Looking to Trump’s next 100 days: DOJ tees up process for jailing journalists

The White House Correspondents Association held its annual celebratory dinner on Saturday night. Only this year it was more somber than celebratory —and with good reason. Since its return to power in January, and over the last month, the Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on the press and news media.

As NBC News explains, “The Trump administration has had multiple skirmishes with the press in recent months. The FCC is investigating several media companies, the administration is working to shut down Voice of America and other government-run outlets, and The Associated Press has sued the administration for reducing its access to events because it has not renamed the Gulf of Mexico in line with Trump’s executive order.”

Its latest effort to bring the press to heel came on April 25, when news leaked of the Justice Department’s intention to aggressively pursue journalists who receive leaked information from confidential government sources. When it is implemented, the policy will give the administration another tool to make the lives of reporters miserable and provide the basis for jailing those who resist.

While no journalists are presently in jail in this country for doing their jobs, prosecuting and punishing them is a regular part of the arsenal of repressive regimes around the world. And the atmosphere for the American press is by no means friendly.

April alone saw a dramatic escalation of threats.

For example, on April 5, Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma marked the 135th anniversary of a shooting incident between a journalist and a former congressman inside the US Capitol by suggesting that in our era, “there’s a lot we could say about reporters and the stories they write, but I bet they would write a lot less false stories — as President Trump says, ‘fake news’ — if we could still handle our differences that way.”

On April 14, the White House issued a bill of particulars entitled, “The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long.” It did not hide its desire to punish them for the content of their broadcasts, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Its charges included, “In 2020, NPR refused to cover the explosive Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the runup to the election, baselessly claiming there were ‘many, many red flags’ and its ‘assertions don’t amount to much.’” And “in 2024, PBS produced a documentary making the case for reparations.” The White House concluded that “For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”

To make good on its charges, the Trump Administration plans to ask Congress “to cancel $1.1 billion in funding already approved for public broadcasting.”

On April 16, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr accused Comcast — the parent company of MSNBC and NBC News — of “violating its broadcast licenses.” Carr said, “Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that Abrego Garcia was merely a law-abiding U.S. citizen, just a regular ‘Maryland man.’ When the truth comes out, they ignore it. Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it.”

That brings us back to Attorney General Bond and the Trump Justice Department.

The Guardian reports that Bondi “has revoked a Biden administration-era policy that restricted subpoenas of reporters’ phone records in criminal investigations….The memo says federal employees who leak sensitive information to the media for ‘the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and government effectiveness’ are engaging in conduct that could be characterized as ‘treasonous.’”

The Attorney General has concluded, the Guardian continues, “it is necessary to rescind Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”

Among other things, that policy forbids investigators from accessing “reporters’ phone records to try to identify the sources for stories that describe classified information.” When he issued that policy, former Attorney General Garland said, “These regulations recognize the crucial role that a free and independent press plays in our democracy.”

“Because freedom of the press,” Garland observed, “requires that members of the news media have the freedom to investigate and report the news, the new regulations are intended to provide enhanced protection to members of the news media from certain law enforcement tools and actions that might unreasonably impair newsgathering.”

More than fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black also recognized the importance of that freedom after a leak of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post. As Black put it, “In the First Amendment, the founding fathers gave the Free Press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy… the government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press could remain forever free to censure the government.”

“The press,” Black explained, “was protected so that it could bear the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

“In my view,” Black concluded, ” deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for… revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War…(and doing) precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.”

How times have changed.

Bondi’s new memo chastises the news media for publishing leaked material “that undermine(s) President Trump’s policies, victimize(s) government agencies, and cause(s) harm to the American people”.

Calling such activity Illegal and immoral, the Attorney General said she would be personally responsible for approving “efforts to question or arrest members of the news media.”

There you have it. Journalists are put on notice that if they publish leaked material that “undermine(s) President Trump’s policies,” they may be arrested.

We know how this goes. A story gets published. A journalist gets subpoenaed and asked to reveal a confidential source. Two bad outcomes result. The source is revealed and prosecuted. Following that, others get the message and are afraid to reveal information the administration wants to hide. Or the journalist does not reveal their source, is held in contempt of court, and goes to jail.

All this is possible because, in January of this year, while they still had a majority, Senate Democrats failed to pass the so-called Press Act. That act, which had bipartisan support and passed unanimously in the House of Representatives, was intended to “protect journalist-source confidentiality, subject to common-sense exceptions, such as cases involving terrorism, other serious emergencies, or journalists suspected of crimes.”

It would have covered “anyone who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public…., not just professional journalists.”

President-elect Trump opposed it and called on Republicans to “kill” the bill. Because he got his way, Attorney General Bondi can now mobilize the resources of the federal government to send reporters to jail merely for doing their job.

And when she does, the American people will be the real victims, and democracy will take another devastating hit.