It would not be hyperbole to suggest that the Trump White House is hostile toward journalism, and has been since before Day One of his second term: Trump still has pending lawsuits against 60 Minutes floating around, for instance, and is still fighting a court-ordered return of The Associated Press back into official White House press spaces after the organization had the temerity to suggest he doesn’t have full international naming rights to the Gulf Of Mexico. Now, AP reports that Trump’s Department Of Justice has taken another swing at journalistic protections, this time by rolling back a Biden-era policy that meant journalists couldn’t have their phones or other records subpoenaed by the government while it was investigating leaks.
The old policy was put forward by Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, in 2021, after Biden’s team revealed that the outgoing first Trump administration had secretly acquired phone records from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN, all in the hopes of nailing down whoever in the administration was leaking stories to the press. Biden decried the infringement of journalistic rights and enacted the new policy—blocking a practice that, to be clear, wasn’t Trump-specific. (Administrations on both sides of the political divide, including the Obama White House, have admitted to using the DOJ’s tools to comb through journalists’ records.)
Now, that policy has been rolled back, as revealed by current AG Pam Bondi. Bondi unveiled the shift in a memo to DOJ staff, re-authorizing the department to allow prosecutors to “compel production of information and testimony by and relating to the news media.” The memo came with a lot of language about warrants for the demands being “narrowly drawn,” and requiring all possible steps to be taken to ensure that the information couldn’t be acquired by other means, etc., but the writing’s pretty clearly on the wall: “The Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.” Which neatly ignores that you can do a lot more harm to the American people by stifling the ability of journalists to protect their sources from government attack, but, hey, here we are.
Of course, many of the current White House’s most obvious leaks have had less to do with clandestine actions from reporters, and more with rank incompetence from people who seem to have only the loosest understanding of information security; god help us if someone ends up getting their phone records seized by the government because Pete Hesgeth fat-thumbed them into his latest “Let’s Bomb The Planet” group chats on Signal.
