DOJ Drops Subpoenas of New York Times Journalists and Their Family Members

Lawyers for the Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped subpoenas of several New York Times journalists — and some targeting their family members — after a federal judge berated the Trump administration for its actions.

Earlier this month, the Times reported on security flaws of President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet. When Trump didn’t use the jet on his travels home from a NATO conference in Turkey, he had insisted that it was being diverted in order to show it off to soldiers stationed in Europe.

But the Times reported early this month that Trump didn’t use the newer jet because it had multiple security flaws. The report cited numerous individuals within the Trump administration who spoke anonymously about the subject.

Later in July, the paper was alerted to the fact that its journalists’ phone records had been subpoenaed by the administration to root out who the sources were. In addition to those journalists’ records, the White House also sought the phone data of their family members, including journalists’ spouses and parents.

The subpoena requests dated all the way back to January of this year — suggesting that “the department is using this investigation not to focus on any purported concerns arising from the July 8 and 9 articles, but instead to forage for information about the journalists’ source relationships more broadly,” the papers’ lawyers noted in a recent court filing.

On Thursday afternoon, during a court hearing regarding the case, lawyers for the Trump administration said they were dropping the subpoenas.

“The government is prepared to unilaterally withdraw the subpoenas at this time,” chief counsel for the DOJ Sean Buckley told the court.

A spokesperson for the department indicated that the case was ongoing. “We will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information,” the spokesperson said.

During the hearing, Judge Arun Subramanian berated the federal lawyers, noting that the subpoenas represent “the last thing you do” to journalists in leak investigations.

“It’s a matter of basic compliance with the law,” Subramanian added.

The DOJ’s lawyers tried to insist that their actions — including subpoenaing journalists’ family members’ records — were mistakes.

“That was an error. We own it,” Buckley said. “We used a public source database” to determine who to subpoena.

Subramanian expressed impatience with the Trump administration’s excuses.

“The inadvertent errors and the ‘in hindsight we should have done things differently,’ these things are piling up,” he said.

“Are you going to do this again?” Subramanian asked the DOJ lawyers.

They indicated that they wouldn’t. However, given Trump’s hostility toward journalists and the media, Subramanian’s skepticism appears to be warranted.