The New York Times on Wednesday was notified that the Trump Justice Department in 2020 secretly obtained the phone records for four Times reporters in an attempt to identify their sources, the third such disclosure of Trump-era practices in recent weeks. “Seizing the phone records of journalists profoundly undermines press freedom,” executive editor Dean Baquet said in a statement. “It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.”
Last month, three Washington Post journalists and one CNN reporter were similarly informed by the Justice Department that it had secretly seized their communications records last year for multiple months in 2017 as part of an investigation into the publication of classified information. To the Times, a department spokesperson said “that ‘members of the news media have now been notified in every instance’ of leak investigations from the 2019-2020 period in which their records were sought,” the paper reported late Wednesday.
The Biden Justice Department, led by Merrick Garland, told the paper that last year, law enforcement officials under Trump obtained the phone logs spanning nearly four months in 2017 for several Times reporters—Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau, and Michael Schmidt—who were at the time reporting on the leak investigation into then-FBI Director James Comey. The current Justice Department also revealed that Trump’s DOJ got a court order to seize Times reporters’ non-content email logs but did not obtain any records; that was also the case for the Post reporters.
The DOJ under President Barack Obama aggressively deployed subpoenas and made unprecedented use of the Espionage Act in attempting to uncover reporters’ sources in leak investigations, controversial seizures that prompted bipartisan outcry and led then-attorney general Eric Holder to amend department guidelines for criminal investigations involving the news media.
Among those reforms was the requirement, in most circumstances, for the Justice Department to notify affected news organizations prior to the record seizures. But the Times, like the Post and CNN, is only now, years later, learning of the moves—despite the fact that the Obama-era presumption of advance notification remained in place throughout the Trump administration, one that ably carried the torch of its successor’s so-called war on leaks. On Twitter, Goldman, whose records were secretly seized in 2013 while reporting for the Associated Press, noted he had been targeted by both as he affirmed his commitment to such work:
Press freedom advocates and members of the news media have called on President Joe Biden, who recently denounced last month’s DOJ record-seizure revelations as “simply, simply wrong” and vowed that he “will not let that happen,” to provide more transparency about such tactics and commit to enhanced protections for journalists’ data. “It is urgent that we hear from the attorney general about all three Trump-era records seizures, including the purported reasoning behind them and the rationale for not notifying the journalists in advance,” Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement, noting “this is a crucial early test” of the current Justice Department’s “stated commitment” to the free flow of information to the public. “The goal must be to ensure that such abuses never occur again.”
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