President Trump vowed on Monday to pursue a “leaker” involved in disclosing details about the downing of a U.S. fighter jet in Iran late last week and indicated that the government would take action against an unnamed media outlet that disseminated the information.
Mr. Trump was speaking at a news conference on the rescue of two crew members who ejected from the cockpit of an F-15E Strike Eagle that Iran shot down on Friday. Though the pilot was rescued quickly, the weapons systems officer could not be located right away, prompting a two-day scramble to find him before enemy forces did.
Mr. Trump said the reporting had put the at-large airman and others in danger. The administration, he added, was “looking very hard to find that leaker.” Efforts to unmask the source of the information, he continued, would include approaching the news outlet that had published it.
“We’re going to go to the media company that released it,” Mr. Trump said, “and we’re going to say, ‘National security — give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who, and you know who, we’re talking about.”
The White House did not respond to a question asking which news outlet Mr. Trump was referring to, saying only that an investigation was underway. Several news outlets reported on Friday on the downing of the fighter jet and the rescue efforts, including the Israeli outlet N12, Axios, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Reuters.
The threat to jail a reporter over the common journalistic practice of protecting a source is yet another escalation in Mr. Trump’s long-running campaign against U.S. news outlets. In recent years, he has sued major news companies and supported a threat by Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to pull broadcasting licenses from outlets over their coverage of the war in Iran. Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly curtailed media access at the Pentagon.
Presidents have historically invoked national security concerns to restrict information. President Richard M. Nixon famously sued news outlets to try to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the Department of Justice under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama subpoenaed a Times reporter, James Risen, to testify about his confidential sources for his 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2017, Mr. Trump urged James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, to jail journalists who published classified information.
Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said he was unaware of another example when a president issued a threat like the one leveled by Mr. Trump on Monday.
“During times of armed conflict in a democracy,” Mr. Rottman said in a statement, “it is essential that the press be able to gather and report information in the public interest and thus provide an independent check on the official government narrative.”
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