Justice Minister Heiko Maas introduced he was in search of the dismissal of Harald Vary hours after the chief federal prosecutor accused the federal government of interfering in his investigation.
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Range, 67, said earlier Tuesday that the government’s move of trying to block the trial was not appropriate, and accused Maas of an “intolerable intervention against the independence of the judiciary”, the New York Times reported.
Prosecutors opened the probe against the website after a criminal complaint by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), over articles about it that appeared on the Netzpolitik.org blog on February 25 and April 15.
“The actions and statements today by Federal Prosecutor General Range are not comprehensible and send the wrong message to the public”, Maas said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Chancellery Office also said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had only learned about the proceedings through the media. “He should have told the chief prosecutor long ago that he did not have his blessing for this investigation”.
With Merkel’s backing, his ministry urged chief prosecutor Harald Range to wind back the case. But Mr Range left little doubt what he thought of his superior at the press conference, telling journalists the preliminary findings of the report Mr Maas had ordered stopped.
“Exerting influence on the investigation just because of its possible consequences, which might not be politically opportune, is an unacceptable attack against the independence of the judiciary”, he told journalists in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany.
Questions of state surveillance, including the NSA scandal revealed by fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, are hotly debated in Germany, a country with raw memories of fascist and communist dictatorships.
Information of the probe towards the 2 journalists emerged final week.
Meanwhile the Netzpolitik affair recalls a famous 1962 case involving Der Spiegel when police arrested several journalists for revealing what the government said were state secrets about weaknesses in Germany’s defence capabilities.
“The federal prosecutor is not in a position where he is protected from instruction [from the Justice Ministry]”, Wieland said.
The media freedom observer of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe on Tuesday criticized the investigation in a letter to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
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The German Journalists Association condemned the investigation for treason, which carries between one year and life in jail, as an “impermissible attempt to silence two critical colleagues”.
