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The Trump administration is scheduled to appear in federal court Thursday to defend a slew of subpoenas against reporters at The New York Times — and their families — as the government seeks to sniff out the identities of anonymous leakers.
Judge Arun Subramanian with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will weigh the fate of the subpoenas issued by the Justice Department and that First Amendment advocates described as an unprecedented attack on the free press.
The subpoenas are part of a government investigation after the newspaper reported earlier this month on security concerns with the new Air Force One. The jet, which was gifted to the U.S. by the Qatari government, lacked the defensive countermeasures typical of older Air Force Ones, including systems designed to deter missile attacks.
The subpoenas, which represent a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to thwart reporting critical of the president, are currently on hold pending a ruling from Subramanian. The subpoenas called on Times journalists to testify before a grand jury and sought the phone records of reporters’ relatives, according to a letter the newspaper submitted to the judge and that was unsealed on Monday.
The Times seeks to quash the subpoenas — which seek phone records of two reporters’ spouses and one journalist’s mother — and has described them as “extraordinarily aggressive and unorthodox” and a “bad-faith effort to intimidate the journalists and chill their ability to report on the administration.” Journalists slapped with subpoenas at their homes are Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt.
The White House declined to comment and directed Straight Arrow to the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to requests for comment. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week the administration is “not targeting reports” and described the journalists as “material witnesses” to its leak investigation.
The Times declined to comment for this story. The Trump administration’s actions against journalists “should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the senior vice president and deputy general counsel at the Times, said in a statement.
“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” McCraw said. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
Subpoenas to journalists’ families are unprecedented
President Donald Trump “is far from the first president who has subpoenaed reporters,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy at the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Straight Arrow. But the latest subpoenas are unprecedented, he said, and part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to clamp down on reporters.
“Even the Mafia says families are off limits,” said Stern, who noted he was unaware of previous administrations going to such lengths to reveal the identities of anonymous sources.
“If you’re an investigative reporter covering the Trump administration, you’re somewhat prepared for that risk,” Stern said, but journalists’ relatives are a different story.
“It’s one thing for a reporter to be fighting their own battles against the Trump administration,” he said. But targeting journalists’ families “adds a whole other layer of intimidation into the equation and has a further chilling effect on the press.”
The subpoenas stem back to reporting from earlier this month that Trump was forced to fly on the old Air Force One after attending a NATO summit in Turkey because of security concerns raised by the Secret Service with the Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8. A second article reported on the jet’s lack of advanced security features.
Trump said on Sunday the luxury jet will soon be “maxed out” in “about a month or so” and could soon be retrofitted with the defense capabilities of older presidential jets.
Trump’s justification for the subpoenas is particularly flimsy, Stern said. Across administrations, when presidents use national security concerns to subpoena journalists, “what they’re really concerned about is reputational security,” he said.
Journalists’ family members whose records were the subjects of subpoenas include a mental health professional and the general counsel at a major law firm.
“It’s never been so blatantly obvious that that’s the case here,” Stern said. “We’re not talking about troop locations or weaponry or military plans. We’re talking about Donald Trump’s vanity plan and the risk it poses not only to him, but the people who travel with him.”
In fact, he said, reporting from The New York Times may have benefited national security by revealing safety vulnerabilities.
Last year, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department for public records related to the Trump administration’s acceptance of the $400 million luxury jet. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly found the jet transfer “legally permissible,” the free speech organization called it a “bribe gift.” When the organization submitted a public records request about the ordeal, the government said it would take 620 days to process the inquiry — a timeline the group argues is unreasonably long.
The subpoenas are part of a broader clash between journalists and the Trump administration.
Last week, Straight Arrow reported on a case where a leftwing journalist and provocator was detained at the border and had his cell phones confiscated and, presumably, searched, after he returned from a reporting trip in Iran. The phones have since been returned.
Everyone who crosses the border into the U.S. is subject to inspection, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in a statement.
Federal officers “review all available information, including travel history, immigration history and other relevant information,” the agency told Straight Arrow. “Additional scrutiny and increased inspection may be conducted, including if an individual has worked in or traveled to a high-risk country such as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, including Iran.”
Trump isn’t the first president to subpoena journalists
As Trump quarrels with journalists, a chart circulating online appears to downplay the president’s attacks. But Stern said the chart contains “factual errors” — and is premature.
The chart, which lacks a source, highlights the presidents who most frequently subpoenaed journalists, with Presidents Richard Nixon and Barack Obama far outnumbering those from Trump. Among those who circulated the chart on social media is Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.
Bremmer declined an interview request from Straight Arrow.
The graphic notes the Nixon administration subpoenaed journalists more than 120 times, including against CBS News and NBC. At the time, the Columbia Journalism Review warned of a government “subpoena epidemic,” and that the Nixon administration’s actions against journalists threatened to turn the press into a “de facto arm of the attorney general’s office.”
Fast forward a few decades to the Obama administration, when subpoenas against journalists were again the topic of controversy. According to the chart circulating online, Obama subpoenaed more than 100 journalists, including those with The Associated Press, Fox News and The New York Times.
The Obama administration, which subjected government workers to lie-detector tests and scrutinized their digital communications, launched an aggressive leak investigation after Fox News reporter James Rosen reported on classified intelligence outlining North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. In a controversial move, the government named Rosen as an unindicted criminal co-conspirator in the case. Stephen Kim, then a State Department official, pleaded guilty to leaking the classified information to Rosen.
In an incident The Associated Press described as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how the company gathers news, the Justice Department during Obama’s presidency used subpoenas to secretly obtain months of telephone records from reporters and editors as part of a criminal investigation into the leak of government information that appeared in a 2012 Associated Press article about a foiled terror plot. In total, the government seized records from more than 20 separate phone lines in offices where more than 100 journalists worked.
Then, in a years-long battle that concluded in 2014, the Obama administration backed off of subpoenas against journalist James Risen, then a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, as part of a government effort to expose the identities of a confidential source who leaked classified information about a failed Central Intelligence Agency operation in Iran.
Stern said each of the cases represented alarming threats to press freedoms.
While the Obama administration sought subpoenas that affected as many as 100 journalists at The Associated Press, Stern said, “I have no idea where they got that Obama subpoenaed 100 reporters.” The ordeal became a scandal and “the administration was embarrassed by it,” Stern said, which led to policies to prevent future subpoenas.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has disregarded its own policies limiting subpoenas on journalists as a last resort, Stern said.
“Clearly that wasn’t what happened here: The Times reporting ran on a Wednesday and the subpoenas were out by that Friday,” Stern said. “I don’t think anybody can credibly allege that a thorough leak investigation was conducted in 48 hours.”
While Trump’s second term is still in progress, there isn’t a comprehensive tally of subpoenas issued during his presidency. Until they became public scandals, such subpoenas issued during the Obama administration were done in secret.
“So it’s premature to try to say who issued more subpoenas to reporters or who surveyed more reporters,” Stern said. “Because who knows what we’re going to find out down the line about what the Trump administration is up to.”
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