When the Justice Department charged Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, and the reporter Georgia Fort and photographer Junn Bollmann with a pair of crimes that carry, in total, the possibility of 10 years or more in prison, something shifted in President Trump’s legal campaign against journalists.
While Mr. Trump has tried for decades to keep the press in line using civil lawsuits, federal criminal law is a sharper weapon. This time the law may also be on the president’s side.
The prosecution of Mr. Lemon and the others arose amid the turmoil in Minnesota following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this year. On Jan. 18, a group of demonstrators entered and disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, where a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement official served as a pastor. In addition to the three journalists, dozens of protesters are charged with conspiring to violate the rights of the parishioners to religious freedom.
Mr. Lemon has a show on YouTube, and Ms. Fort and Mr. Bollmann are independent journalists. Their defense is clear. “I was there as a journalist, not a protester,” Mr. Lemon told me. “I was interviewing people from all sides. We were livestreaming. It’s all right there on tape.”
The product of journalism, for decades, has enjoyed substantial protection under the First Amendment. The courts almost never uphold prior restraints on publication or distribution of news. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan, it’s difficult for public figures who feel wronged by journalists to recover damages for libel. The courts protect journalistic outlets from potentially ruinous judgments because, in the words of that famous case from 1964, of the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”
But federal law, including the crimes for which Mr. Lemon and the other two are charged, offers no similar protections for the process of journalism. In 1972, the Supreme Court rejected a claim that the First Amendment entitled a journalist to refuse to comply with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury and be asked to identify confidential sources. In that case, Branzburg v. Hayes, the justices upheld the “obligation of reporters to respond to grand jury subpoenas as other citizens do and to answer questions relevant to an investigation into the commission of crime.”
Justice Byron White’s opinion asserted that “the First Amendment does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special access to information not available to the public generally.” The Branzburg decision addressed only grand jury subpoenas, but Justice White’s opinion went further in defining the obligations of journalists in a way that’s potentially relevant to the Lemon case decades later. According to the court, “Newsmen have no constitutional right of access to the scenes of crime or disaster when the general public is excluded.” In short, the court in Branzburg said the First Amendment granted journalists no greater rights than anyone else.
In the aftermath of Branzburg, many states passed shield laws, which safeguarded journalists from being compelled to testify and reveal their sources. Prosecutors have also been generally protective of journalists when issues arise like those raised by Mr. Lemon’s case. “Reporters have often been arrested in the states while they are covering protests of various kinds,” Gabe Rottman, a lawyer at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me, “but the charges almost always end up being dropped. There is an understanding that the laws were not meant to police the work of journalists.”
But while it has made periodic efforts, Congress has never passed a national shield law or provided other protection for news gathering, and that’s left journalists like Mr. Lemon, Ms. Fort and Mr. Bollmann more or less at the mercy of the people who happen to be running the Justice Department at any given time.
This isn’t the first time that the federal government has shown less respect than states have for the work journalists do. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department, in an effort to identify the source of leaks, subpoenaed call logs from The Associated Press and obtained a search warrant to examine the emails of a Fox News reporter. In response to criticism at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder narrowed the circumstances in which the Justice Department would seek information from reporters. Under President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland tightened the restrictions on prosecutors even further.
But early in the second Trump administration, the Justice Department overturned the Garland guidance; a new regulation introduced by Attorney General Pam Bondi in April 2025 eased the rules on subpoenas and search warrants for reporters.
President Trump’s hostility to journalists — whom he often calls “treasonous” and “enemies of the people” — is a long-established matter. In 2006, Mr. Trump sued his biographer Timothy O’Brien for allegedly understating his wealth; the case was dismissed. In later years, he filed more defamation cases, including more than one against The Times, but he’s never won one in court. Instead, since being re-elected, he’s used his powers as president to extort multimillion-dollar settlements from ABC and CBS’s parent company for cases that would never have stood up in court.
Deploying the criminal justice system against journalists is a graver step in the same direction.
The assault began in January, after the Justice Department charged Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a systems administrator with a top-secret clearance who was working for a government contractor, with unlawfully obtaining and sharing classified materials. In seeking evidence against Mr. Perez-Lugones, the government wanted to see his communications, if any, with Hannah Natanson, a reporter for The Washington Post.
Under the Branzburg precedent, the Justice Department could have subpoenaed Ms. Natanson to testify and produce her phone and other devices — but that would have allowed her and The Post to challenge the subpoena in court before they complied.
