The Justice Department said Saturday that it no longer will secretly obtain reporters’ records during leak investigations, a policy shift that abandons a practice decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
The reversal follows a pledge last month by President Joe Biden, who had said it was “simply, simply wrong” to seize journalists’ records and that his Justice Department would halt the practice.
The tactic was used by Democratic and Republican administrations alike in an effort to identify sources who revealed classified information to journalists. The policy had received renewed scrutiny over the past month as Justice Department officials had alerted reporters at three different news organizations — The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times — that their phone records had been obtained.
“Going forward, consistent with the President’s direction, this Department of Justice — in a change to its longstanding practice — will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs,” department spokesman Anthony Coley said in a statement.
He added that the “department strongly values a free press, protecting First Amendment values, and is committed to taking all appropriate steps to ensure the independence of journalists.”
The news comes after the New York Times reported Friday that in its final days, the Trump-led Justice Department had sought to obtain email logs of four of Times reporters, in a failed attempt to identify their sources. That investigation had rolled over into the Biden administration, according to the paper.
David McCraw, a lawyer for the journalists, said Friday that the Biden administration had informed top Times executives about the effort, but since March 3 had imposed a gag order to shield it from public view. That effort prevented top brass at the company from informing the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, or anyone else in the newsroom about the inquiry. The probe ultimately failed after Google, which hosts the Times’s email system, refused to turn over reporters’ email logs.
McCraw, who called the inquiry “unprecedented,” said Friday that a federal court ultimately lifted the gag order, freeing him to discuss what happened.
“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Baquet said in a statement. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it,” he added. “As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”
On Saturday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night, but that more broadly, “the issuing of subpoenas for the records of reporters in leak investigations is not consistent with the President’s policy direction to the Department.”
