President Donald Trump took an aggressive stance toward Justice Department investigations of journalists Friday, saying that the way to pursue “treasonous” leaks was to seek information from the journalists who received the leaked material.
The comments — which came hours ahead of a rerun of the White House correspondents’ dinner, where the president was to address the reporters who cover him at a gala that honors the freedom of the press — amounted to a presidential endorsement of his administration’s legal battles against journalists, which have included an FBI raid against a Washington Post reporter in January and subpoenas against New York Times journalists this month.
Judges have taken Justice Department officials to task for their handling of both cases, including on Thursday, when the subpoenas against the Times reporters were withdrawn following withering questioning from a federal judge in New York. But Trump suggested that the legal peril was not over for those reporters.
“We’re not after journalists. We’re after leakers. We’re after people that are cowards, people that are unpatriotic, people that are treasonous in many cases. And the way you find them is through the journalists,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “When the journalists probably know they shouldn’t write, they shouldn’t be giving information out like that particular information or others.”
The president mentioned Politico’s 2022 publication of a leaked draft of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
“That person should be found, and the way you find them is to tell the journalist — if it’s something having to do with national security — you tell the journalist, ‘Who is it?’ And we have a long way to go with that case,” Trump said.
His comments came a day after U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian grilled federal prosecutors about the subpoenas directing the New York Times journalists to answer questions from a grand jury and demanding records of telephone calls made from their phones and, in some cases, the phones of relatives. The Justice Department subpoenaed the reporters this month after they reported on security concerns around Trump’s flying on a repurposed luxury Boeing 747 that was given to him by the Qatari government.
Trump flew to a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on the jet, but he abandoned plans to use it on the return trip after concerns about a potential attack on the plane from neighboring Iran.
The new plane lacks at least some of the sophisticated antimissile technology of the old one.
Trump was angered by the reporting on the subject, and FBI head Kash Patel spent a full day at the White House coordinating the leak investigation.
Subramanian criticized prosecutors, noting legal precedents that say subpoenas of reporters can come only at the end of an extensive legal effort, not at the outset. He offered the Justice Department the choice either to withdraw the legal demands or have him quash them, but he also suggested that subpoenas could still be issued if ordinary procedure was followed.
Trump said of going after journalists that “in many cases, that’s the only way you’re going to find out who a leaker is.”
And he said that he viewed pursuing journalists as worthwhile when it concerns “a national security leak or a leak of great importance.” When someone inside the White House leaks to reporters, he said, “that’s a national security concern.”
Trump noted that the Obama administration had also pursued reporters as a part of leak investigations and falsely said that no one had complained.
The Obama administration did pursue aggressive leak investigations, and in some cases secretly obtained the phone records of journalists, including Washington Post reporters. The administration came under heavy criticism from journalism groups, members of Congress and press freedom advocates, leading then-Attorney General Eric Holder to issue new policies limiting subpoenas of reporters.
“While other administrations have pursued subpoenas against the press, no administration has used the full weight of its powers — rhetorical, regulatory, legal — to attack reporters in the way this one has done,” said Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The record is not even close.”
The Justice Department has typically used a light touch when it comes to involving reporters in legal investigations of the information in the stories they publish, because of wide-ranging First Amendment protections that have been reaffirmed by court precedent. In addition to the policies put in place under Holder, a Biden-era policy protected journalists from subpoenas during leak investigations. The Justice Department rescinded it last year.
Even when judges ultimately rule in favor of reporters’ ability to keep their notes and records private, legal investigations can still have a chilling effect on journalists’ capacity to do their jobs, press freedom advocates say.
Judges have largely condemned the Justice Department’s handling of the high-profile January FBI raid of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s house and devices, issuing a string of rulings in her favor.
The search was part of an investigation of a federal contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. In March, a federal magistrate judge blocked the government from searching Natanson’s devices.
But the knowledge that reporters’ devices can get impounded, their phone records could be searched or they could be compelled to testify about their sources serves as a signal to government officials not to speak to them, advocates say.
The aggressive investigations also create legal peril for reporters when they publish articles that displease the White House.
Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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