Justice Department leaders plan to meet with reporters to discuss a recent flurry of notices about secret records seizures during the Trump administration that has prompted alarm in the media industry.
The agency has indicated the intrusions into the activities of journalists took place last year and are related to leak investigations, and the reporters themselves are not the targets, but information about what exactly was sought after remains unclear. The notifications are trickling in four months after President Joe Biden took office.
“Department leadership will soon meet with reporters to hear their concerns about recent notices and further convey Attorney General Garland’s staunch support of and commitment to a free and independent press,” Anthony Coley, the DOJ director of public affairs and a senior adviser to Attorney General Merrick Garland, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
“The records at issue relate to 2017 and the legal process to seek these records was approved in 2020,” he added.
The statement comes after CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr was notified prosecutors sought and obtained her phone and email records from the summer of 2017 through the courts last year. Starr was reporting on national security issues that related to North Korea, Syria, and Afghanistan at the time.
This followed a trio of Washington Post reporters being notified of similar seizures last year through use of subpoena power. They had been reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The letters sent to each of the reporters said that prosecutors obtained “non-content” information, meaning that senders, recipients, and time stamps would be disclosed, but not the content of their conversations.
Leaders at CNN and the Washington Post raised concerns about the possible infringement of reporters’ First Amendment rights and demanded an explanation from the Justice Department.
“CNN strongly condemns the secret collection of any aspect of a journalist’s correspondence, which is clearly protected by the First Amendment,” said CNN President Jeff Zucker. “We are asking for an immediate meeting with the Justice Department for an explanation.”
William Barr, who was attorney general throughout 2020 until just before Christmas, has declined comment to multiple outlets about the situation. During Senate testimony in May 2019, he said the Justice Department had “multiple criminal leak investigations underway” related to the handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the Justice Department in January demanding an explanation about the reported ending of an investigation into the leak of potentially classified information from former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn’s calls with a Russian ambassador to the media.
The Justice Department previously defended the process by which it would seek such records for a criminal leaks investigation.
“While rare, the Department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the Justice Department, told the Washington Post earlier this month. Raimondi added the “targets” of such investigations are not news media recipients, but rather the inquiries are for those with access to national defense information who provided it to the media and “thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”
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A Justice Department official told CNN that Starr, too, was not a target of investigation.
“This is a big story that just got bigger. That a journalist from another news organization had communications records seized by the Trump Justice Department suggests that the last administration’s efforts to intrude into reporter-source relationships and chill newsgathering is more sweeping than we originally thought,” Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement. “The Justice Department’s current leadership should provide a detailed explanation about what exactly happened and why, and how it plans to strengthen protections for the free flow of information to the public.”
In another flash of investigative activity recently revealed to the public, unsealed court documents showed the Justice Department subpoenaed Twitter in November 2020 seeking details about the identity of an anonymous Twitter critic of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, although law enforcement officials told the New York Times the inquiry stemmed from a U.S. Capitol Police investigation into a purported online threat against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and not Nunes.
