's inner circle knew what was going on until last week, when the IRS blamed low-level employees in Ohio for the targeting. Some of the President's lawyers were informed "very broadly" several weeks ago but Mr Obama himself only learned of the news through the media on Friday, Mr Carney said. Asked if there was "a siege mentality" in the West Wing, Mr Carney replied: "Absolutely not." Mr Holder said that the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors were now looking "to see if any laws were broken in connection with those matters related to the IRS." The attorney general, who is a close political ally of the President, said he had recused himself from the investigation into how news of an attempted bomb plot al-Qaeda bomb plot was leaked to the AP. Mr Holder said he had been interviewed by the FBI as part of the investigation and that his role as the public face of the department, who deals with the media, made it inappropriate for him to be involved. As a result of his recusal, it fell to Jim Cole, the deputy attorney general, to authorise the subpoena of the AP's phone records. Mr Holder said that he did not know the details of the subpoena but said he was "confident" that his subordinates had "followed all of the appropriate Justice Department regulations." Describing the leak in May last year as among the "most serious I've ever seen," Mr Holder defended the department's handling of the AP records, which the news agency said was a "a massive and unprecedented intrusion" into press freedom. "It put the American people at risk and that is not hyperbole and trying to determine who was responsible for that I think required very aggressive action," he told a press conference. News that the government monitored 20 AP phone lines - taking down details of incoming and outgoing calls but not actually listening to their content - broke last night in a letter from the news agency to the Justice Department. Garry Pruit, AP's chief executive, said that phones in his company's offices in Washington, New York and Connecticut had all been tracked for two months. Carl Bernstein, one half of the reporting duo that exposed the Watergate scandal, said the investigation appeared designed to "intimidate" journalists. "It is outrageous, totally inexcusable," Mr Bernstein told MSNBC. This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning. The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters. This was an accident waiting to become a nuclear event and now it's happened. There's no excuse for it whatsoever. There's no reason for this investigation, especially on this scale. Mr Holder said he was "proud" of the administration's record on civil liberties, despite criticism over the failure to close Guantánamo Bay and the use of drone strikes in targeted assassinations