That surreptitious taping of reporters' phone calls — apparently illegally — by a press aide to Attorney General Jerry Brown is causing quite a fuss in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Chronicle, whose people were recorded, says:

"Here's the implication: Reporters now have one hell of a story about a guy who's running for governor of California," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, based in Virginia. "He's just lit a fire under a real big political thing."

Havey Rosenfield of Consumer Watchdog is part of the story and reacts after the jump:

I can't believe this! Two days ago, I emailed you about how Attorney General Jerry Brown rewrote the official summary of a ballot measure sponsored by Mercury Insurance Company to omit the fact that it will raise auto insurance premiums. This morning The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Brown's spokesman secretly taped a conversation with reporter Carla Marinucci in an effort to keep a story about Brown's action out of the newspaper. Taping phone conversations without consent is a crime in California, but who is going to prosecute the spokesman for the state's top cop?

I wasn't on that call, of course, but I do know this: Marinucci's article was taken off the Chronicle's website early Wednesday evening, and during that time, she called us to get our response to the AG's claims. Today's Chronicle story shows top Brown staff were trying to censor the story by going over the reporter's head.

Since when does the Attorney General of California try to censor the free press in order to kill a news article about how he took the extraordinary step of rewriting a ballot title about a donor's initiative?

Jerry Brown needs to immediately make amends by firing his spokesperson and appointing an independent counsel to rewrite the title and summary of the Mercury initiative in an impartial manner.

This is the kind of thing Mercury Insurance does when it tries to get its hands in politicians' pockets — corrupts the democratic process. When Senate leader Don Perata took a contribution from Mercury and carried the same Mercury legislation, he was investigated by the FBI. After Gray Davis signed it, he took $175,000 in Mercury campaign money, and that helped fuel his recall.

A court invalidated the Mercury legislation for surcharging the previously uninsured in violation of Proposition 103. Brown's decision to ignore the Court's finding, in order to rewrite Mercury's title and summary, got him into this mess.

When will politicians ever learn that Mercury is poison?

We are filing another public records act request today to get transcripts of the taped phone conversations. Stay tuned.