Instead of choosing that option, prosecutors took a more aggressive, and outrageous, tack. They obtained a search warrant for Ms. Natanson’s home and seized her phone and other devices, an extremely rare move for the Justice Department in its dealings with journalists. In seeking the warrant, prosecutors did not inform the judge of the existence of the Privacy Protection Act, a 1980 law which banned searches of journalists unless they were considered a suspect in a crime or if the material sought was suspected to involve certain kinds of national security material. The Privacy Protection Act was not meant to prohibit the Justice Department from obtaining any information from journalists, but it was intended to eliminate exactly this kind of harassment of reporters like Ms. Natanson.
The Post has challenged the legality of the Natanson search, and a pair of federal judges in Virginia have ruled that the court will review the seized materials before allowing the F.B.I. to examine them. The Justice Department had appealed the first decision, arguing that the search warrant was valid and that the F.B.I. should be able to immediately examine the contents of Ms. Natanson’s devices. (The Post just reported that the Justice Department has withdrawn demands that one of its reporters, as well as three reporters for The Wall Street Journal, testify before a grand jury, but the government is standing behind its seizure of Ms. Natanson’s devices.) “As a reporter, Ms. Natanson is subject like any other citizen to a legitimate use of criminal legal process in a criminal investigation, such as this search warrant,” the government argued.
That’s also the theme of the Justice Department’s contentions in the Lemon case in Minnesota. In both cases, the Justice Department does not acknowledge that the First Amendment — which specifically protects the freedom of “the press” — offers any relevant protections. As the government put it in a pretrial brief in the Lemon case, “Journalists are not above the law.” By invoking a kind of faux populism, the Justice Department is acting as if journalists were seeking special privileges rather than playing the role the Constitution assigns to them.
Elaborating on this point, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s civil rights division, said on social media of the Lemon case, “Claiming ‘I’m a journalist’ doesn’t give you a pass to break the law.” Because the case involves what the government describes as the protection of religious freedom, Ms. Dhillon’s office is supervising the prosecution.
Ms. Dhillon has a point, at least under current law. Some lower courts have put a pro-journalist gloss on the Branzburg decision and found a limited, or qualified, privilege for reporters to challenge certain subpoenas from prosecutors. But the Supreme Court has been moving away from protecting the rights of journalists, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch having called for the Sullivan precedent to be revisited. And the general rule set down by the justices in 1972 holds: The First Amendment does not give journalists, even those operating in good faith, the right to violate laws that govern the conduct of all other citizens.
Under Presidents Barack Obama and Biden, the Justice Department was at least willing to listen to arguments from journalists and offer modest concessions in return, like the revisions to subpoena policy established by Mr. Holder and Mr. Garland; today, in contrast, the pressure from President Trump will be entirely in the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the Justice Department’s agreement to hold off on calling other reporters to the grand jury, the Natanson and Lemon matters will probably be closer to the beginning of an assault on the press than the end.
When it comes to the specific charges against Mr. Lemon and the other journalists, it would be one thing to prove that the three of them trespassed on church property, where they had no legal right to be. (That would be a state crime, and Minnesota apparently, and wisely, had no interest in bringing such a case.) So, Ms. Dhillon’s prosecutors presumably scoured the statute books and conjured an accusation that the journalists violated the FACE Act, which was written to protect patients at abortion clinics from harassment. That act also contains a provision that safeguards churchgoers from interference, and that’s what the Minnesota defendants are accused of.
The only good news for Mr. Lemon and his colleagues is that the two crimes alleged in the indictment are what’s known as “specific intent” offenses: In order to win convictions, the government will have to prove that the journalists intended to violate churchgoers’ lawful rights by disrupting religious worship. That will be difficult because Mr. Lemon and the others will likely be able to demonstrate for jurors that their real intent was to cover the protest, not to violate anyone’s rights.
The best hope for the journalists in the Minnesota case may be to place their trust in the wisdom of a jury. The excesses of the Trump Justice Department have drawn feisty defiance from jurors around the country, but even so, it’s always going to be perilous for criminal defendants to subject their freedom to the vagaries of a trial. Still, in light of the precarious state of the law and the thoroughgoing contempt of the Trump administration for the work of journalists, it may be the best that Mr. Lemon and his colleagues can do.
As for other working journalists in America, the message of these cases is stark. The government came after Mr. Lemon and Ms. Natanson for the same reason: because they were doing their jobs. Under the First Amendment, that should be a defense — but under President Trump, it’s an offense.
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