A media expert was floored on Sunday by reporting on the Trump administration’s latest effort to silence reporters after they broke a story about Air Force One last week.
Brian Stelter, a CNN media expert, discussed the Trump Department of Justice’s subpoena to a pair of New York Times reporters who broke the story that President Donald Trump landed in the United Kingdom to change from his Qatari-donated Air Force One to the regular Air Force One on his way home from a NATO summit in Turkey. The report indicated that administration officials made the call because of threats against the president’s plane.
Stelter told CNN’s Omar Jimenez on “CNN Newsroom” that the subpoena is “very troubling” for several reasons.
“That is a highly unusual, very aggressive, and very troubling step forward, or a reassertion of the government’s powers here because ultimately, a subpoena to a journalist is an attempt to compel them to testify, to reveal anonymous sources,” Stelter said. “And in this particular case, the anonymous sources are officials inside Trump’s government who contradicted him, who said that the security concerns were the reason why the plane was not taken back from Turkey.”
Stelter also noted that the Times plans to fight the subpoenas. He read a statement from Joseph Kahn, the outlet’s executive editor.
“The Trump administration, with its impulsive subpoenas, used vague pretenses of a threat to national security to try to compel our reporters to appear before a grand jury. But the law protects news gatherers from this sort of retaliatory abuse of prosecutorial power. It is essential that the courts reaffirm that protection and quash this overreach, and we are confident that they will do so,” the statement reads.
Stelter also noted that judges have struck down the Trump administration’s previous attempts to force journalists to reveal their anonymous sources. The key difference between those cases is that “this is all happening within a matter of days of the story being published in the first place,” he added.
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